Plastic Solitude

Next to my friends' house in Kensington was an old abandoned home, faded and cracked weatherboard, with holes in the deck and fallen timbers cluttering the doorway. One night while we were partying, I slipped under the construction fence with some mates and took a look inside. Almost as soon as we'd entered the house, one of my friends wanted to leave - the energy didn't feel good she said. It felt like there was a old, angry force pushing her out. She left, but me and Ben felt good. It felt warm and dusty and cluttered, like there had been someone living here, growing old, collecting their cloak of darkness around them and their belongings; waiting. There was a large workshop attached to the house on one side of the main hallway, full of hand tools and bolts, all stored in that classic shed fashion of carefully marked containers fashioned out of old fruit tins and plastic cartons. Perhaps it had been a man, alone, dieing slowly who lived here. We felt safe, welcomed, respected. In the back of the building was the kitchen, a wooden floored room which still breathed the air that it's owner had chewed and ingested. The walls warmly pulsed with a red mouldy glow in the hot summer night. Across the bench was a long string, tied to the flue of the stove, and to a hook on the wall. Hung on the string, like nails driven into the week, were thousands of plastic tags that tie the top of bread bags. Their moulded teeth clipped to the string, making an undulating plastic snake of eerie regularity. The psychic impact of that image has stayed with me to this day. This old man had lived a life of such immense routine, marking off one week after another, 14 more slices of bread at a time, lonely. Such solitude crept out of this humble monument to time keeping. A kitchen table with one chair. A few plates and a cracked cup. A life winding down.

Is this what we work towards? What awaits us all at the edge of the sunlight? In the shadows of time where we trade the struggle for a slow decline and fade.
I passed out for a while on a bed stripped bare of sheets, and when I awoke I was hungry for life. I went back to the party and I danced and kissed everyone.