and the rock cried out

about once a year or so I go back to my old online journal and read it and praise holy god that I have locked it and no one can read it. but recently I did come across this from 2004:

When I was young I went to Centrelink with my mother to submit some form (back then it was called Social Security) and I saw a scruffy-looking couple staring dazedly into each others' eyes and smiling inanely and making out every few minutes. They were oblivious to the world and people around them.

It took me a number of years to realise that they were both on drugs.

I saw the Dark Knight on wednesday. Heath Ledger was brilliant. I've made no secret of how sad I was that he died. I walked out of the theatre feeling like I probably wouldn't want to watch the film again for a while. It was a reminder of how good he was and how good he would have continued to be if he had lived.

When my friend Gen died a few years ago, she left behind hundreds of books of her writing; poems, stories, little bits of napkin screwed up in her jacket pocket that her mother collected with fervour, eventually collating them and publishing a book. I didn't seek it out to read, but then a friend passed it onto me after finding it in a small bookshop in Tasmania. As soon as I got it in my hands, I read through it voraciously, finishing it in under half an hour. It then sat in my bedroom for weeks, and although I looked at the cover lots, I couldn't bring myself to open it again. That half an hour of Gen was an explosion of memory of who she might have become if she had lived, and knowing what I am missing out on was almost harder than remembering that she'd died.