In youth, imagine the immediate world is everything, lock that you away, read, play games, self-talk, sit in the wardrobe, under the bed, under the house, behind the pool, down the street in the dense bushland, and even a few times under the car. Each place has room only for one, a world within a tight prism of inner mirrors that rotate infinite faces of you, as if you roll downhill, without the invariable sickness that ensues at the bottom. Become a character in a novel where you perform and narrate your destiny to look for happiness outside your own circle. See the self-indulgent behaviour thrust for attention.

Desire another life, away from your enormous family; seek transformation because of the insatiable hunger inside. Hate the lack of gratitude that this hunger symbolises, thus inflames a rage that comes and goes, in control of addiction, a force determines how you react in difficult situations and invariably causes trouble with friends or family, a thirst, like many addicts understand, that craves immediate attention. Now that this you lives free of alcohol and other drugs, the hunger feeds on less volatile items. Take a long bike ride to nowhere, find a track to the beach, secure the bike, fall exhaustively onto sand, recuperate, jump in the surf, replenish, and return after the death of an entrancing novel that without activity destines a night deep in melancholia, fight the desire to kill the hunger with alcohol, or worse. That night goes. Today, look at the written narrative and smile that words affect you so, or more importantly somebody else’s, and yet you breathe content in skin, fortunate to love and receive it. Feel grand in sobriety.

Wake smothered in words, the virtual writer avoids the present. The unknown future is a more glamorous place to become another; veer away from today’s pain. Walk along the road, smell the exhaust, see the faces pass; wonder if they can hear your internal rants. Do they wish to partake in the current dialogue? Come one, come all, join in … not crazy, just different. Create songs and dream of fame until the next corner.

The words, here, now, mindfulness, freedom, become your record, an outflow, a necessary to and fro that brings you to the unit, the suburb on the outskirts of the western city, await transportation back to origin, complete the cycle of indigenous dreaming. Run more than half a life in fear towards faces, away from those same faces, to fewer faces, and then to prison with the GTB, say “boss” and “miss” to robotic uniforms that control you. They become your narrators … sit down … eat now … stand up … shirt in.