You won't play games with me – that sounds like a reasonable way to start this. And you wanted to take things seriously, and I wanted to make everything a joke. So when you said I want to work on Palm Island, I told you to fuck off! You didn’t speak to me for three days. Then I said what the fuck do you want to do that for? and You think Australia needs to be back in the colony way? Three more days incommunicado. It was August 14, 2003.
But you were set and when you set your mind, tsk, ain’t no going back. You flew to Townsville, and even you thought that it was a hateful little shithole, and you told me so via SMS. I thought this meant you had come to your senses and would come back to Sydney, another hateful little shithole, sure, but at least we could be together.
Then you took off for Palm Island a few days later. I got another text message that said something about how Palm Island’s grimy air terminal was decorated with a collection of the local fourth-graders’ projects on safe and unsafe behaviour, and I thought why is she telling me this? and fuck do I care? and can you please come home?
But then you sent me another message and it said everything’s fucking beautiful! so I decided to visit. We were locked into a compound with the cops and the nurses. I could hear them fucking in the next room but that didn’t matter too much because I could hear our neighbours fucking in the next room back in Sydney. Except for the heat, things were largely the same, but I broke it off with you and I went home because I largely didn’t care about what you were trying to do and I hate the heat.
Written on Thursday, 24 May 2012