Nindi-Ngudjam Ngarigu Monero people. For thousands of years, other community groups joined them on the highest peaks in summer for corroborees and trade and to catch the nutrient-rich Bogong Moths. I love this land, but it is not my land. I trespass. I try to walk gently across the alpine grass plains, in between bunches of snow gums. Here, time is measured in sunlight and the autumn wind breath and the moon in the corner, thinned to a thread.
Once the endglow of the sun lowers itself below the horizon one must lie on the earth and look up. Eyes take about thirty minutes to dark-adapt. Pupils dilate. Rods and cones (photoreceptors) in the retina adjust sensitivity. Breathe in from the diaphragm, lungs to veins to arteries to heart and here they are, as they always are, and there are more of them than Iâll ever have the ability to count and the longer I look â awe. Then dizziness like losing gravity, losing a sense of what is up and what is down. Some of them appear to coalesce into a kind of fine lace and some appear to be winking blue and some are occasionally but not always winking red and some yellow and some the whitest white. Mine one tiny view of the piebald vastness.
Back home, I go with Lara, who is beginning her training in pathology, to see 21 Grams , a film about grief. The title refers to the amount of mass said to escape the body at the moment of death, the supposed weight of the soul. I take hold of the character played by Benicio del Toro, lost in grief after running over a father and his children in a truck. I understand his desperate need to atone for being alive. I have a desperate need to atone for being alive. After the film ends we have lunch, and then I catch a tram home via a hardware store where I buy a bottle of 32 per cent hydrochloric acid.
your duty is hell you know it we know it we are watching we are you sickbitch do it do it
I look at the body, the lump of flesh, fat and wavery and hirsute. Jeff Buckley is singing. I sit down on the floor in the hallway, smoke a cigarette, slop some bitter coffee.
flesh is hell flesh is hell flesh is hell flesh is hell we know we are watching now we are you bitch do it
Pour acid into a bowl, soak a towel in the acid and wrap it around the lower half of the right leg. I do it slowly. The pain is not immediate; there is a small lull in which silence stretches through my head on wings. The people in my head howl. Then a prickling, radiant heat envelops the leg all the way to the groin. I rock back and forth, eyes closed, head locked. I atone for Benicio del Toro, I atone. I lie on my side on the floorboards and my fat grey cat curls up under my chin. Her breath, her rhythmical breath falls on my lips.
How does one atone? It is partly the pain and partly the damage done that matters.
In the morning the leg is mottled pink and red with blisters and large patches of dried grey tissue that indicate third degree burns. I pull my pants over the mess and go to work as usual. First we have an all-department refresher in biostatistics to assist with our assessing of journal articles: hypothesis testing using p-values, confidence intervals, meta-analyses, quantitative versus qualitative research. I sit and listen with my forearms clasped under my right leg so that I donât have to put my right foot on the floor. After the meeting we stretch and yawn and make coffee.
âGood weekend?â I ask Tara, one of my colleagues.
âOh great,â she says. âWe bought a pram that converts into about fifteen other things. Danâs obsessed with it.â Taraâs six months pregnant with twins, so her belly looks more like eight months. Sheâs switched from exhausted to glowing to exhausted to somehow rather serene.
âExcellent,â I say and smile. Iâve got all my weight on one leg, holding the wall.
âHow was yours?â Tara asks.
âWent to see this amazing film.â
âOh yeah? What was it?â
â 21
Once the endglow of the sun lowers itself below the horizon one must lie on the earth and look up. Eyes take about thirty minutes to dark-adapt. Pupils dilate. Rods and cones (photoreceptors) in the retina adjust sensitivity. Breathe in from the diaphragm, lungs to veins to arteries to heart and here they are, as they always are, and there are more of them than Iâll ever have the ability to count and the longer I look â awe. Then dizziness like losing gravity, losing a sense of what is up and what is down. Some of them appear to coalesce into a kind of fine lace and some appear to be winking blue and some are occasionally but not always winking red and some yellow and some the whitest white. Mine one tiny view of the piebald vastness.
Back home, I go with Lara, who is beginning her training in pathology, to see 21 Grams , a film about grief. The title refers to the amount of mass said to escape the body at the moment of death, the supposed weight of the soul. I take hold of the character played by Benicio del Toro, lost in grief after running over a father and his children in a truck. I understand his desperate need to atone for being alive. I have a desperate need to atone for being alive. After the film ends we have lunch, and then I catch a tram home via a hardware store where I buy a bottle of 32 per cent hydrochloric acid.
your duty is hell you know it we know it we are watching we are you sickbitch do it do it
I look at the body, the lump of flesh, fat and wavery and hirsute. Jeff Buckley is singing. I sit down on the floor in the hallway, smoke a cigarette, slop some bitter coffee.
flesh is hell flesh is hell flesh is hell flesh is hell we know we are watching now we are you bitch do it
Pour acid into a bowl, soak a towel in the acid and wrap it around the lower half of the right leg. I do it slowly. The pain is not immediate; there is a small lull in which silence stretches through my head on wings. The people in my head howl. Then a prickling, radiant heat envelops the leg all the way to the groin. I rock back and forth, eyes closed, head locked. I atone for Benicio del Toro, I atone. I lie on my side on the floorboards and my fat grey cat curls up under my chin. Her breath, her rhythmical breath falls on my lips.
How does one atone? It is partly the pain and partly the damage done that matters.
In the morning the leg is mottled pink and red with blisters and large patches of dried grey tissue that indicate third degree burns. I pull my pants over the mess and go to work as usual. First we have an all-department refresher in biostatistics to assist with our assessing of journal articles: hypothesis testing using p-values, confidence intervals, meta-analyses, quantitative versus qualitative research. I sit and listen with my forearms clasped under my right leg so that I donât have to put my right foot on the floor. After the meeting we stretch and yawn and make coffee.
âGood weekend?â I ask Tara, one of my colleagues.
âOh great,â she says. âWe bought a pram that converts into about fifteen other things. Danâs obsessed with it.â Taraâs six months pregnant with twins, so her belly looks more like eight months. Sheâs switched from exhausted to glowing to exhausted to somehow rather serene.
âExcellent,â I say and smile. Iâve got all my weight on one leg, holding the wall.
âHow was yours?â Tara asks.
âWent to see this amazing film.â
âOh yeah? What was it?â
â 21
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