Suicide Pyjamas

The loudest harpoon in the phantom orchestra of my thoughts that night was the horrifying realisation that I opted 

for the least flattering (ugliest) pyjamas when the paramedics rolled in like a typhoon into my childhood bedroom (after the first time) I tried do 

it. 

Next, 

I recall the slick Kmart buttons, slippery moss-covered stones seesawing between two pieces of fragile purple-pink fabric and a sudden surge of (self) consciousness. 

Macerating my memory trinkets of 

I will just try again (more successfully). 

I am an accomplished executor if nothing else. I see things through. Always. 

Guilt a guillotine against everything. Hell, eternal damnation, and cold (body) of water against the brown of me at McIvers. Every footnote of feeling thick pulp pressed on my lungs. 

Every earned justification, self-flagellation. Every seismic slap. Administered hard and indiscriminately. All I yearned for was the unconditional surrender to my care. The beating boat of wishing you wanted everything for me, but not this. 

And it should not have taken this to grant me an exodus. Reverence and reassurance. As if wanting out was sacrilegious. 

I had no expectation of decorum from the corpse that cradled me to this grave. Could not extract logic from an illogical entity. But I tucked a pocket of hope in you. A prayer. The way parents cradle their child’s dreams. A promise. 

But, 

leave me late at the river’s edge and I will find home in the hollow ache of the water. Mistake it for swimming. 

Call everything a different, more appetising name. But you don’t call. When you call — it is late. Always. 

I am far from the river now but closer to the sea than ever.