Fuck. It hits me in the parking lot, rushing to unstrap my seatbelt and grab the nappies before dad gets up. It paralyzes me. I sit with the belt undone but still around me staring into the yet to see light and largely empty underground lot, facing this thought: I am getting on a plane in a few weeks to go say goodbye. I am crossing the ocean so I can say both hello and goodbye to the past year and to the man who has been my companion and... the soon to be receiver of concequences. This is not some beginning I am embarking on but a bloody ending?

Words whirl around. Snatches of conversations, bits I've written over the months, thoughts formed and shelved... all emerging and fighting for a spot. I shake my head, trying to shoo them away. A tear falls on my hand and- why the hell am I crying? What's with this sudden pain in my stomach, a real, conscious, doubling-over pain?

I float through the aisles realising I don't know how other writers feel but that some moments - such as this one - I plain hate words. I hate the intellect which creates them and the circumstances which spawn the creation. I just hate words. I wish I didn't know any. I wish my mind was free, unencumbered by big ones and small ones and weak ones and strong ones. All words be gone from me. Like that.

Words have taken me places and brought me people. They have spewed from me and trickled and gushed and rushed, they have been more wrong than right? Not at conception - not all of them - but somewhere down the track most have brought pain, one way or another. Like this little fantasyland I've been dwelling in almost from the moment of moving back to the city.

Oh words are always my undoing. I live through them and I give, and then messes form, and I have largely created them. Time to pack up and go, time to retreat and to accept futility and to abide by that unwavering law: Don't mess where you're not supposed to. I messed. Again. The fact I allow him no say in this departure? What can he say I've not heard before? No grand gestures either of us can make, stuck in our respective realities. Que sera, sera.

I return home still in a daze and drop the pack of nappies on the dinner table. Sit unmoving at my desk trying to grapple with this new likelihood. I feel like one of those people you see emerging from an explosion or the rubble of a building collapse: Dust everywhere and they stagger out confused, bewildered, not aware yet they've in fact survived? I am caught up in those endless moments. One puzzling question: How did I get here?

If I had no words, I wonder where I would be. Who I would be now and I guess, what I would be? I see no answer forming. Only question after question following that first one till there's nothing but question marks consuming my tired brain.

Clock says 7.38am. This is the last hour of my aloneness. In the next hour people will rise and people will need things and people will need me in the many hours to follow. The final thirty odd minutes of being in anything other than this perfect isolation; my offsider asleep, the one I love usually busy; feels like the rest of the world is out of bounds to me and therefore this period of total solitude?

It is during this hour that most thoughts take shape and one or two dominate. Sometimes I write off them; begin something that I may or may not finish later. Most often I sit staring at various screens but not seeing anything, my head full of suppositions and wandering.

Why it hit me as it did before. Why I am now suspended within a scene such as the one I describe. Hell. When realism smacks you on the head there's nowhere to run - for the fantasy is the rubble and there's no returning to it. Nothing to salvage from within the busted, blurry mess, only teetering with it as a backdrop; one you might eventually turn around to see? Eventually. If the dust ever settles.

Oh but it was good? It was so, so good! The words damn it, the words built stuff inside and around me and it was beautiful, it was miraculous this salvaging of me, the inception of a self thought inaccessible? To feel, to allow someone in after a lifetime shut tight, oblivious to all emotion as other but an observer; to bloody feel! And to discover now that it will soon become a memory, one captured on many pages with graceful, at times magnificent words. That this too, this miracle, is to be taken from me?

Yeah. The noise as the daily construction begins next door intrudes and makes me want to scream. Usually I tolerate it with some random grumbling but this moment it is piercing my brain, a brain already overloaded with other, internal noise.

Fact is I have lost connection with the person of before. Who was I prior to opening myself up to emotions and possibilities? I lived - I know this - but I cannot reclaim the me of then, I cannot walk in those shoes, I have no idea who this me was. What did I do all day? What did I think about? In what capacity did I function? I would not have believed it probable to lose a self this way - to lose all connection and all memory - yet, here I sit clueless.

Rubble behind me and a peculiar nothingness ahead, the concept of waking up and him not present in this life - I examine it clinically yet I cannot grasp it. I see it but I cannot immerse in it. How does one fill such a consummate emptiness? There is no blackness to it, no evil; no depths to plunge into and no thoughts of not surviving. Yet simultaneously the very concept of survival beyond such a point is implausible purely because it cannot be imagined, let alone be considered living ever after.

And thus this midway point, this suspension in bewilderment I guess. Afraid to relinquish hold, see the rubble as another step and take the next step forward for there surely is another step despite my not seeing it. I could theorize for months on end, I could pull apart and put back together again every single nuance but I will still end up here at some point wandering why him, why now. Howling unfairness serves no purpose though I want to howl out the window and counter the noise invading from out there?

"V....! V....!" I hear dad calling mum's name. Rush down and see him sitting on the edge of the bed staring at the floor, his nappy half off. Mum emerges from the downstairs bathroom same time as I enter his room.

"What's wrong?" The side of his face is red like a blood spill, only it's under the skin.

"I want to get up."

"It's early dad! Go back to bed." Pointless really but I make gestures to mum to let me handle it, knowing full well she won't listen. She never listens.

"What time is it?"

"Not even eight yet. Sleep another hour."

"I want to get up!" This repeated with the petulance of a child. He knows well what day it is.

Mum makes a move towards him and I back away. Pointless. I discussed this with my brother a few days ago, how she has turned him into a helpless baby; doing everything, not allowing him to even try and see what he can and cannot manage on his own. I am harsher, pushing more independence on him. Times when she's been in hospital, I have made him try; dressing himself, making his bed, changing his own nappies. He's done all these things. Then she returns, taking control away from him again and he lapses into this total dependence.

I cannot stand to see it only because with it comes the moaning and complaining about everything being on her shoulders? I have stopped attempting to explain how she is the cause. I get it. They've been together a long time and all she has known is how to serve him - hard now to break patterns. Or perhaps this is also her way of taking all previous dominance away from him. This makes sense too.

The forced pause in thinking has helped pull me away from him and the impending goodbye for the time being. At my desk I scroll through some word docs having remembered something I'd written in a separate file, the goings-on downstais bringing it to mind. There! I quickly read to familiarize myself with the ideas I'd typed some weeks back. Words flow and I continue where I'd left off, easily falling into the essence of the piece: Freedom; that illusive concept I've chased almost from the moment I could consciously think. Though why the fuck anyone would want to read my views on the UN's Declaration of Human Rights...