56.

I’ll skim through all the stuff that it took me six hours to do:

• battle traffic to get to the airport
• find it impossible to get parking, so I leave the airport, drive out to Tullamarine, and get some street parking
• try to hail a taxi and, then summon an Uber – neither app worked, and the phone for the taxi was never answered
• walk an hour back to the airport, then try to buy a domestic ticket there. Their system went down. I waited five minutes, but then panicked that I was disrupting everybody’s else’s lives
• once I walked back to my car, traffic was clear all the way back home – a twenty-minute drive where I didn’t catch one light.

It’s late-afternoon by the time I’m sitting on my couch, thinking about that time I tried to catch that train to Lana’s. If there’s some spiritual or cosmic overseer, would it really inconvenience everybody to deliver me a message? As flattering as that seems, I know it’s so unlikely, so improbable, it’s impossible to believe, which means everything’s luck or …

I stay with luck for the moment, but that wasn’t the case at the travel agent. Wherever I went, a system crashed. That could be coincidence. But it’d be about the biggest coincidence that I’ve ever encountered.

That leaves the possibility that these cycles, that these resets, are bullshit. I’m back, but it’s not life. It’s some sort of purgatory that exists solely to teach me some lesson. Once I try to leave it, it kicks up all these blocks, keeping me in the here and now – but especially the here.

I’m tempted to end my life so I can talk to Luca, but the problem is what if there is some rationale for these things that I don’t understand? Putting my writer’s hat on (or maybe it’s my editor’s hat), maybe I have to address things here before moving any further afield. I can see a logic in that – or at least see enough of a logic that I believe it could be possible. It’s like a game. I’ve got to level up.

My phone buzzes – again, the dread that it’s Lana, but it’s only Autumn: How’re you feeling? she asks.

Tired. I mightn’t come in tomorrow either.

Okay. You’re not missing anything. Had the meeting with Melody.

Three dots – she’s still typing; I imagine she’s trying to find a way to be diplomatic about what’s coming.

She says it’s a shame you’re sick, Autumn says. She said she was really looking forward to talking to you and she’s looking forward to working with you.

No. No. No. That’s like some ultimate jibe, a way to fuck with me and crown a day of being fucked. Or it’s something that’s changed, although I don’t understand why. No. Likelier Melody’s doesn’t want to dismiss me through a third party. She wants to do it in person. It’s extreme, but I don’t know anymore and as far as today goes, I can’t be bothered thinking about it any longer.

I don’t sleep at all – you know the feeling of insomnia? It’s laying down, and feeling no inclination to drifting off. Because we do that every night: we go to bed and enter a cycle where our mind and body gear down and we drift off. Lana always did it the moment her head hit the pillow.

Not me.

I’ve always had weird sleep issues – struggling to fall asleep (insomnia), hearing or seeing weird things as I was drifting off (hypnagogic hallucinations), crawling out of my bed as I slept and ending up on the other side of the room (parasomnia), waking early (don’t think that has a name), hearing or seeing weird things as I awake (hypnopompic hallucinations), and when I was in my twenties occasions where I just kept sleeping in (hypersomnia), but my episodes where I stay awake the whole night have been few, and usually connected to some other trigger.

Like mania.

That’s what I get now: trying to work out what’s happening, trying to make sense of it, trying to rationalize an answer – there’s got to be some aha moment, some point where it clicks why this has happened, and when none of that occurs I just hope that there’ll be some divine visitation, like Luca will appear at the foot of my bed and explain the rules here.

Uh uh.

My phone buzzes around 7.00am. Autum. Hope you’re feeling a little better today, she tells me.

Thanks, I answer. A little.

I thought today would be spent contemplating the great trip, and perhaps jotting down stuff I’d need – clothes, luggage, that sort of shit. But now I’m not sure what to do. I could just go to work and to fuck with it. If this cycle is tying me into fixing something in my routine, that’d be the logical choice, although that’s hardly what I think I need to fix things.

That stirs a sense of rebellion in me.

Over breakfast, I grab my laptop, sit on the couch, and bring up a travel agent’s website. I try to randomly book a destination, but a pop-up pops up, asking me for my email address so I can subscribe. I hate these things. Loathe them pathologically. Even websites have turned into needy, clingy, neurotic fuckers now.

I type an email address in: fuckoff@youfuckoffpopup.com – I’ve gotten into a habit of entering such vitriol, figuring if they’re going to spam me for attention, I’ll spam them right back. Hopefully, there’s some tech who reviews the emails addresses and get my messages, although I imagine it’s all automated.

Now I try to enter my random destination: West Australia. The website times out. Gives me one of those errors when a page won’t load up. I try another travel agent (fuckingpopuphell@fuckofffuckoff.com), and another (getfuckedpopup@cuntofathing.com), and another (fuckyou@popupcunt.com), but every site times out.

Okay.

Forcing down breakfast, I wash up, shower super quickly (so not just quickly, but super quickly), dress, then jump into my car. Then it’s off to the nearest service station; I fill it up, and eventually find myself on the Hume Highway with the intention that I drive all the way to Sydney. I couldn’t book a domestic flight. Maybe I can drive there.

But about an hour in, the engine dies, and I have to steer the car into an emergency lane as it coasts to a halt. I know nothing about engines, have never had a problem with this car, and have no roadside assistance with anybody who could help, but none of those things are considerations.

I try the ignition again and again and again. The engine doesn’t even try to turn over. I get out, walk back and forth anxiously, then jump back behind the steering wheel and try again, like I can surprise the car into starting before it knows I’m doing it.

Uh uh. Nothing.

Leaning back, I consider my options. I can’t move forward. What would happen if I tried a taxi or an Uber? Would I get one? If I did, would those cars die? What about if I tried to hitchhike, the way Stan and I would when we were teens after big nights out? No. That’s too simple to shut down. Nobody would pick me up.

I get out of the car, and start walking, like I can leg it all the way to Sydney. How long would that take?

I don’t even have time to contemplate that before a sharp pain cuts through my chest. Chest pains are an anxiety symptom – I had such bad chest pains when I was eighteen that they would bring me to my knees. Stubbornness tries to push me through, but in just two steps, the pain has transformed into a blaze that spreads across my chest and erupts like a string of explosions across my back, my left arm jangling while my breath hiccoughs pathetically from my mouth.

Collapsing to one knee, I try to assure myself this is anxiety, but the pain overrides all reason. I’m dying. I’m sure of that. I’m dying. And that shouldn’t scare me the way it does, but I think of lying here in the emergency lane as the pain ripples through my body, my breathing puttering out, and dying slowly, excruciatingly.

My phone. That’s the logical step. Call paramedics. But I’ve left the phone in the car, so I power myself up, one arm clutched to my chest, and stumble to my car. Wrestling open the door, I flop into the passenger seat, and reach for the change compartment, where my phone sits.

But the pain eases, then disappears entirely, and my breathing comes in long, uninterrupted gulps.

Okay, so this isn’t anxiety. Anxiety doesn’t just get switched off like that. This is … well, whatever hems me – and I experiment, rising out of the car, planting one foot in front of the other, and tentatively trying to advance, but it’s only two steps before I feel the pain surging again.

“Fuck!” I say, dropping back into my car.

I try the ignition of the car. It starts. I put the car into DRIVE. It stalls. Put it back in PARK, start the car, and return it to DRIVE. The engine dies again. Thrust it back into PARK, start it, then drag the gearshift into REVERSE. The engine hums contentedly.

I consider trying to lie to myself – I can tell myself I’m going home, I can think I’m going home, I can repeat it to myself over and over, Going home, going home, going home, going home, going home, but instead put the car into DRIVE and be Sydney bound, but I no sooner think that when the engine warbles, a cough like it’s telling me that’s infectious thinking.

Fatal thinking.

“You fucking win,” I say. “I’m going home.”

57.

I sit in front of the TV with a beer, flicking through 1980s music videos on the YouTube app, thinking about these restrictions, feeling like I’m contained in something I can’t escape – not just geographically, but circumstantially.

It would seem unreal, but this is all unreal, because I shouldn’t be back from suicide once, let alone twice with the condition that I can do it to reset. That, in itself, is unreal, so maybe none of that is the actual situation, and something more has happened – maybe I’ve had the cataclysmic nervous breakdown I always feared when I young.

Back then, there was no such thing as neurosis. It was just crazy. And when my anxiety became overpowering, my biggest fear was I’d snap, and the crazy would take hold, but there’d be some tiny niche in my head where I’d remain, trapped, observing the madness, but ultimately incapable of doing anything about it.

I had a friend who was schizophrenic, who thought he was the reincarnation of Jesus, and that his roommate – the most inoffensive and unthreatening guy you could ever meet – was a vessel for the devil. He believed that. It was his reality. So maybe I’ve snapped and this is the last remnant of my sanity trying to navigate its way out.

That terrifies me, because if that’s the truth, what recourse is there? The awful first public-hospital psychiatrist I ever saw when I was just eighteen told me if I had a breakdown, I’d behave peculiarly until people noticed and checked me into a hospital. It’s funny how I’ve never remember that until now.

Am I acting peculiar?

Who can I ask? I’d have to unload this whole story for context, and that would make me look crazy.

What’d you think?

If I’ve lost touch with reality, could I be imagining Luca and forgetting Peta and the travel agent computers going down and the geographical boundaries that fence me in? Is that something I could conjure around me as I navigate the day? Surely, that’s possible. But I couldn’t manufacture the same week three times in a row – not unless I was already locked up somewhere, in a straitjacket, and imagining all of this.

I grab another beer. And another. And another. It helps slow my thinking and dull my panic, because short of taking my life again (which is growing to be an increasingly attractive proposition) and talking to Luca, all I can do is keep trying to move forward and untangle this mess.

Something another psych told me rings through – years ago, when I was going through another bout of anxiety, depression, and OCD, I expressed fears I’d start hearing voices, and he explained to me that what I had was a neurosis, and hearing voices fell under the purview of a psychosis, and they had a saying in the psychiatric community: “Neurotics build castles in their heads. Psychotics live in them.”

I’m not living in a castle.

Well, I don’t think I am.

I’m questioning my reality, so surely that shows I’m aware, doesn’t it?

It’s an endless circle I try to escape, and I try to distract myself with beer and various songs on YouTube: Choirboys “Run to Paradise”, (ad), Jimmy Barnes “No Second Prize”, ad, Queen’s “Who Wants to Live Forever”, (ad), (ad), Spandau Ballet’s “True”, (ad), and on I go for hours, drinking, watching clips, skipping ads, until it occurs to me this is what life becomes: the enjoyable moments in between all the annoying shit you try to skip through.

I go to bed, maybe ten or twelve beers down, but it’s good, because it helps me get to sleep, and although it’s restless, it’s sleep nonetheless.