He committed suicide by life.

This I wrote in fifteen minutes about four months ago. It is written in response to a question asking that I pen something that I have in my life that is ‘challenging’.

After you have read it, do that thing that you do with the image above. Chuck, Eric, and Keith rolling along.

Love you long time round eye,

H

Challenging

My name is Hamish.

I am 42 years and a multitude of lifetimes old.

War broke me fifteen years ago, and now I am incapable of working.

The aboriginals at the end of my street are fighting again. At least twenty, on reflection there are more likely twenty five men and women yelling and screaming; a stubby just shattered the window of a house, and a rock has just hit a man on the side of his head.  He is not moving.

This is all happening, escalating if anything, even though it is two in the afternoon and it is the most glorious day. A Willy-Wagtail is chasing cabbage moths across my green, lush, and about due for a mow front lawn; the big white gum across the road has just exploded into an eruption of white winged and squawky Corellas. If it weren’t for the carnage at the end of the street, it would be the perfect day.

One, only one, and quite a magnificent ‘one’ incidentally, thing keeps me here. Living in a place I so heartily detest. Towering, she is five feet six inches short, reddish brown hair tops a head like Aphrodite with a ‘strawberries and cream’ complexion; her eyes, light grey to light blue, have held me captivated since the fourth of July, 2008. My wife is the most beautiful, most magnificent, person I have ever met, and as a result, this is where we dwell.

Here.

In a rural shit hole with nothing more to offer than flies, and dust, and heat, and an over powering level of antisocial behaviour that would not be tolerated anywhere else in this wide brown land. If I knew a word baring more power than ‘loathing’, I would use it to describe my hatred of this vile place. Suicide by life, this life of mine.

And yet.

And yet this is the town from which my fabulous wife hails. Her mother, brothers, sister, nieces, nephews, friends, and enemies are all here. Each and every day I force myself to endure this pitiless miasma of a berg, and like the ‘Hotel California’, she will never leave. She wears those she loves like the heart wears a beat, and never could I force her desertion of this very hell, perhaps?

So.

So she is here, and I love her.  I love her so deeply, with such passion, that I could never envisage a moment without her. When we are apart I miss her like sleep and I need her like air. To be without her would be the murder of my soul.

And now.

And now, as she is here, so am I; loving her, hating all else, and I could never live without the love of my life.

My beautiful, beautiful wife.

Fin.