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crying.
    Michaela. It costs me a lot of what I used to consider my manhood to say this, but your pleasure was more of a pleasure to me than mine. Shit, if someone had taken me aside a year ago and told me that sex could be more than the relentless search for somewhere to get off, I’d have laughed them out of whatever seedy twenty-four-hour bar they’d found me in. And then you come along with your perfect skin, your freckled shoulders, yourglorious laugh, and you lay my entire life to waste. Ignorance suited me fine.
    You spoke like me.
    You got my jokes.
    You got me .
    You fucked me senseless.
    Then you left.
    The shadows on your face are flickering in the light of that candle we bought in Leura.
    I see them every day.
    So don’t ring me up from your boyfriend’s house on the other side of the continent, bursting with contentment from your great life over there, and ask me to be friends. You’ve made your decision; that’s the end of it. I will never, ever want your friendship. I want only to possess you completely. Like it was for those three days at Leura. Nothing went bump in those nights. Nothing.
    My hand hurts.
    I pass out now.
    Michaela.
    Where are you?
    I know where you are.
    Fuck.

August 23
    Jeez, take it easy, tiger. Don’t hold back or anything, Chris. We wouldn’t want you to keep the pain bottled up inside. You emotional incontinent.
    Please accept my apologies for that disgraceful performance. So many f-words. What will my grandchildren think?
    Probably that their grandpa had his heart ripped out, bloody and still beating, from behind his shattered rib cage by a wily Western Australian. Which is pretty much what happened.
    Last night was just a temporary setback, a stumble, a blip in the getting-over-it process. I really was doing a bit better. I was dealing with the pain. Or at least successfully medicating it with ever-increasing amounts of alcohol and caffeine. When I read back over what I’d written, I seriously thought about ripping out all the pages. It was a pretty poor showing all the way through, but when I got to the bit where I was writing out the lyrics from the Dire Straits “Romeo and Juliet” song, I had to rip that out.
    But then, I really want to be more honest in this diary than I have been in past ones, so everything else stays in. It’s bad enough that I present such a heavily edited version of myself to my friends and family; if I start editing my diary, it will reinforce my already overwhelming tendency to be gutless. But let us never speak of it.
    For the record, she really did cry when we made love and said she loved me like the stars above and would love me until she died. But, you know, people say shit in the moment.
    All in all, there have been better days for one Christopher John Harvey.

September 2
    I’m on the bus on the way to work. It is 7:05 a.m. It is also Saturday. It’s just wrong, I tell you. So tired. So profoundly underwhelmed. Five more hours of my life spent at Coles, pretending to be friendly to customers, making halfhearted attempts to flirt with Kathy, being rebuffed in said attempts and rescuing fifteen-year-old checkout staff who have jammed their registers. Mysister, Zoe, came into my room the other night after I got home a bit worse for wear. It was not long after the disastrous phone call from Michaela. She leaned on the doorframe and did her raising one eyebrow thing. Then she said, “You’re pretty passionate about your unhappiness, aren’t you, Chris?”
    I looked right back at her and said, “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.”
    She just stared back, treating me to a full-strength dose of her nostril-flaring superiority. I suggested that she close the door on her way out. She banged it.
    I’d better wrap up. Coles is shimmering and beckoning at the end of this block. Who can resist its siren call? It is the Land of Dreams.

September 7
    I am officially struck down with the Kathy virus again. Just when you thought it was