Reader, I am returned—mussed up, fuzzy about the edges, but returned. Returned from the wilderness; from cooling pitch; from nine years (plus!) of inactivity. Returned, triumphant, from the bowels of the Overflow. Sweep away my magnificent unwashed hair—parse the bone structure, the shape of the nose, the glisten of the lips, and you’ll see that the incoming figure is me, a web log from 2005. Near-heroic, bursting through bramble on a counterfeit horse: a picture of courage and resilience and after-dark ache:—Returned, raising my cutlass under everlasting stars. There is no remnant of community in these weeds, and it is not the 8th of May. But it is Melbourne, the bolthole into which we were born, and it is spring, the season of hay fever and hope, and it is me, the tireless progenitor of revolutions. Read the change in my eyes, not my waning body—the depth they convey, the promise that this time, this time, it will be different.
Let me settle a moment with this warm teacup and this ugly cross-stitch blanket and I will tell you where I buried the silver. There are trails in my sentences but I suspect, at this stage in the game, the reader would prefer plainspeak. Permit me this brief diversion into scene-setting (its relevance will soon become clear):—April: feverish on the bed of my childhood, with the blind not drawn and something of autumn stealing in, I was the recipient of an epiphany. I had experienced bouts before, little jolts of purpose after dark, but nothing so potent, so acute. It lasted for the best part of a week, as piercingly as in its first sting, and only reduced in intensity when I had committed—in blood—to return. (You’ll recall, I hope, that I made good on this commitment.) Now, as I begin to type this out, and now, as I redraft it several years on, I trace my fingers over its scar.
Queueing for cleanskins down Murphy’s (following afore. epiph.) I hatched a plot; and under blush candleglow (following return) I made a map, on which, in sensual crimson, I marked out the locations of five key individuals. Isolation is essential—some trace element can be found in every worthwhile endeavour—but not in isolation; in isolation its benefits are negated, snuffed out in a vacuum of self. I knew that if this was going to work, work like it never once has, and never will, and probably can’t, I would need allies by my side, or at least mooning about the periphery; allies who can withstand bad winds and worse poetry; allies from my old red book, estranged or otherwise, who had stood with me all those years ago. But I will persist even if none can be rallied. Even if I stumble and fail and don’t persist. No matter my number, no matter the odds, these hideous timeworn antlers will light up the dark.