I and I

I'm reading back over stories from the last decade or so, flicking through the pages of my memory, sleeping in late and dreaming in empty rooms. I've spent too many weeks alone. I've
got packets strewn all around me, going through so much, back in Albany now after an absence of five long, dark Melbourne winters; Melbourne a black and grey landscape in the near distance, a new marker on my highway. My time there a sad pain, not quite over. Sad, but necessary and in some way an absolutely perfect pain. The pain of a splinter being removed. The pain of pulling a nappy-pin out of the heel of your left foot,
(what is the word for that sound?) scrape of metal through flesh as you step into the long grass.

The twins,(1) lying side by side on the big double bed with the feather pillows indented and grey greased from years of hair pressed there, come back to me now as I listen to the echo down the years of my various voices, some screaming softly in the night, some rational and accoustically unimpressive, and I wish that I had two bodies to go with my two minds. Then we could come to some agreement about whose fault last night was. One of us could leave the room and not come back til I'm over it.
I don't know that it's fair on us that we have to do the learning for two souls in one lifetime. And sometimes such
slow learning, double thickness.

(1) Bruce Chatwin, On Black Hill.
Photo: http://www.pbase.com/image/274414