THE SPACES IN BETWEEN

Tony Abbott ran in the Sydney to Surf, along with 80,000 others, and appeared relaxed and comfortable in the much vaunted first debate between the two leaders. It's probably not an experience Kevin Rudd will be eager to repeat, although he had been the one pushing for the debate. Because, behind in the polls, he had everything to gain and nothing to lose.
And what a disaster it was.
Everything shook, and when the leaves finally fell and the branches were bare, there was nothing there. The horror simply compounded.
"It's blasted a hole in the centre of his life," the last remaining fragment of a voice said; and he didn't know whether it was a chirp of his own subconscious, or still real.
They had pursued him for so long it took him a while to believe they weren't there anymore.
They survey your friends, they survey everything.
Well perhaps, but there was nothing to survey.
The hole in the centre of his life.
Yes, the job had gone. The kids had grown. His house had been blown. There were centres of activity and then there was nothing.
An aching heart that had simply been blasted to smithereens.
Documentary evidence of a taudry life.
He had a friend somewhere, but he didn't know who.
The cold beach, the nod of strangers, the quiet that had consumed everything.
There was no life here, nothing that he could find.
He hdan't wanted to come back to Australia, and he had been right in that perhaps, if nothing else.
He slept a lot, usually a sign of depression. But it wasn't that, if nothing else, he didn't know why he was here or where he was going or why.
What had happened had happened.
"I'd like a boyfriend but I guess I'm too old," he said in the Bangkok condo of his wild friend.
Only alcohol could fill the days; and yet he wasn't drinking.
Only time could cure what was the country's greatest angst, frustration.
He didn't want to be here, he didn't want to be anywhere. And so he gathered himself into some unfocussed ball. Glad to be here. Glad to be alive. A natural optimism.
They had corroded everything, and left him here.
"They're very dangerous people," Robbie said on the drive to Bangkok's Survanabhumi Airport. "I think it's good what you did, telling the story. But they are dangerous. You will always have to be careful."
For this the customer pays.
And he continued to pay. In a life that wasn't his anymore.
Come back to earth my friend, we will greet you like long lost lovers.
We will greet you as the darkest, lost love. And make as if to embrace. It was time for it to end.