Earliest Hours

The earliest hours of the morning are when I miss you, when the city is dark, quiet and abandoned but for a few solitary wanderers, stumbling drunks and a woman quickly hustling home after popping into an all-night convenience store to pick up Panadol and tampons.

As I unlock my car, the jingle of my keys is a little too loud in this otherwise abandoned car park building. Suppressing a shudder I climb in and turn the ignition, the engine comes to life and my music starts to play; angry rap about sex, violence and money that allows me escapism and a strange sense of being powerful. I take the tollway home because I love crossing the Bolte Bridge slowly at this time of night when nobody is there to honk angrily at me. I admire the sparkling cityscape on one side and the strange dystopian industrial zone on the other. I notice a dark flock of birds – or maybe bats – circling around the top of the lit up pillars; it is an eerie site and for a moment I forget to breathe as I am caught up in a sense of wonder, as if this is all for me.

I think about how you’re probably asleep right now. I imagine myself turning up at your doorstep, like they do in the movies but of course I wouldn’t do that, the reality would only be awkward and stilted. You can’t go back to something that never was.