Tropical Thoughts (Milan - Sydney)

He tells the people he meets out in the evening whatever lie or truth comes most quickly, most invisibly – without effort. His eyes feel like they never move from the back of his skull, nothing changes. The alcohol here feels like poison entering the back of his neck – he thinks why would anybody drink poison? He goes to the bar, looks at all the bottles and the beers on tap. He doesn’t know what to drink. The beer tastes like piss in his mouth, he drinks it so slowly it even becomes tepid, and the cheap spirits act like sugar syrup blocking his veins, pinching his muscles, making them ache. He says he’s on a diet, straight-faced. He imagines a form of nutrition which has no effect on the body’s equilibrium, the pill of bread and water alone, without expression.

He says to himself that he won’t change his mind while he’s away, but inevitably he goes tropical thinking. His mind can’t grip anything, he lies on his bed in streams of longing,– erotics – said the same way the mind knows how to say the tropics, all floating sensually below his surface. He wonders again, perfectly still, what can you actually do to the naked body of a stranger, when it undresses itself for pleasure, he has no idea, just the shock of heavy breasts, he thinks .

The city slides past him, the harbour bridge, the bay, and through his mind; all its vicious flora and fauna, enormous trees, sandstone, ominous backyard cactus silhouettes, purple jacaranda flowers, stinking frangipani. An arching and languid ‘one-hit’ sensibility pervades the city; an idea seems to go no further than its initial euphoria – over and over again. Even in winter, he remembers, the city doesn’t lose its deceivingly lightweight perfume, rushing silently, minding its own business, over swathes of perfect asphalt.

On the plane back to Milan he feels his soul crush suddenly, like a can of soft drink as he remembers hardness again, that of moving too fast – and knowing how to make something of it. In this way dualities prick themselves to life inside him like veins on athletic forearms, useless thoughts coincide with the really important ones, for him its impossible to distinguish between the two.

He closes his eyes: shittalking endlessly, the dream of it, the smell of it – its intimacy.

Exhausted, burnt out pointlessness flashes through him desperately, I can't sell myself anymore, quickly, like a momentary loss of gravity as the plane hits an airpocket, your guts suspended in mid-air.