Brain drip

There are scratch marks on his arms that don’t belong to me. Bite marks and bruises, old and new, on his chest and shoulders that don’t match my dental records. There’s mud between his toes from another adventure and I can see the pressure marks from his heavy backpack on his chest. There’s a festival wristband around his arm, but it’s not the same as the one around mine.

Out here in Blacktown, four dollars sixty and sixteen stops from Kings Cross, naked and sore I take an OxyContin out of a box on my bedside table and I hold it between my fingers.

I say ten milligrams.

My great-grandmother was born in a large puddle in Osaka. I’m not really sure what happened in the middle. It’s irrelevant to my story. But I was born in that pet store. The one with the photo of the smiling girl surrounded by puppies and kittens hanging out the front.

I didn’t hate my time there - it was by no means extraordinary - but I didn’t mind. I was fed daily at 2pm and every Thursday my tank was cleaned out. I lived alone with my thoughts, which was relaxing.

I had always known that there was something ‘abnormal’ about myself, something that was a little off-kilter. I can’t quite grasp whether this manifested as positive or negative, but I know that I didn’t fit in; my early memories are that of being a square peg, an unfortunate position. Unfortunate because society offered me naught but a round hole.