Returned
I remember ceasing to exist.
Not a near-death experience, no extra-corporality,
I simply lost my definition, went out of focus.
I could look in a mirror to see no one I knew.
I understood it would be useless to try to talk.
The words would not emerge or, if they did,
the hard syllables would crack and fall,
broken pieces of a dialect no one ever spoke.
I could still see. People moved around me
like square dancers treading the pattern,
smiling, laughing. They did not realise they, we
were about to lose our grip, release our toes,
demagnetise and drift off into nothingness.
I don't remember how I came back.
Did the Martians unload me, did I find God,
did I love someone or they me? I'd like to know.
I'm afraid that last encounter was only the first.
- Jo McInerney 2007
Jo McInerney spent the first twenty years of her life in Melbourne. She
has lived in Gippsland for the last thirty years and has been writing
obsessively for the last two.