The Capricorn Highway is a two lane highway connecting central Queensland and its agricultural and coal fields to the sea. It’s where i grew up and anyone who grew up in the area knows of the anti-beauty - the endless fields of lucerne, cattle, the firing of rifles into the necks of kangaroos, dirt roads, the utes, electric fences, the opening and shutting of gates and the bales of hay held tight with bailing twine.
I’m lying on my side and I’m bleeding from just below my eye. It’s early afternoon, rolling onto my back I see dappled sunlight through a tree into the cloudless dome that is a beautiful country Queensland sky. I’m somewhere near my mum and her boyfriend’s place. I have just failed at killing myself at the age of 9.
I remember staring up at the rotting and jagged wood. The bailing twine in a flaccid noose around my neck. I look back up, fucking wood broke - why did it break - why am I still here? Pretty good knot though; I tied it real good just like my grandad taught me. Not the best knot. Terrible in fact. I’m pathetic and it hurts to breathe. I need to get up at some point. I don’t have the energy to try this again. My neck is bruised and red and I’m a fucking failure. I get up and walk down to the footy fields and lay in the dry grass. The sun is high above me and it’s still early in the afternoon.
That’s the thing - when you’re from a rural community and you wander to or from wherever you’re supposed to go - the empty oval, the weir at the end of the street, the bus stop, the ploughed fields, the pig pens, the dams and the sunflowers - It’s just so incredibly lonely. You’re always by yourself and when you have parents like I did, like a lot of us did, a mum that just kept quiet about it, and a distant father that told you to be embarrassed and ashamed about how you felt, about your mental illness, then the loneliness burns as slow as the sun sets - into the rows of irrigation channels, the cotton fields and the silhouettes of empty coal carriages. You sit by the highway and stare into the headlights of road trains as they pass by - the mosquitos briefly departing your skin and it’s at this moment you enjoy the Capricorn sky.
And that’s that and ya kinda live on: us lucky ones accidentally become older. Daily challenges become somewhat less challenging and then you wind up in Sydney or Melbourne or Berlin if you’re a cunt or wherever really and people will probably constantly laugh at you but you’ll learn to work hard if ya care and you’ll figure something out. And eventually you’ll be sweet and that horrible sadness will begin to disappear, please trust me on this one.
The feeling will briefly and routinely return, however, and you’ll remember those days when you’re on your back. Or by that highway, burning, eyes closed, toes to the edge of the bitumen - that passing road train soaring towards you. Holding your breath, inhaling; all you want is to take that step forward into the eternal white heat of conclusion. But that will pass and you’ll feel the warmth of the second chance. Gazing through the dust at those broken rafters, how did it snap? And you won’t care. All you’ll remember is wiping the splinters of treated wood from your eyes and today - not then, but today - you’ll just be happy it broke. You are you, and everything else and everyone else is just totally unimportant and you will have no choice but to become the amazing person you deserve to be.
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