Since further back then I can trace, I’ve longed for comfortable human company that doesn’t infringe on my solitude. To date, I’ve never found it in the living. Conversation, for me, has always been an excruciating kind of peeling – a slow ritual rending of me clean away from myself. It’s extortion, I've always held, to ask a question nicely – for an answer is always demanded; and in one suffocating second I’m squeezed into someone else: some pallid stuttering else that doesn’t even sound like me. This is why I like the morgue so much. Corpses, while they ask just as many questions – incessant, awful questions of fear and grief (sometimes hope) – an answer is never required. Around them, I can relax. When I walk around the morgue at night, and it’s quiet enough that the scuffle of my sneakers on the green-white linoleum reverberates like distant cannonshot, their voices become cacophonous, choir-like, and they begin to deafen me with a gorgeous litany of silent, panicked questions I need never answer; that I may simply observe and enjoy.

oh jesus where has everybody gone what’s happened where have I           have I fallen god what is this    why is it so cold ths       this can’t be all there is   oh god can it      please jesus christ t                                 don’t leave me like this

                                                                                                       is                                                                     is somebody there

                     why can’t anyone hear me

                                            why won’t anybody come?

Come to me.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Please.

I never do, of course. Come to them, that is. As soon as their questions begin to turn into requests or orders, I leave. I’m my own therapist, and I recognise the importance of this boundary. I’m a good therapist. To reinforce the message, I even blu-tacked a sign onto the roof directly above my bed that proclaims, in cheerful multicoloured texta, “It’s only a problem if you make it a problem!” – because it’s true, and because it’s easy to forget when the bodies start telling me to take revenge on the scumbags, the bitches, the sons of bitches that killed them; to kill every member of that fucking family and bleed them out on a line like meat. They only very rarely say things like that, though. To be honest, the majority don’t even really understand that they’re dead – hence the knobbled kite-strings of questions they tug so incessantly from their throats; hence the belief that if they could just talk to someone, their state could change.

It’s pleasant just to walk, though, through these floodlit metallic corridors; to listen to the sounds that ring out from behind the rows of small brass handles that hide all that sagging flesh and whitened eye. No one else can hear them – the self-satisfied bray and caw of the living drown out most things worth hearing, but me! I hear them.

I hear every terror and wish; every one. Yet all they hear of me are my footsteps, swelling and fading away with the godly unconcern of a tide.

Still, as I amble through the corridors of the morgue, listening to their song with the delicate ear of a composer, I feel – singularly, in my entire week – like I’m doing something worthwhile. Helping the truly marginal. I stay for a few hours, visit everyone I need to, then pack up the torsion wrenches I use to pick the locks, turn off the lights at the switchboard, and go home. The first couple of times I came, I wore a helmet with a little blue light on it (the sort miners wear), but then discovered that simply turning on all the lights on a floor is far less suspicious. The one time I’ve been seen, the courier assumed without a thought that I worked there; without a thought asked me to sign for a package. I signed it without hesitation – with a made-up scribble and a tired smile that said, you-working-these-shitty-hours-too? We thanked each other in false complicity, and I closed the door behind me.

Don’t get the wrong idea, reader – I have considered carefully the possibility that the voices I hear are simply a result of some acute schizophrenia, and that my hobby (my necrophilanthropy, as I’m sure some clever wank in the press would think to call it), amounts to nothing more than breaking and entering. The prospect simply doesn’t worry me. I’m a democrat: I figure everyone deserves the chance to be heard, even if it’s only by a lunatic who breaks into morgues.

I met my wife here.

Her name is Elizabeth. She’s a lovely girl, with hair that gleaming sort of black the Irish call raven – pummeled by a truck, just outside of Westall. Killed on some unremarkable orange-grey morning, as sheets of rain pillowed all around her little blue car, and the radio announcers sipped their coffee, trying to rally enthusiasm for the sake of the day’s earliest participants. She would have been rounding a corner, thinking groggily of some smile or gesture from the day before, cardigan sleeved bunched up in her hand, yawning, one hand off the steering wheel, the camry ahead lulling unexpectedly far to the right – sudden panic – shriek – … and there would have been twisted steaming metal everywhere, ripped, flung all across the road, leaving the wounded creature formed from the two broken bleeding wrecks to be discovered, hunched and wretched, by the bevy of grim faces and reflective yellow parkas who always descend upon such things.

I’m conjecturing, of course – for your benefit. It makes no difference to me how she got here; how she was silenced. It doesn’t even matter to me what sort of person she was when she was alive: whether kind, whether funny, whether cheerful or quiet or playful or sad. The only thing that matters to is what she said the first night her corpse spent in my morgue; the thing she said every night, like a hymn:

 Who will love me now

            Who will love me now oh jesus who will love me now oh jesus who will love me now

                                   Oh Jesus who will love me now oh jesus who will love me now oh jesus who will love me now

Who will love me now

I’d never answered one of their questions before – and am quietly confident I never will again – but I couldn’t overlook the plea. Her voice was like a single trumpet ringing amongst a field of drone: piercing, water-clear, unmistakable. I could help this woman, I thought. Indeed, I am (for the first time, the responsibility intoxicated me) the only one who could possibly know that she needed help.

I’ve never been terribly interested in the details of the afterlife, but (if what I’ve heard the corpses say can be trusted), it’s easily surmisable to be some kind of vast, cold, sunless expanse. A weightless suspension, closeted on every conceivable side not by walls, but by eternities. The illusory gravitas life lends to Motion and Change is dropped like a sack, and they are revealed for what they really are: temporary busywork bereft of all purpose other than to pass the time – to forever be passing the time, but never to actually have passed it.

In short; it isn’t too bad.

Or, I should say: it’s only really as terrible as your mind makes it.

Some of my corpses seem perfectly content with their lot – they are the ones, I suspect, who were prepared for their death; who are happy to simply linger and reminisce, until all they ever are actually remembering is remembering itself. This woman, my wife, was not one of these blessed, fogged people. All she could think of was that she wasn’t loved anymore – no other reflection could penetrate the inky veil that surrounded her, nor other comfort find her. My mouth was dry – I could feel quicken inside of me, plunging in my gut and pooling in the back of my brain, the sacrificial burn of a selfless devotion. I would ease her mind: I would love her.

I’d long since reconciled myself to the fact that I could never love a living woman, or be loved by one. After all: in the dark, a self-sentenced mute is worse company than the dead. How could anyone bear to love someone who would cringe every time they addressed him? A still greater question: why would they? Yet with this desperate woman, my precious Elizabeth, I knew I was not useless.

Ours was a night wedding.

Elated and furtive. Somewhat hysterical, yes, but solemn all the same.

Shivering, I took off my shoes – it felt strangely improper to wear them at that moment – and knelt by her drawer (G5, bottom row). I read the neat, dull lettering of her name several times, and slowly shifted my knees closer to her. The metal pricked cold against my stubble as I fanned out my fingers in a facsimile I hoped she would understand was a hug. My cheeks flushed. I was nervous and eager as I explained myself to the empty room – my quick, stumbling whispers commanding (or so fancied the theatrical part of me that was greatly enjoying all of this) the attention of everyone in the room. She understood straight away what I was offering – perhaps, I reflected much later, even why. The ceremony didn’t take long; I read the part of the priest from a crumpled scrap of paper, falling easily into the monologue I’d remembered from a dozen barely-remembered films. Halfway through, I realised with a start that I’d forgotten to mention my name. I tried to mention it, but she interrupted me. I DO! OH GOD I DO! She shouted those words as though we were stuck on separate rooftops; as though terrified the words would get blown away by a city wind, and me, her saviour, her meal-ticket, with them. I murmured that I loved her, and put a cheap silver ring on my finger. Dimly, through the sheet metal, I could hear her laughing, sick with joy. You found me, she kept saying. I knew you’d find me, Jason!

I kept silent.

My name wasn’t important. This was part of my job now.

I calmly gathered up all of my lockpicking wrenches, and returned them to their little black bag. I blew my new bride a kiss, and walked home.

Ours was a spring wedding, and the trees were not dead yet.

Words?
-are coaxers; arrows shot into the dark of the human mind, hoping to hit upon something that's already there, burrowed into folded thought and memory. When they hit, a part of yourself you'd forgotten about blinks, awakes, enfolds herself into you anew.

Here are some arrows, angled metaphors, feathered and eager:

...As hard as primary school rulers
...As bright as a floating dust illuminated by a single shaft of orange sun
...As sacred as an unaddressed letter
...As perfect as circles of wax projecting flickering sounds from long-dead minds to living ones
...As cold as a saturday morning when the birds are huddled silent and asleep
...As cruel as a locked iron gate
...As warm as the remembered glow of a long and tired conversation
...As intimate as a perfectly-crafted mixtape
...As ecstatic as green tendrils growing from damp earth in a child's vegemite jar
...As brief as the glimpse of someone spiriting by in the backseat of a taxi
...As quiet as a strand of strawberry-blonde hair on a pillow
...As beautiful as a tiny act of kindness from a stranger whose face you never see

There are only two things to which all of the above apply; life, and love. Writers, painters and musicians don't create appreciation for these things, they only awaken it. The truest meanings and portents that lie underneath every word  Shakespeare ever wrote can be found, if you look, inside every single human being. Even when metaphors don't relate to something of your experience, they can bind themselves to you. Our lives are constructed of imagining: if a writer can hit upon the same unexpressed thought of a feeling (or feeling of a thought) that you've once subconsciously pondered upon; the selfsame effect.

...As hard as knots of glacial ice
...As bright as the bottled blinking insides of a sun
...As sacred as the slow construction and release of a tear
...As perfect as the other side of the sky
...As cold as a piano cut from a single block of bible-black marble
...As cruel as a father stretching tape across your eyes
...As warm as the quivering feel of a heart in love
...As intimate as a note tucked into the pocket of a doll buried underneath a full-grown willow tree
...As ecstatic as a trumpet blown
...As brief as the song it blows
...As quiet as the very centre of the aurora borealis
...As beautiful as the microscopic seeds of life multiplying, softly plying at the corners of being

Deconstruct a book, and all you have are words. Deconstruct these words, and all you have are letters. Even writing absolute non-fiction is an exercise in fantasy. We imbue meaning into lines and dots, like the Universe sketches and dots us into its vast, ineffable canvas. Meaning is all imagination, and imagination is the meaning.

:-)

(^^ Look at this guy: a slightly more honest version of what words are. Two dots and two lines, enriched in meanings by our gleeful, eager minds. Imbued with our remembrances; impregnated with the totality of ourselves.)
I don't often write. Tonight, however, my lightbulb is broken, and so, being unable to study, I thought I'd messy up my pristine little vox.
Words and words and words.
Joy.