At first, he could watch Letterman with his dad. Eventually the thoughts began: what is he, a serial killer? The others would never know what it's like to live one hour, sometimes just one minute at a time.

On the turbulent C-140 home, Corporal Washburn didn't know whether he was disintegrating or just truly shook awake for the first time in months. What he missed while stationed abroad was the solidity of US ground; he had had enough of the shifting sands near Baghdad. Touching down in the States, Michael felt at least somewhat cradled, if only in the way his boots engraved this magnificently firm ground with evidence of his survival.

After his tour, Michael's parents treated him like a kind of prized casualty. Even right after the nightmares and still soaked in cold sweat, he wished he could convince them to stop the fuss, to let him be more than a failing, flickering light hit by too much darkness. Somewhere inside him was still an iota of hope they had all missed. It just wasn't in his eyes anymore.

Sleeping home is like going back to the desert where strong winds blew that piercing sand in his eyes. Michael can briefly see a destination, grunts cracking up, and then darkness, another improvised explosive device tearing someone up. And all the roads ahead are still blocked with many other unidentified and uncontrollable things laid down on the way.

*

The life he learned in Iraq was in the moments of awareness of its frailty. Not everyone made mistakes. Some posed with the local kids in autumn-colored photographs, leaving a speck of purpose behind. Some could radiate this pride of fulfilling their duty, making things seem almost as natural as pressing your face against your sweetheart, like you were standing close to something amazing. Michael saw soldiers sacrifice themselves in selfless acts some tool in D.C. is never fit to commemorate. He would die for some of the men he served under.

But nobody told him you can't use a magnetic compass next to a machine gun. They didn't see the mortar shells hit the stronghold, they never did, even after six salvos. The co-ordinates Michael gave missed the insurgents and hit a village three miles east of the target. He had visions of what was left of the them, a faint unified movement until  the disintegrated bodies gave up. Kids, mothers, old people in a sea of ash, crimson, and yellow..

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He's not really there and he can't really see me. To him, I'll be just another rotting corpse hidden in a motel mattress. In this darkness a thick rope of longing bursting from my heart throws me against his being. I am drawn to something priceless I have lost as my lower body is torn from the rest of me by the full force of grief. I am now just half a woman, coyly sliding down the chair without legs to keep me upright. As I close my eyes I see him at his loveliest, trodding the streets of Sydney where I once found him.

At least I'm the thin teenage Marian again, having even gone past my ideal form, weighing in at barely 95 lbs nowadays. I'm dragging a stranger's skeleton shadow behind me. To think just two months ago I was still the teary-eyed cow chugging down nocturnal milk-shakes. Even in this lighter state my left shoulder is dislocating as the pulse in my chest is growing and moving. It's worse than ever. Those tai-chi classes and months of meditation on wart-ridden elementary-school floors should've eased that out!

Search for the keys, that's right dig them up so slowly, rattle them a bit in the air. "Expect immature behaviour". Perfectly mature in the offices during meetings with your fluent Chinese to surprise your foreign investors with. But you fucked up once, after the nuclear white hours of the morning, before the yellow ones of the afternoon. My first rendez-vous without your consent blew the telly over, cutting through the title of Dynasty ringing in our kingdom.

A secret companion was waiting for me at that filthy petrol station in the middle of nowhere, a blossoming rough love. We met outside of all manners and civilization while you waited impatiently in the car, fresh from the air-conditioning of the Wynyard Park offices.

Under a bright blue light I saw a flawless divinity. In a broken mirror of a makeshift shithouse I examined my only other perfection and its answer. Mummified beyond recognition, 30 stiches across the forehead, another 25 across the right cheek. Five teeth fractured by the cupboard door, powerless to change the repeating scene, choking on the pieces..

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