Day Two

While the Pharmacy Practice lecture was running, I was walking through the ticket barriers at Redfern station.

It was impossible to maintain my composure this time around. It was cold. I wrapped my arms around myself. I stopped outside the café that had closed down. I had no incentive to go to uni. No incentive to go back home. No incentive to do anything or be anything. I would have wanted nothing more than to simply fade away, right then and there.

I've always been afraid of death. Yet now I wish it would come and find me.

I wish my parents didn't love me. I wish I wasn't my grandmother's favourite grandchild. I wish my friends didn't care about me.

So that when I die, nobody would hurt.

I let dangerous thoughts take over my mind, imagining but never considering. Don't make threats you can't carry out, I'd always say.

I concentrated as hard as I could in PPF, hanging onto Hak-Kim Chan's every word.

I liked this afternoon's dispensing lab. There was so much to do that very little time was spared for idle thought. I was momentarily distracted by a conversation with Bao at the end of the practical about Romano Fois.

"I should tell him he looks like Edward Norton." Bao said, as we walked past the bench behind which Romano was marking off names of students in his group.

"Go!" I urged him. Romano had a right to know.

"I'm too embarrassed. Why don't you do it?"

"He'll think I'm flirting with him."

"What if I do it and he thinks I'm flirting with him?"

"You're a guy. That's far less likely."

"I think I should get to know him better first."

"How's that possible? You're not in his group."

We let the idea go for a brief moment, before I mentioned that Edward Norton was gay.

"Well then," said Bao, "what if he knew that Edward Norton was gay, and when I tell him he looks like Edward Norton, it'll be the equivalent of saying 'Sir, you look gay'?"

I rolled my eyes at him. "What if Romano Fois is gay too?"

"Then he'll definitely think I'm flirting with him, especially by telling him he looks like Edward Norton, who's gay."

I roll my eyes again.

"It's a lose-lose situation." Bao said.