SHORT STORIES : Bungundarra

Bungundarra took several years to write.  It came towards the end of polishing Symbiosis, and now forms the novel's prologue.  In 2004, I painted a somewhat cryptic interpretation Jeune Amour.  The closing passage from this story also adorns the canvas. 

©2005 Andrew Thompson. Introduction to the novel "Symbiosis"

As I drive up the street where he lived, I ignore the shiny new homes and children playing in the yards.  It all seems so sterile and false.  He would have called it pastel.  He reserved the term for those who pretended to live, colourless folk, people to whom appearance was everything, and substance all but meaningless.  Most of society was pastel, the authorities were pastel, and the church in particular was pastel. 

I park the car at the end of the street and walk through the scrub towards the hills.  I haven't been here in decades, but the fallen eucalypt log is just where I remember.  The sky overhead turns painfully blue and I watch him break off a piece of flowering lantana.  He lays his head in my lap and looks up at me with that sweet shy smile ... 

The seaside town of Yeppoon has changed since that long-ago time, but he has not.  His effect remains evident in those of lesser colour who were drawn to him, and assuredly in me. 

People tell me that you can't find true love so young, that I feel the pain so intensely because my memories lay dormant for so many years.

They want to find a label that explains my psychosis so they don't have to analyse themselves.  They won't hear my words because they're terrified that I could be right and they could be wrong. 

But like it or not, I am right. 

We are scared to give too much of ourselves, yet that is the very nature of true love.  It is not a pallid smudge of pastels, but a vibrant explosion of colour that sucks the air from your lungs and leaves your heart reeling in glorious wonderment and pain.   

Don't try to explain it for you will fail.  Love is not about hormones or logic, time or age or death.  It is simply love, and nothing else matters. 

Cling to it, embrace it, and never let it go.