A Perfect Apple

By Ethan Houldsworth

My greatest fear in life will always be the end of it, the blistering uncertainty of what comes after,  will I ever be in a position where I can accept nothingness? Will I ever feel comfortable with my death? Should I ever feel comfortable with my death? I’m really not sure.

I can tell how close I am to death every time my credit card rolls over, every 5 years i’m so inconveniently reminded of the disappearance of 5 red Autumns, 5 dark grey winters, 5 bright yellow springs and 5 fresh green summers, I have seen these come and go like an evening sunset, so disgustingly wasted. When I receive that letter from the bank I feel a unique sense of grief, grief that holds me down so tight I can’t move, the anxiety of what is truly, not that far ahead terrifies me, it boars through my flesh, my muscle, deep into my heart, it leaves me aching, whaling, frozen in time as I beg my feeble brain to let me go, to spare me from this torturous feeling. In these moments my brain and what I can only describe as my soul have a sort of tennis match between ideals, back and forward, fifteen love, 30-30, deuce, serving is my brain, telling me that it is inevitable, it is soon, why not have it end now that you’ve wasted 5 years? What’s another 40? Determinedly receiving is my soul, my want to drain the last drop of my life, to wring out every exciting and unexciting moment from it. Ace, no touch on the serve, advantage Brain. In the end, my brain always wins this match and the depression I feel for the following days churns inside me, through my blood vessels like a disease it permeates into every muscle, every bone and every pore it stings and burns everything it touches.

As I contemplate work I can feel the pressure to disguise myself, like some sort of spy film, I withstand a scalding shower in an attempt to wash off my feelings, I pick out my dusty pink long sleeve, and my nicest blue pants, all in a fruitless endeavour, probably. One step at a time, I make my way out of the coffin of an apartment, into the old 70s stairwell equipped with a blotchy yellow paint job covering the textured concrete walls, long, slit windows running up and down the north-facing wall and steel screen doors enshrining every apartments entry. The echo of my footsteps fills the room like an anxiously beating heart. As I struggle against the front door the sharp winter breeze converges on me, making my skin feel brittle in an instant. I crank open my car door like a can of soup, It dislodges itself slightly and as I sit in the thinning seat cushion I can feel the springs underneath. It starts on the fifth try, which is a comparably lucky day for me, I can’t help but think, is this truly all I can afford, do I go to work all day just to drive a car too old, possibly dangerous, and certainly on its last legs, do I go to work all day just to force tinned soup down my gullet, just to pay rent on an apartment built just after my parents were born, just to have no free time and no spare money? If only I could get out of my own head and continue on this miserable day, It’s hard enough without my own interjections.

I can feel the world around me skim by, through the windshield like a Warp Speed scene from Star Wars, like beads circling my car, the lights and people fly past me. I’m not entirely sure who’s driving, I know it’s supposed to be me, but I’m watching the car drive like a secondary passenger in my own body, it feels as if I’m staring through a warbled church window and the world around me misshapen and oddly coloured. I see an old lady walking her dog on the path, it moves and zooms in and out like a 90s soap opera, the dog changing shape every second, a little girl, a ferret, a Chinese communist tank, and a dog again. The lady is always a lady, always old, always decrepit moving as if in slow motion, but even she isn’t immune to my brains broken musings, she is melting into the ground, not quickly but I can still tell, her body liquifying from the bottom up like an ice cream dropped on the floor, you can’t help but pity whatever dropped it, whatever left it to die in this sorry state, slowly but surely, unaware of her own death, she slowly progresses into nothing.

The red light on Owen Street halts my progress so I reach for my coffee, its container is adorned with rust like a lightning strike down the side, burning my fingertips on the shell, I take a sip, and I feel the heat run down my throat through my chest before I lose track of it somewhere near my lungs. I look at the dark gaggle of people at the crossing, all cranking their shoulders forward in an attempt to not touch one another, while still staying warm. The icy breeze made their faces pink and their eyes squinted. Among this group is a lady, shorter than the rest of them, so petite I fear that someone could grab her and run away as if she were a stolen purse. Her face is just perfect, so perfect I can’t think of a word to describe it beyond the word perfect. Her near-black hair has strands poking out of her hood like one of those old stringy glow lamps, her hands, tiny in brown leather gloves that don’t even cover her wrists, her jumper, a new-style University of Sydney hoodie, all black with the pocket logo, crinkled and creased all over, very different from my old one, and a pair of baggy sky-blue jeans. As the hoard starts walking she moves with it, I can’t be sure she is moving voluntarily, she could have just been swept up in the momentum of the group and moved along like a hockey puck in front of a stick. I want to step out there, I want to wave at her, or chase her down. I picture us running toward each other and embracing, in slow-motion, like in the movies. My blood feels warmer, I take another sip of my coffee as I watch her part ways with the group and head left toward the new bus stop, as she makes her way there I have to move in my seat to see her past my passenger head-rest, and I continue as she passes through my rear window and eventually- 

“Beeeeeeeeeeeeeep”.

I find this happening more and more frequently, the world losing its colour, becoming a grayscale facade of what I know the world to be. The sounds all but disappear from my perception, becoming underwater warbles resonating deeply, and mutedly between my ears. My sense of touch dampened like an early waking, my mouth tasting of pennies and dry like a dusty bookshelf. As I continue to slowly lurch forward, my little red mobile stammering along, an old man in a car, moving as an old man does, in stints, slowly and roughly, I cannot stop thinking about that girl. I’m not sure what I’m really thinking about her, all I know is that she won’t leave my mind, I picture her in a glass world, moving like wind through her glassy surroundings, leaving no trace of her progress, past buildings of glass, trees and shrubs of glass, over roads of glass, surrounded entirely by this clear fragile, dangerousness, she moves not much like a person, but more like a wisp, effortlessly traversing her world, where she exists alone.

“Why won’t she leave my mind?”

I mutter to myself.

I turn left off Owen, my mind still as if filled with blank tissue paper, I’m struggling to concentrate on anything or even nothing. The light poking through the clouds like white lights at a disco, illuminating the road, showing all of its bumps and crevices reminiscent of the moon landing. 

“Can I keep going on like this”  I whisper to myself,  afraid of what my own words mean. 

I just cannot see a way out these days, every single one, a muddied mystery of repetition, like some sick perversion of Groundhog Day, where time is still progressing but the days never change. Am I the only one experiencing this? What about that girl? Is every day for her the same day on repeat, same old bed, same yellowing sheets, same cheap coffee and the same trip to work?

My body seems to act on its own, as I precariously step out onto the sidewalk, parked in the no parking zone on Herschell, the cracks in the concrete disrupting my balance, the near-ancient Irish Pie shop standing in front of me, with a green sign O’malleys, held up by rusted chains, its green interior like something from a 70’s Hollywood movie and a large open facing window pointing towards the street. Its customers glaring at me with eyes so sharp I feel they’ll slice into me like a paring knife. I trudge my way  inside, my mind still foggy. I must look drunk, or high, or both. I order a mushroom pie, something I mustn’t have done since I was a kid, since mum was still here, and sit in the only available seat. Just about touching my shoulder is a man, with sunken dark blue eyes, so sunken it looks as if his body is trying to hide them, dark grey hair, a jacket that was probably yellow at some point but has faded and is covered in grey and black stains like a Pollock. He has black cargo pants with enough pockets to constitute calling them luggage. We sit on wobbly 4-legged stools at the bar table, facing out into the black 4-lane road that could easily be 6 on a good day, cars passing in and out of my vision, I try to imagine where they’re all going. A white old minivan I see as charging towards school dropoff, I imagine parents scrounging packed cupboards for snacks, yelling back and forward between each other about what has been done, what needs to be done, and which of their family unit should be doing it, I imagine every day being both a well-oiled machine and simultaneously, an absolute catastrophe, but in the end they will all be able to sit down together, watch some TV show and talk about their days. I see a little red sports car, I’m no good with cars so bugger if I could tell you what it was, it whizzes by in a blur, I imagine some beefy business-man, determined and hard-working, pushing himself each day to get through piles of work and spending his afternoons between the gym, work dinners with expensive clients and watching sports.

“What do I have? What do I even want?”

“Huh?” The man exclaimed

“Did I say something?” 

“You said some crap about what you want?”

Before I could even gather my thoughts my mouth was ruining my attempted silence

“Sorry, I feel like someone else is controlling my body today, I feel like I’m watching myself through a glass bottle.”

The man made a groaning sound like a decrepit oak door opening on rusted hinges.

I couldn’t help but wonder how this man had ended up next to me here, maybe he is a sailor, stopped for his week off before hitting the seas, or maybe a tradesman, working his body thin every day, or possibly even a lollypop man, having a meal between shifts of helping kids cross the road, I’d much prefer to think he is the last option.

“Yeah mate, you’re not the first one to wish he was anywhere but within their own body”

While I sat and thought about what the old man said, he rose in his seat like a rock surfacing on a beach, he limped off of his stool with a heaving sigh,

“You’ll find something, one day, something that makes it worth your time existing within your body, sometimes it’s nothing overly important, but important to you, and sometimes it’s the opposite”. He uttered these words like they fell out of his mouth, as if he had no doing in their creation, he said them in the same way that he moaned and groaned when moving. His wrinkly arms stretched out to open the door, grunting as he heaved with his weight, he bobbled out into the cold, and moved, much like my car, slowly down the street.

The man’s words really had me wondering, thinking about what I could do to find out what made me happy. I’d never once thought about actively seeking out things, trial and error in an attempt to find what it was that made me happy. How do you even go about doing that? I couldn’t even imagine the process of figuring out what that thing is; or whether that thing even exists. Although, if the old man is correct, there is something out there for me, something that makes these wandering days of dazed monotony worth wading through.

I thought about that girl, about what made her so special, or moreover, what didn’t make her special. I can’t get her out of my head, and yet, I couldn’t think of anything extraordinary about her. Every single aspect of her was so totally normal, and so entirely perfect, like a beautiful apple, with no incredible perfections but regardless, perfect, like one within a children’s book, solid bright red, rounded and supple. This perfect apple was right in front of me and there was nothing I could do about it, walking across that cavernous road, that apple, an apple so all consuming, so mundanely perfect, right in front of me, and all I could do was blankly stare, half within my own self, and half floating upon the skin of my body, like a cicada staring back at its own shell.

If I died tomorrow, or even right now, if it all came crashing down and everything went black, would I have felt accomplished? Happy? I can’t imagine so, I know exactly how I’d feel. I’d feel as if i wasted it all, I would feel like no matter what I had done so far in terms of my career, my schooling, the things that others would consider successes, all completely pointless, all entirely wasted on me.

I’m not sure what was moving my body at this point, but I certainly don’t think it was my brain, maybe some other part of my body, maybe not myself at all. But as I stepped down into my car and felt that hard seat underneath me, something changed. The lights turned on, the blurriness and distance I had felt completely removed. Immense clarity consumed me, I found myself standing in an open field, with a grassy breeze flying past me with a grace like none other, I felt both the warmth from the sun and the cool from the breeze in tandem, dancing a waltz in circles around me. Then, ahead of me, lying in the grass like a cookie cutter through it, the girl! I can’t believe my eyes, she is just there in front of me, perfectly imperfect, fantastically normal and yet totally unbelievably mesmerising. Her light yellow sundress falling over her figure, tracing it on the grass, her dark brown hair lying splayed in all directions like a human medusa, her deep brown eyes glazed with bright orange hues from the light, filtered down through the mix of sea and emerald green leaves that make up the tree above her. This moment, so mundane in its reality, yet so vital, so valuable in its importance is like nothing I’ve ever experienced before, in awe I stand, staring blankly, but feeling fully.

The incoherent screaming of a shirtless man brings me back to the real world, stumbling by like a pirate with a peg leg, Jim Beam in hand and a noticeable lack of teeth in his mouth, his unaimed screaming both jars me and puts my foot on the throttle. I had somehow come to the conclusion, to continue in this life, to find fulfillment as the man said within my existence in this world, I have to envelop myself in that world, where the breeze blows and the girl lays in the grass. I must seek that as the only end to my means. As I, for the first time in my life, turn from my trip to work. I’II have to be selfish. I realise not that I cannot turn back anymore from finding my way into that world, or more aptly, finding how to bring that world into mine. That way I’ll never have to think about the end of my life, or its meaning, all I will have to think about is that breeze, and that girl, the perfect apple and that tree.

Ethan Houldsworth is a young upstart Poet, Artist and Author out of New South Wales Australia. His work focuses on the intimate relationships between people, their environment and themselves. He works in the world of Literature education and has an unhealthy quantity of hobbies.