The ceiling of the surgery was a confronting place.
I wasn’t having surgery.
So I guess it was more like a clinic.
But still, I think they do surgeries there too.

I digress.

Zo jokes that it's cancer treatment when we catch up later that night, pulling Marlboro Reds from her bag and pointing to the crosses of tape across the folds in my arms where my veins are.

It was not cancer treatment
so I should probably not complain about it,
mostly because there are people in the world that are dying.

Nevertheless.

The ceiling of the surgery became a confronting place -
the Chinese medicine clinic in Middle Park, through
the door with the bell between overpriced gift stores.
God I hate gift stores. Why can't things just be gifts. In seperate stores. It feels like a very white middle-class concept. However.

I digress.

In the surgery between the gift stores I have lain six times while Malvin slowly infuses me with liquids my body can not create.
He injects them and then we wait.

While I lie there, absorbing, he stands silently.
Because for some reason I find the entering
and staying there of needles incredibly traumatic. Or at least
my body does because it shakes and it does not stop

shaking until all the tears and the shakes have been released. Malvin waits and pretends not to notice, replacing tube after tube, pouring drinking water into a polystyrene cup to hand me once it's over.

But despite his silence being somewhat comforting,
the ceiling of the surgery continued to be a confronting place.

Because six times is a lot to lie in one place in pain,
looking up at the fluorescent lights in blurry, salt watery vision - all the things that lead you there confronting you in one sterilised wave:

The quiet underbelly of things we deal with and don't
tell each other.

And while I think about this I am full of resentment
that I am here. I hate that I am here.
But mostly I hate how upset I get about the needles,
compared to all the larger things I should be spending time being upset about.

Like the babies on Manus Island or the fact
that gay people still can’t get married in Australia. Or all the points Leo made in Before The Flood that sometimes keep me up at night.

On the last time I left Middle Park,
the Uber driver pulled over once we got to my house,
because of course the surgery is in the most inconveniently
located suburb in Melbourne in terms of public transport.

He had been talking about his religion and the sun and peace and what was I doing, may he ask, without someone to take me to the Middle Park surgery,

I had not really been listening.
But when we got to my house, while I was gathering my bags from my feet, he turned in his seat to face me, looked me in the eyes and said,

It’s time.
You know what I mean, it’s time.

I guess that could mean anything.

But it was right then that I decided I was going.
And I was no longer going back to Middle Park.