Mount Glorious,  Queensland,  2025.

It’s summer. Or it’s winter, and I’m sweating anyway. I have an affinity for bundling up, piling blankets, always wearing the bigger coat.

It’s impractical, but I’ve never been one for functionality. Style over substance, and a tendency to wax poetic when really, I don’t have all that much to say. At least I don’t anymore.

Lately I’ve been struggling with communication. Not in the sense that I can’t relay my emotions, well – no more than usual. I mean in the most literal sense.

Talking has grown difficult over the past year. I find myself stuck in “buffer periods” more often than not. Times where I have to stop talking because I can’t remember what I was going to say, or what I just said, or what we were ever talking about at all.

I feel like a fish out of water, mouth moving soundlessly. It feels a little hopeless. I used to be eloquent, verbose. Now I’m just stuck, stuttering, repeating the same few lines and trains of thought like a broken record. What happened to being articulate?

It’s made me feel a little stupid, but more than that it’s made me angry. I try and tell you, I’m sorry I can’t talk quite like how I used to, but you say I’m just the same as always. It’s in my head too, and I try and explain that. How thinking has gotten harder too, how it gets fogged up like your glasses when we head outside. It’s hot today, early spring, but the breeze is nice.

I forgot you don’t need glasses anymore, so maybe you’ve forgotten what it’s like. I’m trying to figure out how to explain this to you, how to get you to understand that it’s gotten so much harder. I’ve forgotten whole years. I can’t remember what I’ve done in a day. I don’t remember your birthday, and we’ve been friends for five years. I tell you it feels like a highway up there, and that they built my house right in the middle of it so I can’t sleep anymore.

I can tell you don’t believe me, not really. Maybe it’s my articulation that’s the problem. It’s not an easy fix though, I keep trying to tell you. Maybe I need to try and tell myself first.

I start sitting in dark rooms, wearing jackets in the summer just so I have something to pull tighter around my body. I cut out distraction in my life, prune what makes my memory wander. Before I do anything now, I tell myself – I’m going to remember this.

I only ever remember saying that.

The fog feels foggier and my head is getting heavier. I don’t know what to do and I’ve completely given up on talking to you about it. You’re busy and I’m bored, but I don’t bother you with that.

I’ve started going up to the mountains, drinking tea and talking to people I won’t ever see again. My head may not feel clearer, but the air up here does, and it’s a small but welcome comfort for the pressure that’s been building.

It’s not the first time I’ve seen her play – not even the first time I’ve seen her play on a mountain – but it’s the first time I’ve seen her play this song.

The chords echo through the old church, and the buzzing of the wooden beams makes my brain reverberate in tandem.

We’re going to need a bigger blanket, everybody’s getting cold.

Up here forgetting is a part and parcel of the green. Up here, with the bats and the birds and the bugs.

And that’s where I am, in the green, with the bats and the birds and the voice of an angel.

I wrap my layers around me, more than I need.

Grab that blanket, won’t you?

It’s cold up here, and I’m beginning to feel the chill.

 
 

Stereo Story 877

RC Murphy is a young writer (and writing student) from Meanjin. Her work often features themes of times and place, as stories so often do.