Oh hello friend. I know you. I know you. My bones hurt, do you want to rest? With me too. I will keep you company. Cruel thing. I will keep you kind. 

I am a constant ache. How bright your light, how blue and wide and blinding.  And when you look, it's like you’re alone. It’s like you’re all alone. You must ache too. Can you breathe? Let’s breathe together.

Oh my back. And you constant, do you hurt too? My face fish-eyed and terribly large and still you flock to me. Are you so desperate? Have you been made so desperate? Sit with me. Sit. Worship with me. Love with me. Delight with me. And are you less lonely yet?

My sternum. My breathless workless sternum–the place I keep my art. You who consume and I who create. An unfit right kill and let sit right. Suffocate. Am I scaring you? You are so small, your pond is so small.

I am with you and you are sad. We are still sad. Still alone. All lonesome. Together because I cannot stand the thought of you sad and lonely, alone. It is so loud and we are so lonely. Together. So lonesome.

You are sad and I am sad with you. Lonely. Together. So lonesome. A sweet thing. You or I could be. Trapped and–at least you can breathe. At least you can move. You are beautiful. Have you been told enough today? Has anyone ever told you? Do you miss your mother?

I miss my mother and nobody has told me today or yesterday that I am beautiful. I am. Will you tell me? Tell me while I am trapped here with you on my knees, face and cheek to the glass until we are trapped together. You or I. So lonesome. Together. Lonely. I am sad and you are sad with me. 

I must stay here to be with you. And you must too. You cannot follow me into oxygen and art and I will not follow you into sea and let be seen. But right now, for a moment. You and I. Lonely, together so lonesome. 

I would know you lonely. I would know you blue, so blue. One in a million. One of one. Cruel and trapped and made art made art make art. Like magic. Even then? Yes I would know you.

Mirth and stunner. Roll glee and content. Fit content. It does not fit in a bottle. Could I pierce your side and breathe you in and save some for later. In a bottle? There is no you left in that bottle.

Ah hello friend. I know you. I know you. 

When I was little my mother and I would do business. I would let her display my baby teeth in a little dish on the counter and she would buy me goldfish. Pearl goldfish that I would kill en masse.

Oh Poisson. Dearest Poisson. Mon cheri. Tu es magnifique. Je suis mal. Je–cry. I cry. I mourn. I’m guilty. I’m so guilty. I will be here with you. And cough back up – plexiglass.

When I was smaller I was paler, smoother, quicker and they could not trap me. Hold me down, face to glass and lift my gills. Scratch off my scales. 

Mirror image. My mirror image. Will you slow dance in insanity with me? Give her careful open mouthed kisses and stare eyelids-pinned into the horrors of each other?

I am here. I am cold here. I do not feel like a work of art, I have been made limbless and immobile. They have taken something from me. 

The first dead thing I watched become dead was one of you. A head here and a hand wedged in there too. Mock, lift, snap. All I could remember was the red of it, and then the feel because I was desperate to poke. 

I am almost alone in the cold and dark of my hometown, as close to the edge of water as I have ever been. My grandfather’s weathered hands over mine as we pry a hook from the mouth of my pufferfish. He says they're vermin but he will still help me set this one free. 

Terror. Pitch dark. Curling my toes then feet and legs up. Up like I might float above it. Gentled on the waves. 

Do not play in the water. Do not swim in the water. Do not put your feet in the water. Do not stand near the water. Do not look too long at the water. 

The way a crocodile drowns and tears its prey apart for eating is called a Death Roll. Round and round and maddeningly round. I dreamt of it. Descend. Roll. Be tucked away for later.

I push my head into the air and I scream. I scream and choke. 

My first apartment had a window the length of me, like a huge glass mirror into the world. The night I moved in, my mother and I sat shoulder-to-shoulder on the biggest bed I have ever had and watched the many lights in the apartment building across the street blink out. 

A real estate agent walks into my apartment. To her left a table covered in scraps of paper covered in incoherent babble about fish. To her right a wall covered in crudely drawn ink fish taped up with golden star stickers. The real estate agent backs out of my apartment. 

The lights shutter toward me boom boom boom. For one brief shining moment I am gone. I am blind and without sense, waiting. Colours shift, coalesce, come together. I am standing, or just still. In the dark, unafraid of the dark, do not be afraid of the dark. I spill open my eyes into the dark, one at a time, and realise I have been alone here for a while now. 

A ZET LIGHT, the perfect shade of ever-bright hums to life right above the soft cap peak of my skull. A thousand chips of technicolour bone lock fingers. One hand flares out, webbed flutter; a glide and propel. Inside, I am still all air. 

<*))))<

The ocean has a bottom. An endless unknowable one, but still a bottom. Where you can sink to, and rest among company. A sandbed for a snooze or a smudged mirror bottom that goes back up up up. One could swim straight into the sky from the ocean. Even upside down, you’d be alone. 

It’s like an IKEA in here. It’s like if an IKEA was round and we two kids from small ponds were playing house at the round door to the round bedroom where our round divorce will be witnessed on many wall-less sides. Like that. 

I saw my insides once. They were red and full of tiny little bones with needle points. 

I don't even like fish. Did you know. Not flake or salmon or barramundi or crab or shark or marron. Not to eat or spend time with or befriend or keep or kill. 

I had a pet marron for 5 hours. A man my grandmother swindled let us pick out a bucket full of marron the length of my hand from the silos on his farm. Mud brown but for my marron. He was blue like nothing in nature has ever been blue. By my grace, he would not be eaten. Not until all the kids had been put to bed and grace with us. Not until then. 

I have always loved blue. How I hold to blue. Blue is a memory that lives in my skin, scale, fin. Blue is a life I’ve never lived but it is one I just might miss. 

I remember being an egg. Round and many-eyed. Merry-eyed, especially. 

A lid over the world couldn’t keep the sadness in. She’d keep filling. And one day fill. Then overflow. Sadness would spill all over the floor. That’s what the filter is for. To bind sadness into water on an atomic scale. 

I watch a thing, a stretched thin thing, wander aimlessly nearby. It is flat planed and poor in colouring. This is not a very well-made thing. It is a lonely thing but it is not art, not yet, not here. The un-art hunches and goes low, curling up into a rounder shape. A wide feckless face wanes in the window. 

Hello, the face tries to say, be not afraid. But I am not afraid, I am remembering.

A fish and a woman, swim and walk into an art gallery, together and at odds. They meet under a bay of lights and neither has a want for air, but both are drowning. They have a conversation with their sanities and neither one understands the other but that is not why they talk and so they do a little more of it. 

We are not so different, sloshes the fish. 

And yet and yet, cries the woman. 

I am orange and you are not, glugs the fish, but it is not so different. 

My legs my legs, wails the woman. 

Legs make the difference? bubbles the fish.

My legs will take me where fins cannot, the woman mourns. Won’t you be lonely?

Lonely? burbles the fish.

It is so different after all! the woman cries in earnest. Loneliness is everywhere and makes our love worth keeping. 

Ah loneliness, the fish gasps into air, I do not have it. It must be in your legs. 

Eventually, the woman and fish part ways, both having left the other with something vital. Neither breathes easier but something in the breathing is new. 

I am in a small soft set of cupped hands on the bow of a boat hurtling toward nothing but blue lined blue. My bones rattle and jar at the breakneck speed as the sleek vessel crests up a wave, up and over, then down. Down so hard my scales sing. 

I am tapping on glass, trying to summon a friend. Knocking on an eternal door and demanding wake up wake up! A hand taps back a deafening tune. 

I am in a pail on a sandy dune pressing cotton into stinging eyes and scrubbing salt from fine hairs along my legs and gagging on the smell of fresh seaweed. The pail swings precariously on the run back into the water. 

I am in the little space between goggles and an eye. Pressure like a primordial fist squeezes me tight into the teary corner. Cyclopian, the eye and I take in the tinted view. An ocean floor in joyful bloom races into endless blue, alive with darting spectres and the strong round curve of a shell. In this memory, I am both terrified and brought home. 

I am in an empty tank in an art gallery trying to grow a self. Goldfish remember things for months, and I have been art in this gallery for months. 

If I were a pet before, I do not remember because now I am art. If I were a friend before, I do not remember because now I am art. If I was lonely before, I do not remember because now I am art.

I am in an empty tank in an art gallery trying to grow fins legs. Fins make you art, but legs hold memory. You cannot be lonely with a memory. You cannot forget what you can follow. If I could stand on legs, I could climb out of the tank, I could slosh across the floor to the wall of acknowledgements and remember my name. 

To remember, to grow legs, to be art is to be lonely. So first I must be lonely. This creature of fancy, the gallery and I — part-leg part-gill and feeling. We make up new kaleidoscope names; lonesome, together and lonely. I might only remember small things but those you never forget. I eat the creatures lonely and I am never alone again.