Mary 

I was rather drunk as I walked into the carport of the house I share with my mother in suburban
Queensland Australia.  
I was carrying a length of garden hose with me, that I’d earlier shortened with a box cutter, and a silver
roll of duct tape. 
I knelt down before the exhaust of my mother’s car, fed one end of the hose a shortway into the tailpipe
then taped it in place, being careful to make the seal entirely airtight. And I then went and opened the
driver’s side door of the car and sat inside. I turned the car on and started running the engine, and I
pressed the applicable button in the car door down to lower the rear window on the driver’s side an
inch or two and I then got back out of the car again and went and lead the other end of the hosepipe
thru the open window and into the car until the rest of the hose was resting, coiled up a little on the
backseat. 
I then went and sat back in the drivers seat, raised the rear window up a little, just to be sure, and shut
the door beside me. ‘Shit’ I thought to myself, ‘fuck’ and I then started to weep a little.
‘…So this is it’ I thought to myself, ‘So this is it. Ah well, fuck it, fuck em. I could give a shit’
I continued to sit there and a short while later I thought to myself, ‘I suppose you should write some sort
of note or something...’ 
I got my iPhone out of the pocket of my black jeans, unwound the earphones around it then put them in
and put Joy Division’s Closer on on Spotify. Midway thru the first track, I opened a new note on my
phone then began to write in it, ‘As I sit here in my mother’s car, however far into gassing myself to
death a memory comes back to me; it is from perhaps 9 odd years ago and of a girl, I had little to do
with but who has stuck in my head for a long time. Her name was Mary, she was Australian, and of some
form of asiatic heritage, and pretty in a shy, unimposing sort of way and was at the time, I suppose
around 17, 18, 19 years old or so. And the memory took place at St Lucia university, where I was
studying a bachelor of arts for a couple of semesters before I got kicked out for an incomplete
assignment; I’d been playing a lot of World of Warcraft at the time. Anyway in the memory Mary, Derek,
this, rather popular effeminate outgoing homosexual young lad, someone else and I were all walking
down a paved cloistered lane beside the large lawn square in the middle of the campus and I tried to say
something to the group, which Derek ignored and talked over the top of and Mary then said, ‘Derek,
stop excluding Max’ 
And a shortwhile later that day, as I recall, Mary and I caught a bus back to Toowong village, where she
had another connecting bus and I had a train, and I remember that I struggled to make my feelings
known to her on the bus, before we went our separate ways. But the memory has stuck in my mind, on
and off, ever since. I must’ve fantasised about being with her on occasion in the immediate fallout, and
later in life I pictured myself on talk shows, a famous novelist or painter or app developer or what have
you, and mentioning her to the host. That sense of shyness from the bus has followed me most of my
life—I’ve never had a proper girlfriend, never climaxed whilst making love to a woman and it hasn’t
happened often, and my hairline has begun to receed a little at my forehead and temples, and
combined with a slight depression in one of these temples due to some brain surgery, from an assault
when I was 16, I have come to feel not at all becoming to women. 
And in all this world seems a rather nasty and cold place, which I no longer wish to live in. One in which
men and women seem to inhabit, polar opposite worlds, in which women may choose and men must
prove themselves worthy of choice or else resign themselves to isolation. A world in which there is no
room for the weak, and a man’s value is ascribed by what he can provide to others.
And I do not wish a single rotten, cold, self-interested soul from this place to say a word of me in my
passing.

And what can I say, it is what it is. Men are to be confident and women are to select which man they
find the most desirable.
And to be what a woman wants, one must never falter, never doubt himself—to be worthy of such icy
assessing eyes, is a trial I hereby resign’
I clicked off my phone and slide it back into the pocket of my jeans, and I continued to listen to the
album, and the car by then was rather foggy with smoke.