John: I drove to the City. I climbed inside that great grey concrete beast and I drank. I drank whiskey and never showered. Stinking and wallowing in the foulness of myself.
Isabella: I went to the hills to write. Leaving everything behind I went to the hills to write of the sea. Does that seem a strange choice? But how else to write of it? I could never write when we were together.
John: Some mornings I woke up fully dressed and other times naked but always with the sour stench of vomit in my beard.
Isabella: I sat in my cottage in the foothills with the scent of eucalypts and far off bushfires and I wrote. The air conditioning made me cold so I turned it off and let the sweat come, sat dripping at the wooden desk while ants bit in the dampness behind my knees.
John: I don’t even remember the writing of it. The days blurred and I drank and sometimes there was ink and paper and at the end it was done. I was done.
Isabella: Outside my cottage an enormous prickly pear bristled with strange red fruit. They dropped and fermented on the gravel pathways.
John: As Laocoon I was crushed. Who knows what sin committed, what Gods I offended. It was enough that I spoke the truth.
Isabella: I drank vodka with blood orange and wrote of the ocean.
John: Grief is a dangerous place from which to write. Anger, love, fear, jealousy even, these all have form and shape, they are anchored and finite. But grief, grief knows no restraint, it spills and pours without boundaries, consumes itself and grows larger. Why grief, grief might say anything.
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