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August. Nothing quite rhymes with 'August'.
It's 4:15 a.m. Again.
More than most people I'm frequently up and about at this time of morning. Sometimes it's because I'm a runner; sometimes it's because of insomnia, but more usually it's because of my other affliction: that of being a night-shift worker.
But, anyway, here we are: 4:15 a.m. and just to be a little different I'm not running the streets of Gordon and Killara in shorts and singlet, but am in fact up in the air. I'm on the seventh floor of building 'B' of my employer's headquarters in Ultimo, close to Central Station in Sydney. There's an open area here, a kind of linkage between the top of building 'A', from where I've escaped my control room for some fresh air, and the half-way point of building 'B'. I'm most of the way through my night shift, and here I can recover a little mental acuity and look out over the precinct that is Ultimo, looking north-east towards Darling Harbour.
Some years ago, not long after I moved here to Sydney, a woman from the department next to mine threw herself to her death from this very spot where I now stand, vaulting the wall and balustrade to fall seven floors to the concrete and asphalt pedestrian precinct below. You'd think seven storeys would be enough, but no. It took her a full half hour to die, all the while having her hand held by a sobbing fellow worker and friend who just happened to arrive for work at that time. Suicide is always a terrible thing, but that one was especially bad. Just talking about it in the days afterwards ripped apart long-standing friendships among the staff, where opinions were keenly felt, but sometimes radically different on the subject.
It's perhaps one reason I rarely come up here: it's impossible to not think about that tragedy, despite it being nearly a decade ago. And, in fact, this is the very first time I've been up here alone at night. As I look out at the normally busy pedestrian corridor below, there is only one person to be seen; a young gun on a skateboard, trying a few tricks, whilst joining him excitedly alongside is his dog, a small white mongrel terrier by the looks, alternately being stopped in its tracks by the fascinating scents of the area and then tearing off again by the desire to keep up with its master. I fancy the skateboarding dude is actually something of a loner, perhaps a social outcast, enjoying the freedom that comes from sharing the solitude of a city at night with only his loyal dog, and maybe the melancholic stares of an unseen stranger on the seventh floor...
I was feeling a little melancholy anyway, of course: it's hard not to, really; and had just emailed a friend on the other side of the world, explaining how bad things were here at work, and how I was only just succeeding in not letting it all get to me; a sometimes difficult task, especially if you visit an area like this alone at night where a fellow worker had been driven to kill themselves not so very long ago. In what only later transpired to be monumentally bad timing, I had sent off that email (which had taken me five weeks to get around to writing) and which now reads as nothing more than pointless whingeing and loathsome self-pitying, on the very night that my friend's father had died... many of you here will know immediately who I mean.
Sometimes the stars align in such a way as to force you to refocus; to adjust your perspective and put your own life into its proper context. This is one such moment.
Life is a gift meant to be lived whilst you have the chance. Time, once more then, to get on with it.
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August. Nothing quite rhymes with 'August'.
