I have a friend who works in a rest home.

It's been a while, but we're out walking again just like old times.

Lighting up a joint, I draw in deeply and pass it over—but he turns it down.

He tells me that things have changed, and time is short. Turns out Ben gave up smoking a while ago, ever since he started working in the Rest Home.

'I don't need stimulants,' he said. 'I get out of it enough just being around all the machines—bed lifts, life support, emergency red buttons…'

And I picture him camouflaged in a white smock, all goggle-eyed at the foot of a bed.

I start telling Ben what everyone's been up to, but he interrupts me, telling me how once a day he wheels the residents and their electric chairs into town. Their daily outing, which they really look forward to.

'You should see the filthy looks guys our age give me, as if to say: 'What the fuck are you doing that for! Then they turn away and pretend they haven't seen me.'

'There's no point being cool when you're wiping someone else's arse.'
But I miss his point. My mind's racing and I'm busy thinking how I've got to catch up with an old girlfriend, my first love. But I'm worried that I've lost her. I've got to call her.

I drove home from Ben's place through the motorway fog, with cars peeling off left and right in search of fast food.

Back in my friend's rural town he's like a beacon, whether we lose the rugby or not.

But I'm thinking of my first love. I'm positive I could find those special moments with her again.

Ben's words come back to me during the drive home, but not before I've thought to him: 'the world's a better place when you're high on life.'

But he wants to dissolve the ego. Like the way he strides into a room full of strangers and insists that That Chair isn't even there. So some of them argue that the chair is there, and others just think he's mad. Me, I stand there awed by the way his almond eyes blaze with so much conviction.

We're back at his house after the walk, and I'm looking at some paintings he did a while back, before he started at the rest home. They're very good, and unlike anything I've seen before.

'You should keep painting, Ben, you've got a real talent.' But it doesn't bother him, bent over dishing out the coffee.

'They're just pictures.'

And next thing you know he's explaining what its like having to fish plastic bingo counters out of their throats because they get confused and think that they're lollies.

During the walk we saw a tree outlined in the chill North Canterbury fog.

Leafless branches like capillaries. I was freaking out, acutely aware of internal organs, my own, throbbing with blood and life, unseen to me all these years.

I say to Ben that amongst the machines and the old people he must be very aware of the workings of his own body, surrounded by physical degeneration.

'Soon as we were born we started to decay,' he replied. What a thought.

It was a teaching on losing the ego, which he gave that night.

'Why should we fear death. Fear pain, sure, but not death.'

'Well I'd still rather be young than old,' I joke thinly.

At that remark, Ben leaves me and heads off into his mother's room. He comes back with a sleeping pill, all blue and luminous under the light. Sealed liquid. 'Just like the pill Neo chose to take,' Ben informs me, dead serious. He swallows it in front of me.

Right about now I'm getting suspicious, so I start sizing him up out the corner of my eye. And I'm thinking he looked sideways at me for a moment there.

After all, some of those old people do have a marvellously pleasing way of talking, at least the ones that aren't soft in the head. And I imagine him filing their exotic words away in his vocabulary. Selfishly, I find myself hoping that he hasn't changed as much as I thought, and that the artist never leaves the man. But I'm feeling lost and I'm trying to bridge the gap between us. It hits me hard to know that he's more generous than I'll ever be.

It was a relief to get out into the fresh air again. It had all got a bit much inside.

Later that night I didn't dream of sleeping pills, or decay. I dreamt of what She will sound like when she picks up the phone, and what it will be like to be with her again.

That sacred, child-like affection towards life.

And I dreamt that she'll remember too, and invite me over.

Because hope is stronger than reason.

And I want a fresh start.

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