Sandman by Emily Button
The local news did a segment interviewing people with terminal illnesses last Sunday. Somewhere, an old man is in hospital thinking about all the countries he would have seen if he didn’t have a family to support, and a young woman ponders the career she could have had if her teachers had paid her more attention in primary school. At any given moment, there is someone on earth torturing themselves with the elusive notion of potential.
In the red sand, there lives a man with no TV and two names. I first met him on a Friday, and he introduced himself as Nothing. The next morning, he reintroduced himself by the name Everything.
Nothing moves like a snake in the sand, never picking up his bare feet. Nothing tells me that he hopes he dies on a weekend so that his mind will be silent as he slips out of consciousness. Nothing tells me that potential is fear dipped in honey and that each sweet tooth will be forever convinced that they could fly if they flapped their arms hard enough. He tells me through the gaps in his gums that he is afraid to try lest he find out that God holds him to the ground.
Everything looks at the sun all day. No one has ever caught his eye – even when the sun has set, he follows it to its hiding place, a shelter beyond our comprehension. He tells me that I have no potential and I’ll never be anything except all that I am. Everything tells me that the sun does not have the potential to give light, it just does, even when the rest of us don’t see it. Did the sun ever begin to be the sun, he asks me, or was it always so? Would one say that the sun has the potential to cease to burn as a consolation, or a disturbance? He tells me that he hopes he dies on a weekday so that he can live another life before his own ends.
Everything’s eyes turn to meet mine as Sunday turns into Monday, and Nothing begins to console me with the idea that I could shine too,
Ifonlyifonlyifonly.
“I trashed this because the beginning and end feel a bit whiplash-y, and it doesn’t flow the way I would like it to throughout – the idea of the poem feels forced and disconnected.”
Emily Button (she/her) is 18 years old, living on Kaurna country (Adelaide plains), currently working as a specialised dementia carer. She has only recently begun writing again.