As usual, traveling to school by the tedious method of public buses, through the great city that is Sydney. My headphones are broken so I am trying to refamiliarise myself with the nuances of early morning urban life, and it is quiet. My mind is involuntarily elsewhere, with someone else. I do not seek to stop these thoughts, as he intrudes and leaves upon his own whim. I am open. My eyes trace the course bricklayers of art deco architecture across my bus stop. I see metallic typography, but it is too far to see myself in. The stores are still closed, but the deco hotel open, dark inside. With bricks of beige and pale green, it appears out of place opposite the possibly-post-nouveau-or-I-am-very-wrong pink office block, and the larger, taller, frankly imposing prisms of glass and synthetics. Faded posters of Australian opals are plastered against the arched windows of that pink block, appearing as faded rainbows. It has not changed for the two years I have stood opposite it, and my heart aches at such a blight in the city center. My heart also aches as he comes back in again. Really, he is relentless.

I should have been more concerned for what was about to come, an exam of two essays I did not want to write. I was still elsewhere. Emma floated in, rambling with perfect naivety on the values of love, gender and class. Othello crept forward and fell before me as love and imagined betrayal ruined his facade. They preached, but in vain, falling upon deaf ears. I am elsewhere.

I picked up that pen and allowed my brain to work with what little information it had, finding myself more often than not staring at that blue lined paper that seemed to prefer not to be filled. I had to force the ink on, every flick, curve, dot, line and dash aggressively pressed onto the clean white, pure white. I frowned, I was academic but weakly so; smooth, rich and black ink was wasted upon cheap words.

My will is weak, and his persistence is great. I am powerless to finish anything, and I will not finish this. My day was good. Sleeping and aching is all I can achieve.