Varmari.

His head felt like it would explode, not from anger but sheer frustration which had been slowly building up for some time.

Every morning the same hope evaporating like the morning dew underneath the fierceness of the merciless Australian sun, the frustration building with each cup of coffee or Pepsi Max until the pressure he feared would drive him out of his mind or beg for death.

It was so easy to feel this way it was as if it was the default setting for his brain just like his serious facial expression was for his face. I guess it was the lack of human interaction, the release following a conversation with someone, anyone to think something, anything but the tired old narratives of a previous existence.

He thought to himself if this was the result of his mental illnesses but it seemed to him that all of it seemed to dissipate when he had company, when he wasn’t alone.

This is the perfect way to break someones will he thought, isolate them from loved ones, family and society and let them slowly deteriorate until they just destroyed themselves by their own hand.

In his mothers tongue there was a word for love, varmari, he thought – kir ta varmari ati!, which meant there was no love here.

Everything revolved around the almighty dollar and it was getting that way where he came from, a whole world enslaved and without love for each other or the common man or woman.

The word varmari also incorporated or meant pity and pity seemed in no supply in his world, he was brought up Melanesian, a race of people that were by default very social and community orientated and to be alone was akin to death.

He’d been alone a very long time.

He stayed because he had everything he needed to survive, water, shelter, food, electricity, medical care, security, communication, stability, money but still he yearned quite painfully for love and a sense of meaningful community belonging.

His flatmate had potted plants out on the balcony where he spent the most of his days smoking, he watched them in the dispassionate way that the rest of the majority European neighborhood he imagined watched him.

Probably waiting for him to die for the cardinal sin of not working, not meaning anything in their ‘world’.

He couldn’t go back to where he came from, he had no skills, no means to support himself and his medical ailments yet he wondered how much of this anguish he could bear for he feared he would soon lose his mind,

but of course he never did.

It was like that line in Otis Redding’s song ‘Sitting on the dock of the bay’ which goes-” and this loneliness won’t leave me alone “.

Australia as a society or community seemed to him to have no varmari, he was sure it must exist somewhere in this enormous land but to his current experience it was lacking.

Kir ta varmari ati.