i tell him stories like how the other day i was at the bottom of my parent's property and i was feeling intensely sad (which i do a lot of these days) but i could actually hear the quietness because the drugs i am on at the moment silences the voices i never realised weren't normal. and it was so quiet i could hear all the leaves, which were all hanging down because it hasn't rained there in months, touching each other slightly when the breeze, which was as slight as you could be, moved them slightly. it was the strangest most beautiful sound and my son came up to me and i think he saw that i had a strange expression on my face (and he worries about me) and he said 'what's wrong dad?' and i said 'nothing, i just never noticed the sound of leaves quietly touching each other before. it is quite beautiful. listen…see if you can hear it too'. and so he did (cos he does what he is told), cocking his head comically like the cartoons have taught him to, and i was looking at his face thinking 'was i once that beautiful?' and then there were the sounds of a kangaroo moving off quite a long way away (and so there were nice spooky echoes) and he said 'that?' and i said 'no that is a kangaroo…you can tell by the lazy thumping. they don't walk they hop. and they hop very emphatically, like they invented punctuation.' and he was about to say 'whuh?' but there was a closer crackly sound of something very nearby trying to move suddenly, but very quietly, away from us, and that sound interrupted us and we both turned and there was this feral deer standing mere feet from us looking really embarrassed and fat and shaggy like it had been drinking or something and it leapt off through the prickle bushes like it had never been there before. and my psychologist was saying, as i was retelling this story, 'see how your face changes? you have these sad stories, but when you tell them it seems to lift you up. i think you get some kind of appreciation of observing your life from a distance. and maybe all these surreal things that happen to you (waking up and finding yourself inside the body of someone walking in a garden with a woman who might be queen asking you 'is that a kookaburra?' and you say 'yes ma'am.' and as if on cue it looks at you two, walking in the garden, and opens up its devilish beak and laughs its laugh and the woman stops with her mouth open and is frozen by the strange cacophony and then you, in being forced to listen also realise, suddenly, how strangely alien that laughing cacophony is, and then it ends and the woman, who was ill and cantankerous before all this, looks at you and beams and says 'that is the most beautiful thing i have ever heard'.