Anna Goldsworthy - Welcome to Your New Life

Why the spontaneous dinner plans? asks Nicholas, as we pull up at the red light.

I switch on the wipers to distract him, but there is not enough rain and they blurt loudly across the windscreen. Youll find out.

He turns to me suspiciously. Youre not pregnant, are you?

It is not the way I would have scripted it, but it will have to do.

At the restaurant, he is silent through main course, laughs uproariously during dessert, and then is silent again. Only when the waiter clears away our plates does he speak.

I hope were doing the right thing by it.

What?

Making it alive.

Three months ago I was in a car accident in Germany. It was a high speed head-on collision and it seemed unlikely we should have survived. I had been dozing in the back seat alongside the other members of my trio, and was awoken by a collective intake of breath. And then that infinite moment the wonder, the surrender, the terrible patience of it as the noise and the pain moved through my body, and I waited to see if I was still alive.

Afterwards we lay on the frozen road, gasping for breath, while bystanders gathered around us.

Are you really from Australia? You have these how do you say kangaroos in Australia, yes?

And these little bears. What is it that you call them? Koalas.

I had sprained some ribs, fractured my spine in three places, dislodged a splinter of bone that now floated around my vertebral column. That night, I struggled to remember how to breathe. And at the same time, I could not sleep for outrage. For the rude reminder: there is no safety . Above all, I wanted Nicholass arms around me, but instead I took out my iPod and listened to Fritz Wunderlich singing Schumann. His honeyed voice was another form of embrace, affirming the laws of inhalation and exhalation, alongside those other laws of beauty and order illusory laws, perhaps, but ones I needed to believe in until the black room lightened to grey and I could get up.

Back home in Melbourne, I still cannot sleep. There is a place deep within my chest that bore the brunt of the insult; each night my muscles contract around it, as if bracing again for impact. Nicholas buys me a robotic massage chair, and I sit on it as he sleeps, waiting for my body to forget, to relax its vigilance.