Jim has returned from Sydney to his family home in rural New Zealand after months of feeling increasingly unwell. Before leaving Australia, he had what was then being called an AIDS blood test. In 1985, these tests were still new, and results could take a couple of weeks to come through - sometimes by telephone.
The home page for the musical can be found here. The human-authored lyrics and dramatic structure by Gareth Watkins are licensed under the CC BY 4.0 licence; reuse and adaptation with attribution are permitted and encouraged. See the full licensing statement.
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[Verse 1]
Can you imagine, being in a room
But slightly to the side of yourself
outside of myself
Remembering how I said I’d never return
And yet here I am
In the family living room, a living room
[Verse 2]
And the kettle’s on
The clock keeps doing
Tick, tick, tick
And the phone rings
And the doctor’s voice
comes down the line
[Verse 3]
His words don’t land together
fragments of clinical and everyday
So I try catching them,
grabbing them, one by one
Trying to make them make sense
And they don’t, and they won’t
[Verse 4]
There’s something about my test
And something about infection
But nothing, I mean nothing about my future
And then there’s a pause, a deathly pause
Like he’s holding my breath
And I’m holding my breath
[Verse 5]
And then one word
Just one
It doesn’t sound like any word I know
It sounds like a sentence
And that stops me
And it stops me
[Verse 6]
The fridge hums
A car goes past
A clock ticks, ticks, boom
And I only catch fragments
Little treatment
Prepare yourself
[Verse 7]
He then asks a final question
And I don’t hear it
I don’t hear it
But the message is received
The message is received
[Outro]
And the world sharpens
It’s too fast, too focused
Every sound too close
Closing me down
The world sharpens
And I can’t imagine me anymore
Please, let me imagine like before.
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