Kay gave away sleep many hours before rising, her head spinning with experiences, real and imagined. She was again suffering a bad case of ‘whys’. Words keep floating around her head attaching themself to every passing thought, no matter how mechanical or frivolous. Who, what, where, when, how and why? Who will I marry? What will life serve me? Where will we meet? When will we meet? How will we meet? Why do I keep thinking these things? Over and over, every thought comes, goes and re-appears. No answers, only questions, an endless stream of unanswerable, meaningless, untimely questions.

Sitting at the mirror Kay brushes dark strands to establish order where none currently exists. She visualises the silky fibres travelling off into the cosmos, one end attached to her mind, the other stretching across oceans onto continents where they touch familiar strangers. A far away connection to the calmest of peace loving mothers with two tender children, writing passionate messages with the strand, offering hope. Yet outside the familiar strangers door, cold wind howls across an icy landscape dotted with barely visible silos containing instruments of immeasurable destruction, waiting silently to be jolted into motion. Strands pass over mountains into lands where visiting is not permitted, onto red dirt where kangaroos joyfully jump across dry rivers, to places where towers tilt and roads travel through mountains.

Kay sits with her family and pretends to eat. She wonders why, how, her father can remain so calm, turning off his tender wisdom every day, to go ‘fight’ for survival in the madness of the city jungle?  How her mother can content herself to another day of silent persistence tending the kitchen, the laundry, and watching the flowers climb from of the soil for a brief stint at life?

Kay enters the bus and surveys the catalogue of seats waiting, searching for a vacancy.  Is the man in the front row really reading the newspaper or is he off in his mind re-climbing the Himalayas? Does the delicious young man in the second row have a girl friend or is he saving himself, waiting to notice her, notice him? Is the young lady in the third row as sweet as she looks, or does she offer her nights over to grunge, loosely playing the field with gay abandon? Is the man with the eye patch a retired pirate, or does he hide the tears that still fall over his long lost lover? Should she sit next to the gangster carrying the violin case, in the sunglasses and the tilted hat, or the gorgeous young man with the lonely eyes and his top button undone?

Quietly she enters the room trying to be invisible, the lecturer turns to her saying, ‘Kay, why are you late, and where is your assignment?’ Kay offers no answer, her face blank she is tired begging for peace; her glassed gaze confused further, by yet more questions.