The Last Passenger

by Will Dean

My sister is my rock in so many ways but she is a fragile, weathered rock, complete with deep stress fractures.

‘It’s similar to the Freudian unconscious, kind of, only more elegant. It can be positive or negative, but Jung told us how everyone carries a shadow around with them. Animal instincts, anxieties, repressed childhood memories. The irrational side.’

‘Humans can survive three weeks with no food, three days with no water, three hours with no shelter, three minutes with no hope.’

My mug scalds my hands and I let it. Pain I’m in control of. A blessed distraction.

The only private spaces we have are inside our own minds. The thoughts we conceal from one another. From ourselves.

You’re strong, until you’re not.

‘You will bear this like a scar. There are some things you should never watch. You turn away. But you’re all still viewing all this, aren’t you?’

‘Sometimes life happens whether you’re ready for it or you’re not.’

There are times in life when you have a sense that something terrible is about to happen and yet you are unable to do a thing to stop it.

It’s odd how your perception of life and death, fear and hope, risk and reward, changes when you live through something like this.

He told me once he was in a kind of sad trance, as if something else had taken him over.