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By Billy Johnson
T
he scariest thought I've ever faced was the realisa-
tion that I hated my life. Hate is hyperbole here but
nonetheless it's pretty damn close to factual.
Bonnie and I had slammed into a wall. My friend
calls it, “the bomb moment”, a moment likened to what it
could perhaps be like being in a room when a bomb goes
off. Not the physical trauma, but more akin to borrowing
the idea of a moment in time after which nothing can
ever be the same; ones sense of safety, ones value of self
and others, of life in general, completely altered in the
space of a moment. For us a bomb went off …
In the wake of a series of deep personal tragedies
across a short period of time, we slammed into a wall. It
seemed an insurmountable dead end. In that place we
lay, damaged and hopeless.
Enter the bomb ...
The fuse found its powder … kaboom! Just doesn’t
convey it well enough. A harrowing, broken, desperate,
soul heaving, snot weeping, dread laiden, mortifying in-
stance. Our bomb was not of terror … it was a revelation.
In the space of that moment we realised that the wall
we had been speeding towards was indeed no dead end
… it was a perfectly positioned coordinate of space, a
moment in time that, contrary to all better sense and
logic was, instead a breakthrough.
I’d fallen forward off a log where we had camped for
Valentine’s Day (2018) in order to escape reality for a
moment. I’d hit the ground in a ball screaming Bonnie's
name.
She came running thinking the worst; heart attack,
TRAVERSE 67