a new drawer

I went and got myself a website. Figured it’d be nice to have a place where I can collect my stupid little things. It’s still a bit empty, but it’s looking a lot better than when I first tried setting it up. I had trouble resizing the photos (I can’t figure out why they won’t go smaller!!), but I figure people will assume it’s some kind of effect and hopefully won’t be too bothered. Check it out!

papercut to the pinky finger and a scraped inner ankle

Tags

bodies, routines, superstitions

Sitting with my knees pressed against the solid base of my bed, holding in the inevitable need to urinate that fills me upon every entry into my bedroom from the outside world. I am still but urgently fidgety. Everything is just out of reach, my fingers stretch and I clutch at my pale blue sheets.

Sitting with my back against the wall, padded with my bunched up duvet and my battered pillows, a computer on my lap. The power cord stuck to the side of the laptop leaves an indentation on my inner thigh, near the crook of my knee. When I lift the laptop, the square head of the cord breaks free of the little bed it has made in my skin.

Sitting on my hair covered carpet, pulling my dress, my t-shirt above my head, pulling my cardigan at the sleeves, taking my shoes off as I sit cross legged. Unhooking my bra, slipping the straps past my shoulders and letting it hang, stuck and molded to my shape. The quick action of draping my towel around me like a cape. I bend at the waist to tuck in the towel around me, maneuvering around the awkward short cord of my headphones which I never think to take off beforehand.

Lying down on my stomach in bed, the joy of only having to put on a t-shirt and a pair of underpants, the feel of my duvet cover sliding across the backs of my legs, and my bum, the awkward cushion of my pillow beneath my breasts, tucked in by my elbows. I am propped up.

I cross my legs behind me, making a tent of the fabric and thinking of how my grandmother and my aunt used to tell me that doing that would mean the death of my mother – a bad sign, a bad omen, a bad thing for a daughter to do. The superstitions embedded and stitched in a young girl’s limbs. I remember the teenage years of this pose, lying in front of the TV, too close and ruining my posture. Being a bad anak dara.

I remember thinking, “My mother’s already dead” as the sole of one foot massaged the other.

open doors lead to absent handy men

Tags

authenticity, conversations, fakery, scripts, sincerity

You called me today and asked me to listen, in so many words. Two faces on my computer screen, waiting, and your voice floating at the end of the line. We are back on the grass, under your tree, the sidewalks of Melbourne under our shoes (the outsole on my left foot coming apart from my arches). A heartbroken girl, confused and with more words than she can carry.

You emailed him, and he did not reply. You texted him, and he did not reply. You woke in the morning and wanted to hear his voice, panicked that he would be silent forever, denying you his last words. You called him, and he did not pick up. In the back of my mind, the words tickled me, emerging from a hazy bubble of a half forgotten reference. “Do not be that girl.”

Good advice or a bad call? Now it is my voice that floats. My hands and fingers are nimble over the gleaming water-shined glasses and plates from the dishwasher, the bang and slam of cupboard doors like messages from other worlds, the blinking light on the answering machine behind my ears. I am thinking, “Be a good friend.” I am thinking, “I don’t understand.”

Is it a writer’s curse to invent words to string together as you speak, your lips like the nibs of pens, the lead tips of pencils and your tongue and breath the ink? Never have I understood air better than when I am pretending to know what I am talking about. Here is heartbreak, here is denied self-worth, here is desperation and a need to understand. Here is another person. Two people, in love and out.

And the script says.

*

Over the kitchen counter I can feel the rush of air conditioning as I dawdle with my water glass to hear you speak. You’re a book I learned to read, a well-thumbed magazine in a doctor’s waiting room. Repeat visits. It is getting harder to keep being positive with you. Always somewhere in your many caveats and validations — excuses — there are the dark, burning embers of surrender. Being happy is the most difficult thing any of us can ever try to achieve. It seems.

Once, months ago, when you told me about this thing now that has finally found its legs, I told you that I would say this one thing once, and only once. “I think this is a terrible idea.” And once it was said, I would be happy for you.

I lied. God, how I lied.

I imagine us as broken phonographs in this kitchen, bleating our glitchy tunes at each other. “It’ll be fine.” “I know.” “It’s tricky.” “I mean…” I do not know what I am saying to you. I turn and inch my way to the kitchen door and leave. A half-turn, a half-smile, an exit. It seemed better than anything else I could have conjured up, cheap tricks.

*

And through undersea cables, my loved ones speak. A best friend with two heads, and a sister with a husband out of frame. We repeat stories and tread soft, familiar ground. There is silence, and the palpable lack of anything to say. The palpable need to keep talking. I would rather have this.

The little green symbol next to my avatar goes green and gray in turns, Skype in Morse code. Our images grainy, squeezed through our camera dots, our voices out of sync with our lips, overlapping and drowning out. We tread water and float. A hum breaks free from the base of my throat, and I close my eyes to think. What else to say? What else to say?

I would rather have this.

bees in the grass, the denouement of twigs

I have software on my computer that dims the light of my screen to a more pleasant warmth and colour when the sun sets. It is supposed to make me sleep better, possibly, but that hasn’t worked. I never got it for that purpose anyway, so it’s no great loss. I like the wash of warm orange yellow that slowly settles on my screen as I sit alone in my darkened room.

The red and white beach blanket I got two Christmases ago has been spread out on my carpet all this week. My makeshift beach. Sometimes the bed just isn’t enough. On my terry-cloth island I can lie nude and paint, but when my limbs skim the beige carpet that surrounds the borders, I pick up all my shed hair. It’s all very flawed, but it’s what I have.

Today I sat under someone’s tree in a public park and listened to her put her secrets in front of me on the grass. We looked off into the distance and suffered some not entirely uneasy silences, I focused on her staccato “like’s” but also on what I can say, what I can possibly say to help. There is a noisy seagull that paces around us, and I am not ashamed to say I threw a small twig at it that hit it right in the face. I kept saying, “I mean…” What do I mean?

In the past few days my life has gotten full enough of events that I was compelled to buy a new planner to replace the old one. When things get slow, I can fill the pages with poetry, just like I do in my lived life.

My cousin got married in the past month, an email from my father told me. On the grass we spoke of our parents – mothers, fathers – and our families. We spoke of blackmail. We spoke of worth. The way we cannot choose who comes out of us, and who we come from. The blood line of rot and regret. The blood line of obligation and duty. Love. We spoke of love.

On my beach towel, I lie on my stomach and scroll through my cousin’s wedding photos on Facebook. On a separate tab there is a photo of my little sister who will turn 12 in thirteen days. I almost did not recognize her. All the things I am coming home to, and all the things that crumbled and slept and died while I was gone. I am nostalgic for the concept of family and for a moment feel terribly alone as a member of this unit, trudging along through the years, losing pieces. I think of the strict fence I have put around my own Facebook profile, to keep out my family. I think of how I can look through this window into their lives, and the imbalance of that.

It’s all fleeting, this desire, the reaching out of fingers to glass. This life of mine has morphed so unrecognizably from the little girl they all knew. Maybe I am saving us all the shock.

putting sunscreen on too soon before swimming

Tags

buses, country, trains, travel, victoria

On the bus from Seymour, there is the imprint of a pursed pair of thin lips, the misty white triangle of a nose above it and the round ball of a chin. A small face, pressed to the window a time earlier, another one just next to it.

Earlier that morning, in a grey Melbourne drizzle (the memory of which evaporates the further I get into the country) a friend tells me she grew up in Seymour and I think of her as I pass a complex of uniform beige tin warehouses – a Curves gym, a signmaker, a mechanic. This is her town. The bus passes mothers with their daughters and sons in tow, all wearing shorts, buying ice cream from the corner store, jumping up and down their white porches, texting three abreast on the sidewalk. What must it be like spending long summer days living a life here? I look at every place as a site of activity. An empty carpark where teenagers trespass and smoke? A bakery where they get their first job? I don’t care much for the adults. Someone else can think of them.

I feel a bubbling moment of inexplicable happiness, with the sun glaring on the left side of my face and the roads seemingly empty from our height. I love that I have left behind Melbourne’s cold winds, my suitcase full of books. I am looking forward to seeing Ruth. The moment is brief but strong, and I hope to make it grow, or keep it with me.

Jacobson’s Lookout, a stretch of water at our first stop. The shine of sun on the chopped up glass of a small lake adds lustre to a country town. The glitter makes everything a little brighter.

Before the bus, I was on a train. I fell asleep, the deep drymouthed head-tipping sleep that feels like a significant blip in time. Drool spots the corner of my mouth as I wake, the woman in front of me anxiously checking her watch. This is such familiar sleep, like a quick drop of the curtains before they lift to a brand new view. A necessary transition – the seamless blur of moving from one place to another.

The house is gleaming wooden floors and other people’s bedrooms. Ruth removes the porcelain doll in my temporary room, on my request. I see it lying down on another bed as I walk down the hallway to the bathroom.

I slip into the indentation of their leather couch, into the rubbery blue of their pool. I look at the cerulean blue of my dress hem against the black tights covering my knees as I read a whole book in the lazy afternoon, in this cool, high-ceilinged house. There are details everywhere that remind me I am not at home, that I am “away”. The dogs pant at the door, and bring us balls and toys as entreaties, and we ignore them because we are not dog people, and we are not much into play.

I come home with a dozen stories in my brain, and another layer of tan. My suitcase wobbles behind me as I drag it home, and the sun is a bright dot in the sky, setting behind the train windows. Moving, always moving.

he just kept the tins underneath his bed/and sniffed a different colour every night

Tags

age, heartbreak, identity, women

There is a quiet, undignified thrill in having someone cook for you. Not specifically for you (although that would be even better), but you as a part of a larger group of people. Big enough to require some fuss, small enough that nobody gets charged money.

Two beans drop down the front of my grey striped dress and leave three stains of their descent. I drink ginger ale with ice and the others drink wine and vodka. I do not know how to wrap a burrito, but I get it right on my second, my third try.

“Can you please pass the cheese?” And again. One more time.

Everyone in the room is older than me, I realize by the end of the night. Louder, more familiar with each other. When I find this house, the door is open and the left wall is a straight line from the small front yard to the back of the house, the kitchen. In the half a minute that passes as I enter through the front door, the living room and finally into the kitchen, I feel like I am trespassing.

I am liked and everyone is friendly, but nobody here feels like my friend. Not yet.

“All of us have been Juliets.” She starts, lit up by two lamps, round orange moon faces turned to us nine, inquisitive. “You’re a child, you walk along in life until smack! Love hits you in the face.” “That realization that you could feel that way, this much for someone else.” “Wanting to die rather than feel that pain. I remember a friend who said “I’d rather have broken both my legs, both my arms, than have this happen.”" “Do you know what you’re saying when you say “I love you” at that age?”

Somewhere I hear the rattle of leftover screws and nails of a half-built project, abandoned. Incomplete. The rattle comes from me. I keep putting and taking off my elbows from the table. My chin does not quite fit in my palm this night. All the negative spaces I housed suddenly felt like they were never meant to be filled by anything. I think about the young girl, walking along in life. A country road, a field of grass, a dirt track. I think about the absences that mark my milestones.

*

On the lawn of the state library, I sit on a stone ledge by the bike racks. The trams trundle past, and the air is full with the incomplete snatches of strangers’ conversations. There’s dried gum next to me, stretched like a snail in a mild storm.

No force in the world can keep my fringe in place – the plaything of Melbourne winds. I tuck my plastic bubble cup tea, a quarter filled with ice, behind me like a small child, so it won’t tip over from the strong breeze.

*

When I say goodbye, the women press their cheeks to mine, and slowly I feel a swatch of blank paper being coloured in. One stroke, two. I remember all their names, and I list them one by one in my head. I walk to the train station in the dark, chest out, eyes darting between the fence posts and street lamps, at the darkness stretched taut between them. At a crosswalk, I forget a name and fish out my script to read in the fluorescent orange lamplight. My heels clack, fierce and false and young on the wet bike track.

I feel, for the first time in a long while, that I am missing an essential answer. Unnerved, I continue home.