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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.
