What I Need to Say When I Need to Say Something

I’m sitting here, smoking in my room because I have the house to myself, and thinking:

Fuck it.

I’m sick of being So. Fucking. Good.

I’ve had enough of not having sex on the first date, let alone with strangers. Of no longer taking drugs. Of getting anxious around the smell of pot and being shy with guys. Of my need for approval from those in authority.

There is a duality in me, like in all people to some extent, which confuses and frightens me.
I yearn for the self-destructive consumption of alcohol, yet I’m equally repulsed by the lack of self-control it represents.
I am intense and violent in my sexuality but, until very recently, felt horrified and dirty at the thought of presenting anything other than the illusion of pious virginity to my parents. Not to mention the impression I make on men of being intimidating and difficult.
I have a merciless contempt for anything conventional and popular – musically, sartorially, artistically – but I long for the simple sexuality of blonde hair and fake breasts and have a secret playlist of pop R&B songs that I listen to when noone is around to hear it.
I spent a good part of my life trying to starve myself to death, can tell you the caloric content of almost any food you could name, use Equal, drink soy, eat organic… but nothing warms my heart more than deep-fried slivers of potato covered in chicken flavoured sodium chloride with some form of processed meat product. And as a child I would cry myself to sleep about the state of the world and wake up having wet the bed, but these days I eat McDonald’s and never give money to people in the street, as if the $42 a month I send to Lidia Rodriguez in Honduras somehow frees me from any further responsibility or guilt.

I am a walking contradiction and I no longer know how much of this is natural human caprice and how much has come about as a result of attempting to fit my passionate, intense, violent and self-destructive personality into the outlines of the body I’ve chosen to present to the world. But what I do know is that I’m sick of holding it all together. I want to spill out over the edges of my carefully drawn lines and run screaming at the world while I’m still young enough and beautiful enough to do so.

That’s what I want to do.
But after twenty odd years of building up walls, how the fuck am I meant to break them down now?

The Most Beautiful Woman in the World

Post-coital

Right now
today
after sex.
He feels unnecessary.
He lies against me and I face the other way and I feel like the sun.
Outside it’s raining and I imagine I’m in Paris - the beautiful ingénue in an arthouse film and he is one of my many lovers.
He turns my face toward him and says,
“You’re very pretty”.

And I feel alone.

The Lust of my Life

From my private journal, dated 28th August, 2009

Today I saw ______! He was sitting outside Jungle Juice, next door to my work, when I came back from my break, wearing a fisherman's beanie and his 1940's suit.

Beautiful, beautiful man.

I walked past my work and hurried straight over to order a coffee and he remembered me and smiled.
"Hey" I said, staring transfixed into his bluest of blue eyes.
"Hey" he replied, calmly.
"What you up to?"
"Working, working" he said with a camp flick of the wrist. Is he gay? I hadn't really considered it before but it's very possible.
"You?" he added.
"Yeah, working. Next door." I pointed.
We smiled and I ordered my coffee and walked away... but I could've stayed and stared at those eyes for hours. It makes my stomach buzz just thinking about it.
God, I sound like I've been reading Mills & Boon romances. I haven't. I promise. He just has that affect on me. I would marry him tomorrow. I would sleep with his brother, but I would marry him tomorrow.

LATER that same day...
Saw him again. That's two sightings in one day. But there's a negative spin to this story. He was sitting outside the fish'n'chip shop with a female. Rubbing her knee. This leads me to conclude one of two things. Either, she is his partner and therefore the obvious recipient of familiar knee touching, or, he's gay and she is his fag hag (I hate that term. Why did I use it?) She is his female friend and therefore open to all manner of intimate physical contact.

Unfortunately, neither of these possibilities bodes well for my future with Mr ____.

To Get a Woman...

Taken from The Light of God and Girls

The Big Easy Empty

I’ve had an unusual week and I’m at Dutch angles. I allowed myself to let go of my own values and that’s dangerous territory to venture in to, the result of which has been the materialisation of a Big Empty Nothing in the pit of my stomach.
I’ve found it hard to focus. It’s been tough to eat. I’ve talked too much. I missed by ex-boyfriend. I washed down high-strength codeine with wine at 3 o’clock on my lunch break. I didn’t do the cryptic crossword. I cried all the way home on the train. I called myself mean names and thought bad things about myself.

But, during the same week:
I was chased down the stairs at the theatre by a boy twice in once night. An actor. A lead actor. Of a Big Production from a Well Respected Theatre Company.
Another boy-man, a drummer, in a band, that I’ve secretly liked for a long time, caught my eye and smiled at me, more than once, in the laneway, and started to come into my shop (before I got scared and turned away and looked busy. But next time I may act normal).
And a man-boy has wanted to spend time with me and walked me to my car and offered to spend more time with me in the near future.
And yet another boy drew a picture for me and helped me make a decision and sent me a nice text when I was sad and asked to eat food with me at a place where you pay to do so.
And I have an audition for a TV show tomorrow.

So, why do things work this way? Why do good things bunch themselves together like sixteen-year-old girls and then disappear for months on end? And why do some other things, which start out as really, incredibly good, suddenly decide to become really, really not so good and altogether quite unpleasant? And where is that lovely balance between the two?

But I must say that despite the Big Empty that’s nested down in my stomach, a part of me has actually silently enjoyed the frustration of this past week. A part of me that says, “This may feel bad, but savour it. It means you are alive”.
So me and my Big Empty are, for now, learning to cohabitate. And when it eventually decides to pack its swag and leave town, I will not reminisce about it altogether unkindly.

Feed Me with Lights

At the age of 25 I left the city in which I'd grown up, knowing that I would never return. In the years that have passed from then to now, I have never once ached for it so intensely and completely as I do for New York.

It is an all-consuming, palpable yearning not dissimilar from the pain of a broken heart.
It buzzes in my chest and knocks the breath out of me.

What kind of magic does this city command that it has so utterly taken over my soul?

Of Hands and Teeth

It’s cold and wet and I’m overcome with a familiar feeling of loneliness and solitude. The heater is on. The dog is licking himself in that way that drives me insane. My 26 year-old sweater smells like fabric softener.

The aimlessness is torture.

I’ve never been a person who copes well with inactivity. I fill my days with work, chores, outings, events, to avoid, at all costs, being left alone with my own thoughts. But in the depths of my busyness, nothing excites me more than the idea of an uncluttered day. Because we are wired to strive for happiness in something ‘other’, regardless of whether that ‘other’ has proven itself to be pleasurable or not.

So today, like on all my other days off work, I went out1. I wandered around Sun Bookshop looking for The Trick is to Keep Breathing but ended up being seduced by zombies yet again. Then I went across the street to Cornershop and spent a solid 3 hours reading, eating, drinking coffee, and awkwardly responding to the subtle flirtations of the cute waiter who is slightly too young and too shaggy to interest me enough to want to pursue him. I put off returning home as long as I could. I even walked back across the street to the cinema to see if it would save me from the inevitable. It didn’t and here I am. Sitting in the quiet warmth of my living room, legs tucked under me, on a folded quilt on the ground, feeling… feeling… feeling alone and surrounded by the deafening noise of a million other sorry people rushing about or sitting quietly alone, inflicting some form of pain upon themselves, all in the same state of aloneness as me.

Oh my God. Have you read this thing I’ve just written? Who am I? Please someone take me out and shake the black eyeliner and razor-blades off of me.

And after you’ve done that, stay for dinner and keep me company.


1Because in the three years and four months since I moved to Melbourne, I have spent only one day confined to my house. No. Wait. I did leave the house that day. For breakfast. But I spent the entire rest of the day at home on the couch reading a book. Quite a feat! I couldn’t stop thinking about it for weeks afterwards.

On Men and Parallel Parking

So.
Men.
I don’t get them.
And lately I’ve found myself more and more attracted to the kinds of men I’ve always reviled. The tattooed and the dirty and the drug addicted. Is this the after effect of a six-year relationship with a ‘nice guy’ (who, as it turns out, wasn’t so nice anyway)? Or is it a rebellion against my Eastern European, Catholic, clothes-freshly-washed-and-ironed upbringing? Whatever the reason, I find myself being inescapably drawn to the suggestion of a no-strings-attached liaison with a man who will expect nothing of me but simultaneously shower me with attention. “Fantasy!” I hear you say. Very possibly so, but a girl can dream can’t she? And by God I have been.
But dirty men aside, what I really don’t understand is the whole courting ritual. Once again I blame my LTR* for my complete lack of dating savvy but really, if a girl is interested, but not overly so, why must men make everything so complicated? Is it that they believe all women want to marry them? That every interested girl automatically thinks of nesting down? Because I can truthfully say that in my case this isn’t so. So why the hot and the cold? The on and the off? The furtive glances across a crowded room and the arrogant attitude? I mean for God’s sake (should I believe in him, which I’m not sure anymore that I do), just tell us what you want and be done with it. But I guess that’s asking too much. After all, I have a 6-month-old secret crush that I express by being openly rude and hostile, so what can I really expect in return? And, deep down, at the very core of my subconscious mind, I don’t actually believe that any man is really capable of loving one woman for the term of his natural life, nor that he really wants anything more than sex, so what am I getting so upset about anyway? If only I could, a) become emotionally self-sufficient and actually stick to my resolve for more than a day; and b) train myself not to view every man through the relationship filter left for me by my parents.
If only.
But if I am to be completely honest - and I always am with you, my reader - what I really want, really truly want, is someone to be nice to me and make me cups of tea and kiss me on the forehead and hug me when I have a bad day and come to me with their sorrows and tell me jokes that aren’t funny and buy me clothes I’ll never wear and speak to me in languages I don’t understand and wave their smelly socks in my face and be impressed by my parallel parking and play with my dog even when I’m not around to see it and watch disgusting zombie films with me and listen to me talk about books they’ll never read and show me work of theirs I don’t care about but will pretend to anyway and, and, and… make me feel like their day is that much better for having had me exist in it.
Is that so much to ask for?
Is it?
Perhaps.


*LTR - Long Term Relationship