Post Two Hundred and Thirteen: Part 1 - In Deep.

Part 1: I'm in deep.

My life events are starting to string together to create a weave of action and reaction. There's a natural ebbing and flow of connection and solitude, and in the last five years I've observed myself navigating a career change, five romances and five corresponding breaks to the heart, an interstate fling, two global adventures, and this here literary adventure.

I'm facing an erupting volcano. A situation that I'm going through today has been developing over the last six months due to a maladaptive avoidance coping style that I've since self identified. It's no secret that I had a rough 2012, but I didn't share the full extent of my issues other than the odd "A book this heavy should be closed in private" sort of analogy. It was very certainly the most challenging period of my life.

I told someone about my anxieties and a depression that I had faced during this time, of which I still succumb to occasionally. This companion said "You're not anxious. You're the happiest person that I know. A REAL anxious person does 'x,y,z'....". This stung to the core, as they didn't even pretend to consider the internal conflict that I had been facing at any point of the year before. My anxiety wears lipstick, hides knots under smoothed hairbands, speaks softly and with temperance, and unleashes like a high frequency whistle to a dog when the burden is too heavy. It also pushes strength to it's limits and faith for a clearer future, and blends it up into a smoothie of 'life on this planet hurts.'

Prospective funeral directors take note: if you're a nervous or anxious person generally, becoming a funeral director will give you a new found perspective on life and love and make you grow into a very aware and capable professional. On the other hand, the time pressures and responsibility specific situational factors involved can send you on a downward spiral if you fail to keep your life in balance. I took a little from column A and a lot from column B. I burned out in 2012, working too hard and too rigidly in a new city.

I drank too much, ate badly, wasted opportunities and constantly chased my next pay day. I felt lonely and restricted by finances, so instead of the bigger picture I kept focusing on putting one foot in front of the other. With one step forward and seemingly sixty five back, I didn't get anywhere but deeper and deeper into it. Into debt. Into desperation. Into illusion.

There was a point where things felt good. I met a gentleman that could seemingly take my blues away. He addressed my loneliness and my intellectual hunger and he literally took me away from my problems at work and at home.  We spoke of travel (and did some), and then of marriage and children and a house full of light and love. Obviously, this didn't work out. He left for travel and never came home for reasons that neither of us can really understand. It was on, and then it was off, and my life was more shattered than I dare wish to push my breath to speak of.

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Post Two Hundred and Twelve: The Organic.

This period in my life feels alien.

Some days I can't break out of my own thoughts and I'm all consumed in a battle to feel better. Stronger. More connected. Less stressed. Then there's other days, sometimes flowing in succession, in which I am a detached onlooker of my behaviours. This period of observation exposes how easy it can be to ruminate in resentment and dejection.

I'm arrogantly absorbed by these things, these feelings that have no relevance to how strong I am, how much stress I place onto or absorb from others, or how connected I am to the world around me.

I have more information about myself than I have ever had before. I'm 28. I know shit. At least shit about how I function best. And I know that I don't know even more about the actual world than how much I think I know.

It's another new good start. I want to learn and love and stay steady in the ebb and the flow of those two pulses.

This is not alien. This drive is as organic to life as the salt is to the surf.

Post Two Hundred and Eleven: Roll On.

A perfect* gentleman entered and exited my life, romantically speaking, and I'd probably let him do it all again.

I was sure that I'd be able to record our days together, our quiet work nights in and our noisy weekends out. There was something intrinsically supportive born in the early days of our relationship that made me feel dynamic and inspired, and even though I was reluctant to settle into monogamy I felt so swiftly bewitched by his perspective. And those eyes. The way his hair sometimes fell across his face and called to my hand like a magnet. The exemplary steering wheel percussion. The Seinfeld Sessions. The.....fuck.......the almost everything.

You know what the Rolling Stones say. You can't always get what you want.

I wanted more than what I could have. Within reason, but without a basis in reality.

In retrospect I can see that I wasted more time in being consumed with the fear of losing the relationship than I did in actually enjoying it. Circumstances changed but the contract couldn't. I was like a fat woman and a packet of twinkies; it was comforting but we were just no good for each other. That and twinkies can't actually sustain you.

I cried like a fucking child for days because I guess we just don't go into these things thinking that they will fail. Especially at an age where people are having children, not acting like them.

And unrequited love is just sad.

I'm ok. I really hope he is. I also hope that he doesn't think that I want to eat him.

Peace. x







*Perfect, with discretional allowances.

Post Two Hundred and Ten: The Circle Game

You and I. 

We're in for a good time, not a long time. Lessons concentrated, tightened in a loop by sight of the start and the finish. 

The truest love lies with the realist; he who holds an awareness and acceptance of our impermanence. 

I'd wish me for you, and all of time, but all of time wants more from

you and I.

Post Two Hundred and Nine: The Book.

I'm not asking for much. A simple black book. I don't even want a picture on the dust jacket.

For fucks sake. I don't even need a dust jacket.

Let me write a book.

I'll put my best stories in there. The profound ones and the shocking ones and the nonsense ones and the ones that make you smile and the ones that make me cry.

I'm not asking for a lot of money. Just enough to pay my way, and enough to buy one of those  fans without blades. Those things are so rad.

I want a book that I've published to hand to my mum.

I want a book that I've published to hand to my grade seven teacher.

I want a book that I've published to prop my feet up when I'm resting in my coffin.

Deal? (give me).

S.

Post Two Hundred and Eight: Dreamer.

I had a dream of you

we were walking hand in hand.

I wanted to say,

"I love you here.."

but before I did

I realised that I didn't know where we were.

Post Two Hundred and Seven: Like Patchwork.

For Loz. 

18/09/1951 -28/01/2002  

~it's your world now

  use well the time

  be part of something good~


People often ask me why I began a career as a mortician. My answer is generally satirical. I seldom acknowledge that the lure of the industry was an awakening of ideas and the beginning of my own epistemological journey.

Death. The unhinging of all of this that we are.

Before this gig I was working the counter of a successful cosmetic brand in a city department store. I studied full time and worked the cosmetics job four days a week, growing restless and disenchanted with the application of camouflage. My customers mostly wanted to impress a man or gain some power somehow, and although our quick exchange made me feel like I was giving these women a boost I was also painfully aware of the superficiality of my services.

One afternoon a co-worker threw a phone book on the bench and dared me to call a funeral home. There were two businesses in the city area. We'd been watching Six Feet Under at home and thus had begun a discussion on the practical applications of cosmetics on a corpse. Never shying from taboo, I called the first listing. As they say, the rest is history. They needed a mortician and I needed a challenge.

I'd seen a corpse just once before. Driving with my mother late one night when I was twelve, the head beams of our car illuminated a gentleman on his stomach, bloodied head still, contorted to face the direction that we were coming from. He was wearing a red checkered shirt and faded blue jeans. He didn't look mad or shocked or angry, he just looked like a very unfortunate splattered lumberjack. A police officer had ushered us to drive around the scene at the very time the covering blanket was moved for a forensic photographer to complete his work. I will never forget my mother's questioning.

"Well, what is it? What is it, for fucks sake?."

She was flustered by the commotion, but completely unawares.

"A man, mum. It's a man."

We drove the rest of the way home without any further discussion. How Bizarre by OMC came on the radio as we pulled into the driveway.

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I was 17 years old when my best friend's father was killed. We'd been hanging about doing something teenagerish when she was called away to the hospital. I didn't see her again that night, as she and her mother had to make the very painful decision to switch off his life support after he was declared brain dead as a result of haemorrhaging. His death was so unexpected that the rest of 2002 was spent building this family, my extended family, a coping schedule.

As his death was a police matter, the road to healing for us was protracted well into the following years. There are many things about this period in time that I can't remember, possibly because I've blocked out those moments most painful. I remember his funeral though, as it was the first time that I'd attempted to understand tragedy.

I very openly sobbed through the majority of the service and I held on to my own parents as if the ground was going to gobble us up too. Through my distress, I wanted so desperately to keep it together. I was dizzy with grief, and I continue to acknowledge that the man that was buried that day often acted as my adoptive father at a time when my biological one wasn't always available. He went on a walk with his daughter and I EVERY Saturday morning to get the Courier Mail and buy us an icecream. He showed me how to cook a real english breakfast and bake the fluffiest of cakes. He took me to see my first music concert. He taught me what it was to work hard for every dollar you could bring in to the house. He ferociously loved his children, his wife, his bike, his life in Australia, and he never ever let us feel anything other than safe.

I will never forget the shock and the awe of that loss. The cataclysmic feeling that your world has been irrefutably changed forever. I know, almost eleven years on, that we think about him every day. This is what I remember every time I meet with a family who has lost someone in a similar tragic circumstance. Nothing makes sense and everything hurts, and there is very little that I can do apart from provide an honourable ceremony to make things...endurable.

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An accidental death. An accidental awakening. An accidental career. One big purpose.
These occasions, thrown together in a story for you, make me make sense.