Post Two Hundred and Two: Princes and Thieves.

When I was twelve years old I told my best friend that I was going to marry Prince William. I blushed in telling her, supposing that I'd be consumed by a sudden and furious celebrity exposure. Perhaps it was his downcast eyes and alabaster skin. Maybe it was his family tragedy that I found appealing. Consider this; Was Prince William the Edward Cullen for kids in the 90's? White, sad, historically significant and really really loaded?

(Ok, so I know nothing about Twilight, apart from the fact that the glitter spangled guy is British).

What I find interesting is that at one stage I felt destined to be a princess. The freshly-evoked feminist in me raises her brow in nervous apprehension.

I am not stereotypically lady-like. I curse like a sailor and dress like a perpetual camper. I stitch together body parts for a living. What part of Disney's 'finding my prince' phenomena did I not find metaphorical? I called bullshit on the Bible, so what in the fairytale kept me under spell? And lastly why, when no other personal qualities offer explanation to the attraction, would I deem myself an appropriate royal?

I was talking to my dad about my romantic failings recently. My sister was sitting with us at the dinner table, thumbing through pictures on my phone camera roll. I snatched it off of her when I realised what she was doing. What sort of person looks through another adults camera roll? I suggested that I might have pornographic images stored, to which they laughed. "What would YOU be doing with boob photos?"

It dawned on me. I've been treating the whole partnership thing way too seriously and even my family can see it. I'm making dot points so that I can beat down this illusion into simple anti-romanticised take home messages.

1) I've been waiting for someone to come and collect me in a motherf*cking pumpkin for sixteen years. Given, I've also expected him to shred like a demon and look like Johnny Depp. At any rate, this whole 'Prince' caper is a sham. It is no more right for me to uphold this expectation as it is for a man to expect his lady friend to be able to bake a goddamn Cherry pie).

2) I need to celebrate my boobs more.

and

3) My family are hilarious but I will probably never tell them about boys or bad dates again. My dad might do something protective like ask for their email addresses again.




Peace.

Post Two Hundred and One: Mr Bus.

If I have kissed you I apologise. It was possibly shit.

My first kiss was on a trampoline at Cassi Devine's birthday party. She was a cool kid and everyone in our grade that mattered* was there. I was about sixteen. It was fucking terrible.

This young lad decided that he'd try and pop his digits down my fake snake skin pants after about fifteen seconds of making out. He was strong and handsome and I remember the initial excitement as his mouth pushed into mine. And then I realised that he was PUSHING. I had never kissed anyone before, but I knew that in this maiden exchange I wasn't supposed to feel conquered. Luckily I valued that little basket o' virginal goods and high tailed off the trampoline in time, dignity still contained in those god awful pants. In the peak of a Brisbane heatwave I hid my lust-damaged throat for the following week under a blue turtleneck. If you're reading this El Trampolino, you literally sucked. (And thanks for hooking up with the birthday girl almost immediately after me, swiftly schooling me in the ways of the school representative footballer).

I had a conversation at that party with another young man as he stood, leaning away from the crowd with his back up against the house. He was smoking a cigarette and I said to him that doing so would harm his babies. He had honey skin and a set of big brown deer eyes that caught me by surprise. I wanted to acknowledge his odd composure but I was distracted by my near miss intercourse with ol' mate Mr Trampoline.

It took a few months for us to talk more during class. One day he asked if I wanted to go shopping with him and his mother. I wore a Cat in the Hat shirt and his mum drove us in to the Queen Street Mall.  His mum dug my shirt. She loved olives and used to eat them from the jar so for many years to follow I pretended to like them in the hope that I looked as cultured as her. Damn that woman and her casual weekday elegance.

I was almost seventeen when he and I started officially dating. About a week passed after the shopping trip and he asked me if I wanted to take a walk down to the Scarborough shorefront after school. We carved our names into a tree and exchanged stories that still trigger an emotional reaction in me after all this time. As we walked to his bus stop I knew that this kid was seriously special. My first 'real' kiss happened as the bus waited for him to board, his fare awkwardly clasped in his hand that pressed against the small of my back. Is your first love so special because retrospectively you can see that you were naive to the pain of what it was to break up?

Obviously we did break up a few years later. In my first year as a Psychology student I was in no position to successfully diagnose or treat his problems (and nor should I have). I think he got another girl pregnant soon after. I don't even know if he's still alive. I really loved him, and then I really didn't.

So that's a nice story for you.

Fast forward ten years or so and here I am, thinking about all of the kisses between then and now. The few good ones, the few shit ones and the much more common fantasy ones thanks to Joseph Gordon Levitt. I wouldn't mind a kiss. Not like with Mr Trampoline, but like Mr Bus, with focus and connection and intention. Bring back the kisses that stop time.









* And by mattered, I most certainly do not mean by whom was and is most interesting, nor successful in later years.

Post Two Hundred: Another city baby, Another town.

It's odd, coming out the other side, eighteen hundred and twenty six kilometres away from where I started. Or at least from where I was, if it were not the start but some sideways skip. They say that running away from your problems will never make you free of them, but I propose that driving far away isn't a bad approach to giving your own engine a good run. I know nothing about cars but any shit writer would have enough fuel to connect a Ford with the human mind and pump out a bunch of 'destination vs journey' analogies. 

For the last three weeks I've been sitting at a desk. I haven't been out driving hearses, preparing bodies, arranging funerals or carrying coffins. It's been entirely uneventful and largely underwhelming, but necessary in it's sweet relief. Do not be alarmed, I'm still involved in the funeral business, but I'm the voice on the other end of the phone at present when someone calls to say "Hey, Nan's dead. Come help." 

It's nice. 

From the impregnable safety of the office blanket fort I can think a lot about why I left Melbourne. There were a bunch of reasons. A perpetually empty wallet. An exhausted body. An overthrown character. Chiefly though, I needed to shake a habit of catastrophising and being a general dickhead. I didn't have a good grip on what problems were actually problems and what drama I was creating out of exhaustion.  This whole relocation has stopped me from throwing my car into a ditch somewhere between Caulfield and Camberwell.  

I saw a coworker the other day rushing around the funeral home. Watching her from my desk, I could see that she was consumed.  Frantically, she stammered about wasting time. This lady, drowning in panic, undermining what time she had in hurry. I could see that all she needed to do was stop and breathe and open the cupboard to find what she was looking for, but I was struck with the awareness that in my own pressure I had failed to stop and understand what was right in front of me too. 

I didn't need to go anywhere, but wanting and changing shit for health and happiness is a bloody good move. Thanks perspective, you're great. 

Peace. 

Post One Hundred and Ninety Nine: Raw

Sometimes thoughts kamikaze into consciousness. Today, enjoying a coffee and reading the paper,  my concentration was interrupted by the mindful realisation that I was indeed relaxed. Why my brain felt the need to say "Oi Sarah, you feel tranquilised" was curious in itself, thus manifesting in a ditched Courier Mail and a half an hour of me staring at the wall, cogs turning recklessly.

I'm on holidays, initiated by my relocation after the Molotov cocktail that was 2012. Most of the year was spent with my days dictated by work and the pressures of kicking it in a busy city. The job itself in Melbourne was not that difficult, yet I found myself feeling like a falling Alice. I observed people toying with logic. There were constant limitations. I felt like an outsider. I had a yearning to return home. There was an overriding theme of death, a sense of urgency and an obsession with time and self analysis as I woke up. There, back in the real world, half way through my soy latte.

 Being in direct contact with death for forty to seventy hours a week shapes you. It smooths your corners during the day; it softens your tone of voice and sharpens your focus. When families thanked me, I had the go-to phrase of "That's what I'm here for." In reality, that wasn't what I was there to do. I was there to arrange for the disposal of a body and to co-ordinate a memorial event. I took the rest on, because I thought I could.

A hangover of this dedication is the exhaustion that I'm facing now. As a twenty seven year old, I came home mentally depleted and could govern nothing more than a bath and half an episode of futurama. I wished for my time in Melbourne to be spent growing and learning, but instead I could feel my batteries wear like a torch left on in a drawer. In my private life I felt hypervigilant, perhaps due to my constant exposure to high stress situations. Being the one in control of arrangements I assumed a responsibility to alleviate heightened emotions. The more aware I was of this responsibility, the more sensitised I became to stresses outside of work. I was highly strung. I catastrophised, and this is potentially the root of many of the problems I faced in my personal life. It no doubt caused rifts between myself and others that I cared about, and explains why I felt like such an alien to my peers.

So these thoughts stole me away from my otherwise passive enjoyment of caffeine. I am glad for the deviation. I am glad that in knowing this, my year will take a different shape.

Peace
S.

Post One Hundred and Ninety Eight: Travel Light.

I've been reluctant to write, knowing that I've been ruminating over denouement, pensive and sober, my feet stuck in the drying mud.

Times like that; black, hungry times. The crushing ones, the ones that make you throw things and cry out. Should I have shared them? I could have given legs to my pathos and let you take them for a run.
Finding the words that match the way I feel, to colour mood with more dark than light, allowing others with minds that paint with words to see alike.

I enjoy the idea of words dying as time does. Of laying them out like corpses to say goodbye. Yet in shock and tragedy perhaps the close of such a heavy book is best done with a private funeral.

I'm moving. Come along and read with me. I'll blow air into a new balloon with words that float, born of the hunt.  


S.

Post One Hundred and Ninety Seven: Bad Girl Gone Good.

 

 

 

This term gets thrown around a bunch, but the last twelve months have been a f*cking rollercoaster. A portentous, rough and ungoverned amusement ride with the occasional reportable injury, lost child and zombie infection. Let's take a walk down memory lane, shall we?

 

Rewind to New Years Eve, 2011. The one beyond last night, back before this years loops, the free falls and the corresponding bouts of vomit. I was new to the city. I had just started dating a pretty clever guy, so clever that he told me that under no circumstances was I to ever write about him. So I didn't and won't, apart from this, because the story is pretty entertaining. It's also pertinent to the general mise en scene of 2012.

 

We got ready to head out to a 70's themed party at some fancy Melbourne restuarant. I knew a couple of people attending, but the majority of the guests were strangers. Funny, smart folk who seemed to have their shit together. At this point in time not only did I not have my shit together, but I didn't even know where my shit was or if I was creating said shit from scratch.

 

I'm not proud to admit it but at that stage in my life I had no reservations about indulging in both legal and illegal intoxicants. My friends and family know this, but for some time I partied a little too hard and fast for a young woman with no 'issues' to pin the occasional substance use on. Not that everyone has a reason. I didn't. I was just young, bored and a maker of poor decisions. Never did I play with anything jabby. If there was fun to be had and mind states to be altered, I was smoking or snorting before anyone could find the lighter.

 

This was one of the very last times that I took a drug. It was a horrendous evening. 

 

Proceedings were lighthearted. Merriment was in the air, yet not even two hours later my brain exploded and I lost all ability to reason. To ring in the new year I was in a gutter alone, crying, because some hot french bird at the table mentioned that she was missing her Parisian friends. I missed my friends, more than anything. In Brisbane people were interested in who and why I was such an oddball, but these people and especially my date were nonpartisan to what I could offer. It was not me at my finest. In fact, this was me at my worst hour.

 

Needless to say, I was dumped pretty quickly for being ridiculous. I lost, and was lost. I started the journey from January 1st to clean up in body and mind.

 

After that there was a period that stank of melancholy and loneliness. I felt split down the middle; I could go from feeling strong and free to insecure and fragile in the time it takes to shut the doors of the cremator. I had very little human interaction outside of work, which I've decided is just not good for anybody.  I met the occasional fellow and had the occasional snog, but nothing was right and I lost all confidence in my ability to capture anyone's interest.

 

Baseball saved me from turning into a hermit. I ran around hitting shit and sliding in mud. It was a necessary outlet for the frustrations building from feeling forsaken. When you're in the game you're not in your head, and that for me was like a benzo. It was, and is, one of my favorite discoveries of 2012.

 

And then I felt good. I felt better than I had all year. And then it was July.

 

Oh, July. I fell in love thanks to this here blog.

 

The way I felt was like as if I'd never experienced live music, and suddenly a symphony orchestra was setting up their instruments in my loungeroom. I had to stop myself from saying that it was crazy, because it wasn't, and we damned well deserved each other. From the day we met I was devoted and all consumed. And then, just a couple of months down the track and after a phenomenal holiday filled with companionship and adoration, it fell apart with as much fire and gumption as when it begun.

 

December for me has been a time of very necessary scrutiny. From all the crazy business, the feelings of inaedquacy and rejection and deficit; I've brought that upon myself.  There is just no need for it. No need, and no room for it in my plan to meet others and shoot the shit.

 

I spent this New Years in a bath tub (clothed, in case you got excited) with two of my dearest friends, of whom I met through old mate that I was dating at the 70's party. I lost contact with all of the other people associated in that circle, due to my erratic behaviour no doubt, but these two girls have stuck by me through all of the drama. I've been late to countless dinner dates and so forth because being in the funeral industry sucks a fat and is very good at interrupting my personal life, but they are patient, kind, and wise beyond their years and I love them for their advice and excellent laughs.

 

And so that's that. You know me a little more now. Probably too much. And don't worry, this is the start of being an excellent decision maker. I'm open. To everything (apart from spliffs).

 

COME AT ME DAWG.    

 

 

 



Post One Hundred and Ninety Six: Here I Am.

I get it. Or as much as there is to be got on being miserable, I took as battle wound.

A constant, I wept as a widow does.

Like the obscene Vatican Fountain, my tears fell. For all who passed by to see, splashing down with intensity as if falling from a giant's cheek. Yet for what was spent in construction, and the toll was considerable, not a soul was fed by these tears. Nobody healed. My energy atrophied.

So I sat. And I thought. And there is only one way to go. And that is on with it.
To continue in being miserable is to ignore what I know and to thus miss the entire point of it all.

"Only by embracing all that you regret and not denying it, only by placing the highest value on what you've gained because of all that you have lost, does regret lose the ability to cripple you." 
- Augusten Burroughs. (He said this because he is awesome).

Dear Self: Change things and see what happens. As the days develop, so should you.

Peace.
S.