What do you do when you get what you want? Do you run around with your camera, madly snapping up every corner of your dream, so that you have proof that it was there when it is no longer and you realize that it was yours for but a moment? What do you do with that moment? Do you realize that that is it, or do you have to wait until it is over, step back, and see the bigger picture? Does your un-believing ecstasy have to be developed in troughs filled with time, and hung up to dry in your nostalgia? Or can you let the happiness wrap its arms around you in that moment, and hold you in the fleeting hours of your joy, so tight and so close that it’s the only thing you breathe? Because your eyes will soon close on you, and tomorrow they will open on a new day with planes, and plane tickets with tomorrows date on them. So what do you do with today’s date? Do you think about how the happiness of yesterday faded, or how this happiness will fade tomorrow? Or do you simply not think at all? Do you just smile? Snap, snap, snap. What do you do?
Over to you my darling one, am watching your life unfold with the most confidently baited breath that there is.
A friend has asked…
“How is your heart? Excited, scared - a strange, but tasty cordial mix of the two?”
And I can’t help but share the beauty and clarity of these words put together. Words can be confusing and boring when they stand alone, but mash them together (carefully) and they create a feeling, an emotion, a situation so perfectly clear that I can see my toes resting on the bottom of the ocean.
So this cordial mix of fear and excitement that is a bit diluted but still refreshingly sweet, explains my heart for the moment, as Greece tips over to the ‘basically three weeks away’ marker.
(Thanks again for your wise words http://amostpeculiarplace.tumblr.com/)
Your toothbrush rests in the mug on my sink. It’s you I think of every time I choose the pink one and not the green. The green one is yours, along with the stripy socks I gave you to pack in your bag. You’re weaving a new story with your footsteps in them now.
The milk lasts a little longer these days. Do you still add sugar to your tea? A cookie to dunk? Or do they look at you funny, back home, amongst all those things you are not?
Who’s going to do the shopping with me now? Smell the rat-shit behind the cracker aisle? Wednesday night is still ours. I got home tonight and put on my sweatpants and cami; poured myself a spritzer. I’m hoping that this week they’ll finally get together. Sometimes it just takes baby steps.
Last night this town was ours. This morning it is just mine. And as I make my way down this hill, I am thinking that hey, maybe things aren’t meant to last forever, because if they did, they’d get old and tired and there wouldn’t be any room for the new things to come on in. Oh I’m sad, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve become trained in the art of goodbyes.
RULES: Be kind to yourself; be nostalgic for a wee bit but don’t dwell. Dwelling will get you no-where. Part One: Order OPI’s Quarter of a Cent Cherry - this is being kind to oneself. Part Two: Write a rambling and nostalgic blog with far too many un-meaningly, condescending ‘you’s’ and ‘we’s,’ sickening, enlightened hyperbole, and a trite ending that quells any dwelling you were planning to partake in.
Part Two:
So I’ll be playing that song as soon as I get home, and I’ll be thinking about you dancing at the top of the stairs; rattling the doors with your shimmies and shakes. I’ll Imagine your voices singing it out of tune, running through these streets with all the lights out, and it won’t make me sad. Because you gave me these streets. Because of you I’ve walked them so often and now they are more like home than they have ever been. With you, I’ve uncovered a new part of this world, and collected a new piece of myself, and so goodbye is not so bad because the me of today, walking home alone, is made of you, and you, and you, and it will still be made of you when the new thing comes along.
It’s like Jenga this life, you can’t take the bottom blocks out or you’ll topple and fall into a million pieces all over the place. We are built upward and onward with a myriad of moments; some of them are collected alone, some of them you collect with others. And those others will come into your life and then you’ll have to farewell them from it. That is just how it goes. So you drain every drop of blood out of this moment and that way there is never any un-lived blood in your veins to be mourned over.
And if you happen to feel those mean reds coming on, take a deep breath and be kind to yourself, because you are just at the end of this time. You’re at the eye of this storm; too close to the bend to see that it isn’t that sharp. Because you’ll hardly have to turn your wheel to make it, and if you do, it will be worth it. And voila, just around the corner, there is another era, another piece of life to be collected. You are where you came from; you will be where you are going.
Last night this town was ours; this morning, and here it comes folks - I guess it still is.
The box is filled with your life here. You built it all from scratch with your black marker, and pot of salt that we emptied with our licks, sips and sucks. You came to this town in your long legs that count for three of mine as we walk home from the station - sometimes I can’t even hear you I’m so far away.
The half empty conserves you popped in the box for good measure, bear your moniker on their lids; they were yours to eat from with a spoon. And the glass, peanut butter jars you finished off with your thrice daily P&B sandwiches are mine now. No more drinking wine from those white, coffee mugs. No, they are for the aphrodisiac tea you got from that girl who went to Barcelona. You put all the leaves in a salsa jar, and placed them in the box with a warning.
The yoghurt tubs you used to fill up with crisps are unpacked now in the back of my cupboard. Your cardboard box lies empty in the hallway. When I wave you goodbye, my left hand makes the shape of Michigan. Oh brother. You’ve left on your beloved train, making sure to find the conductor. C’est pas la peine de pleurer is what you say.
Down there where the pears grow, is where I pushed you over; it’s where we laughed when we couldn’t cry anymore. That is the ticket that took us to a land of childhood dreams; brought us home after the sun had pillowed itself. The dark gave us a fright that night, and we ran home in the rain. This table is where we ate the first breakfast of the year; this is the bike we broke. I can picture you sitting in your chair as the ants crawl over your skin, the skin you burnt when we dove down deep to where we thought the sun couldn’t reach us. This is the bell you left behind; hung on the door I once tapped on to wake you. This is the ceiling we plastered late one night because it was the only change we could manage. My bandage today was the one you bought me; green and gold flecks tied into a bow - and you ask me ‘Where do you feel the pain?’ I can see you smiling now as you read this; shaking your head at the things in me that will never ever change - I want to argue that they will. This is your memory dancing across my keyboard at work, but it’s already chipping away, and growing out of me. We’ve lovely smelling skin, you and I, but it’s me who doesn’t feel like dancing tonight because this place is crawling with your ghosts. I’ve built a bower for them to lay in because we’re back to this.
This is the way you packed my bag
With a gun squeezed into your temple
My body is lagging, clothed in the clothes
You packed me; neither here
Nor there and I don’t want to lose
This feeling, because this feeling is
You
And I’ll smile and save you. But you’ve only got half of me. Coz this is not where I want to be. Not tonight.
I’m floating in the ether; cut my shadow off and left it behind. I’m like a Round The Twist ghost, with half my body here in this room, whose musky scent makes my eyes water till they are red, and half in a no-where place - where my Australian self waits in passport-purgatory until I come back to redeem it again.
Roll on, just keep rolling. Roll on, and on, over this land of mine. Please, big, white plane, be too heavy to lift me and my three bags packed off this country where my sister, and my mama, and papa roam. Don’t, please don’t, do what that pilot tells you to do. Just keep rolling - down the highway, to my door, and I’ll surprise them all again.
You count to 112
But I’ve forgotten the
Number of bones in
Your spine
George
You dear darling
Saint George
Coins in my pocket
All this dirty gold
And no silver
I’m yours for the night
Let’s dance
This town is his. He lugs the rig from stage to stage, rolling up his shirt at the sleeves, and flicking his hair from his face. It always takes him longer than the others but he patiently screws in every last piece. His arms now lack the definition they once wore, and these days he favours long sleeved cotton shirts to the singlets and cowboy hats of old. Beneath his shirt’s fifth button is Friday, Saturday, and sometimes even Thursday afternoons, turned nights, at the stool, and the large fries he picks up from the Drive-Thru on Raglan. His hair, it falls into his face as he keeps the beat, and it is the colour of the Guinness froth he’ll capture on his upper lip after the gig. He signs his name, for the few who ask, in pink biro. He doesn’t tell them that it’s just the way he signs the back of his bank card. He throws in a caricature for them to differentiate. Practice perfects the consummate, school-boy scribbler, who dreams away class-time obsessing over the ‘shhh’ of the snare.
This town is where her papa was born; where the green grass circles the pine trees whose sworded leaves fall into the sea. She doesn’t come to dance anymore, and she buttons one more hole closer to her neck. She still returns here, at least once a year, and now she captures the beat on her thigh and in her shoulders as she smiles at the young kids who strain their legs. She threw out the green v-neck she wore with those first words years ago, and she’s forgotten about the ring she lost in that park. It’s all gone in the dark, as she smiles at the face she knows, behind the microphones, amps and leads. For years she pretended that they’d be different. In the possibility of everything and nothing, she had her happily-ever-after. Standing, waiting for him to return with the drinks, she catches her breath in hesitation. Thrown by the fickle amphibians outside this enchanted place, she wonders if it is worth it.
The victim always returns to the scene of the crime, just to see if the knife pierces shallower this time; to see if less blood is lost at point blank than from miles away. Or perhaps I’ve gotten that confused? Is it the perpetrator who always returns?
She was the Australian. This morning she’s just an an. She lost the badge, and pinned the ones she’d left behind to her heart. And she thinks you’re rude. Here, on the right hand side of the footpath, wondering why you don’t veer right to get out of her way. She sees a baguette instead of the tennis racquet sticking out of your backpack on your way to work, and she’s thinking of those wine stained pilgrims as the scent of the Summer of 08 jogs past. In the sun, in the backyard, she is sniffling back a cold she caught in a place where it’s snowing, and when her hand reaches into the draw it instinctively knows how to pull out a spoon. This was her, this is her making a new picture.
It takes a journey to get somewhere; anywhere. A journey is what it takes to get between departure and arrival; from Australian-French-Dweller, to daughter, sister, grand-daughter, high-school friend. It’s the journey that cocoons and transforms and sometimes I want for nothing more than to keep on journeying - legs cramped and crimped up between my chair and the one in front - my very own chrysalis at 52K. The clouds rattle the seats, and soon they come for your blanket and it’s time to test your own wings. And it’s the journey, with all its nowhere places and faces, that readies you for arrival, an obligatory freeze - a meditation. No ride is too long, sometimes you just need a journey.