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Thursday, August 9th, 2007
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11:26 am
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I'm sad. I grieve for him, for the things he isn't. So I suppose I grieve for myself, for the death of an idea I had kept in cotton wool, held close to my chest as I slept, nurtured with my own strange incubating thoughts; none of this has anything to do with him. But I am sad anyway, & I wait patiently for this grey cloud to pass over.
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| Sunday, August 5th, 2007
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12:21 pm - sunday morning like a lead balloon
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With one clean sweep the day can become new. But I stay in bed and turn down the invitation. There are more interesting things inside my own head than exist out there today, and anyway I have to be at work at 3 and when will I get my time back, if i give it to the beautiful day outside, out of compulsion?
Old habits die hard, but I am clinging desperately to the new habits trying to make them old so they stick. Last night's mediocre outting and its stunning display of moorish, outspoken neophytes burned into my memory glowing like a radioactive chemical leaking away into the past but not quite fast enough. I have images of myself squawking and flailing like a puppet that render the whole world meaningless, but it may not have happened that way. Still, I feel down and that remains the only plausible explanation. Other than him, of course. There's always a him, or I expect I invent one to deflect matters with historically-acceptable explanations. A Him. Who is to be my unlikely Adam today..
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| Tuesday, July 31st, 2007
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4:36 pm
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You know what I think?
I think you’re terrified that someone’s seen you. Really seen you. And you’re backpedaling as fast as you can trying to get back to Before , because that was more comfortable. It’s too late, you can’t, but you try anyway. You’re a stubborn one. You won’t be pushed around, even if it’s good for you. So there you sit night after night amusing yourself with this or that, but not with the real stuff, what could change your life.
And when you said “you can trust me, you know”, it turned out I couldn’t. You’re not strong enough for my trust. It’s heavy and it weighs you down, it’s broken you in two.
That’s what I think.
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| Saturday, July 28th, 2007
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10:39 am
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Well, I've heard disappointment doesn't kill you. In any case, life will go on, that's for certain, and next time I shall know better. That is some comfort.
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| Friday, July 27th, 2007
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1:00 pm
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Careless as it sounds, shifted from all this is that crud in your head you
watered daily, it has grown into this colossal monster, snarling
snapping at your heels & now you’ve gone over your mind’s edge with
grief, running like a fugitive through pouring rain to escape –
escape what? Only the bunch of soaked letters in your pocket
attest to where you’ve been and the fuzzy neon lights your
splattered way like a drag-net. Halfway up a hill you
lose your will to live & stop mid-step wondering: what can possibly,
possibly be done about this? Traffic pelts air clinging whip-shod frozen,
wraps you in its static, strives to blind, your lungs will explode, your heart
somewhere down there with your shoes, lose this, you think & a howl
starts up in your chest; it’s going to be there a long time. That night
you fell beneath me like a pedestrian & me riding on oblivious to the
falling, the crumbling, the arrest in arbitrary space, the unsaid
the unfurling ends, the insinuated light of some kind. Why did I let you go
Out alone with trembling knees alone
when all the exhales we kept inside would have saved us?
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| Thursday, July 26th, 2007
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5:41 pm - Conversation between me and a friend
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"So did he say he had a good time?"
"Yeah ..kinda"
"Did he say he'd miss you?"
"er..No"
"Did he say he wished you didn't have to leave?"
"No"
"Did he say he'd come visit you?"
"No"
[silence]
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| Monday, July 16th, 2007
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1:06 am - Lovesong
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Better the devil in a cheap grey suit than someone you could
fall in love with, make pure with your longing embrace
& whose arms would encase your slipping world &
hold it there, like a mood. This was always your idea,
despite long nights infused with warnings that told you otherwise
a clear blue sky appears & you suddenly believe - not just think
- that Everything Will Be OK; what dead-eye glare casts
across this speckled truth to make it so believable? As if
everything were as simple as sunlight & your aching back just a
figment of your bristling imagination, snapping at junctures of the
day when at last you have the strength to be alone. Wretched &
unholy strings of days line both sides of the calendar
& with them your apprehended nothingness articulates its
meaning perfectly, eludes annotation, but keeps you singularly
occupied for weeks; You've done your bit after all
And what if you were the only real person they ever met
& it all came crashing down like an angry intruder one day
to seek its revenge? I huddle, ever at the ready for
loafing matters of the heart to catch up, become old.
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| Friday, July 13th, 2007
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5:53 pm
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and that a person’s writing doesn’t matter – oh, what a disastrous revelation. How could it be. I thought it was a sure way to judge. I know nothing of the sort and I have been a fool.
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4:51 pm
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I do not know whose fault it is, or even if there is fault to be lain.
Only that I have ceased to care now, and you killed it, by not writing. Words were so important to you. You always struck me as a hypocrite. The friends line smacked of an old bitterness of my own. Someone who turned out to be a liar and a fool. I do not trust people who glorify their friends. Because I know people are fallible, friends especially. I say count on no-one but yourself. Only let in the special ones. Maybe i am guilty of the same. But I hardened against you in your absence. Now the absence itself has hardened into a stone wall, and we will never get over it. A spectacular burst of light and then dust. Thankyou for the painlessness of it.
And if you were to write again? It is the choice of two of the worst. If you do not, my hate will harden. If you do, it will harden against myself. Because I cannot let you in. I would not know how to behave now. Yet I feel impelled to go anyway, sabotage it from close range. Ah. You have opened this box of knots. You have tangled us in it. Why? why? when all you had to do was write.... I cannot forgive you, because you are fused with the person in my head and you never lived up to that person. You faltered. You were human, fallible, disappointing. It is my own smashing I must get over. You are just an ordinary soul cast in an extraordinary fantasy. So I can hardly blame you for that, can I?
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| Thursday, July 12th, 2007
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11:13 pm - last thing
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I have given up my fear of words, I have filed my talons
for the real tussle but otherwise I am mute & the old
songs come to me in burnt out phrases, barely of this
world anymore. How can irrelevance have crept up on me?
I feel as though all guiding lights have been extinguished
And I creep along striking matches like a fool, no idea
where the course is anymore.
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| Monday, July 2nd, 2007
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12:50 pm
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I want to say I think you are interesting and I’m sorry I doubted you, after I read your writing I reconsidered. I have high standards for people, you know? It is a silly thing I do, but I silently judge people on all sorts of things. The way people write, definitely. You passed.
So I am curious about you now because we seem to have jumped straight into this deep conversation and missed all the other stuff, which doesn’t bother me too much because I know we can always catch that up. Only when you said “ask me anything” I wasn’t sure what to say. I’m not very good with being put on the spot, as you may have gathered. You have to coax me out slowly. Or take me by surprise. Don’t give me time to think, because I will. Too much so.
I am bemused, flattered, and slightly disturbed that you re-read the entire conversation, that sounds like the kind of thing I would do – if I’d had the presence of mind to figure out how to save conversations. Have you figured out yet that I’m slightly obsessive? If I saved MSN conversations I would be preoccupied for most of my spare time analysing them. So I don’t. Sometimes I am my own worst enemy. I think I know myself pretty well though, so if I seem pre-emptive sometimes (“I could do that...but then this would happen...”) that is why. I’m an intense person and the slightest things send me off the scale emotionally. I have to be careful. It’s all very well to live in the moment, but that moment can slay me for weeks at a time.
What else. I want to know what you sound like. And other stuff. What is your favourite colour shirt.. Are you a morning or night person. What is the most trouble you’ve ever been in.
I have booked my flight back, I arrive on the 18th. Perhaps if I haven’t scared you away by then we can meet up. My mum will be happy to see me at any rate. I haven’t been back since Easter. I feel more and more like I don’t belong there e now. New buildings have gone up and my favourite cafes have closed down.
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| Tuesday, May 8th, 2007
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7:29 pm
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I have tried reasoning with myself but it simply will not be; tomorrow I am going home. She has packed the bags. She has decided on everything but an exit strategy. She does not care if they think she is weak, irresponsible maybe, she toys with the idea of getting work done first, so as not to look bad. But she hardly cares. She just wants to go. Go & leave a blazing trail of failure behind her, let it burn right into the sunset -- she hardly cares. 2 years would have been nice. But 2 years is November and it simply isn't possible. She will blow a fuse. She will smash the heavens, cleave open the sky, watch the stars fall out bursting like a battlefield, this exhaustion will spill itself like black ink over everything.
It is not even worth dwelling on how many decisions were wrong & wrong & wrong & wrong, a trail of wrongs into eternity, oh so many more, so many more just waiting at my fingertips to be brought into being. It is not the medication. I don't even want it. I feel self-destructive & it's been gaining on me all day, gaining & gaining until I start to shove down chocolate bars and cycle up hills in the dark with a potential lover jeering from a window. I hate this life. I hate it. I hate what I have become. A sellout. Pcking my little bags of trinkets and incense and rye bread to steel against the awfulness, only they are never enough -- everything melts down, everything collapses, my colossal efforts come to dust.
No. Tomorrow, afternoon maybe, I am going home. Morning, morning, she hisses. Morning. I cannot keep going without this thought. I collapse in despair without it, I cannot move.
There are other options. My own car. Yet more things to draw attention to myself, oh yeah. Fury unfurls at the very thought. I am livid, trempling with rage. I snarl & spit. I scoff at those suggestions, I do things differently all my life trying to be the 'same', enough now. I have reached it, the threshold of intolerance. I am through. I will not try anymore. I will stop trying to shove myself into moulds. I am through. There is not enough time for B, he will slip away and I will wonder why might have been
Oh why won't she hush. Why won't she settle. She's had a fright and a shock and will not calm down. She cannot decide what to do with the alarm. She refuses to set it. She refuses and claims she will not sleep with it ticking away. She's irrational and will not listen. She longs for the other hotel where she felt so comfortable. Nothing they do is good enough, she just doesn't care anymore. It is a drop of water in the ocean. She's been humiliated in front of her lover, on top of everything else. SHe knows those guys will never call her. She knows in her soul because the timing is all wrong, she neds to flee not start on new chains. She already escaped, Houdini-like, from one set when she never thought she could. It is for other things that she left, not for more of the same.
How to hold one's head high after another collapse. It seems heavy beyond belief. It lolls, it will not stay upright. They may say 'I spoke to her and she was fine', but I know it was only the front they saw, and I know the painstaking effort of those masks, how they suck out my soul. I can barely breathe in them.
So tomorrow, the suitcase comes with me. She insists.
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| Saturday, September 17th, 2005
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6:43 pm - Lost again..
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The darkening sky and the recent drops of rain just barely hanging on to the bare tree branch outside my window. The darkening sky. Darkening darkening. I want to be out there, not in here. But lethargy of the soul cripples me.
I have come a long way, but not quite far enough. Not quite far enough.
White lilies to make me feel better, but nothing from him. Just a letter, in handwriting I could not understand.
What now? A new beginning? Can there be?
I had made peace with the idea that I could go on alone. But these people who disrupt my sureness, fill me with doubt again and the falling through space comes back. Remember the falling through space? I never thought it would arrive again, not with him. Not now. our anniversary.
Still, my tears are for me, and for the blow that my ideas about the future have been dealt. Dreams? I wouldn't call them that. I had none. Nothing from my heart. Nothing from my soul. Just a vague idea, that it was the right thing to do, and within that I would find my strain of happiness. Not necessarily the conventional one.
But now I am alone. I gaze at pregnant women with adjacent men and wonder how, how did they do it. How did they arrive at that point. How did the script stay on track.
And so perhaps it is these ideas that I weep for, rather than anything else.
I was sure.
What happened.
Darkness. Just darkness, fast approaching.
I tell myself whatever I feel is fine, whatever I feel I should let out, ride it. But I'm holding back. I'm not feeling. Its kept inside, cryogenised. I am afraid for the day it suddenly becomes real, and the truth comes out. I am afraid of what it might be.
In the meantime?
A week of reprieve.
I want to put it off. I want to push it away. So thats easy. That's what I do.
Fear of making the wrong decision. Later, that will come.
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| Monday, July 4th, 2005
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10:45 am - Mt Keith
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I understand now why screaming, restless babies are soothed by the low rumble of car engines. I know why so many parents drive in the dead of night around town until their kids fall asleep. There is something primitively soothing about that undulating passage of a moving vehicle. The whole body relaxes, almost against its will, cocooned in the sweet vibrating darkess.
5:40am, Mt Keith. Some mornings the bus ride is the only reason to crawl out of bed. That 15 minute trip huddled inside my bluey clutching a warm mug of tea, the reassuring rumble of the engine, a brief respite before the glaring hell of fluorescent lights and computer screens waiting at work. Other mornings I barely notice it. Usually this is when I have had enough sleep, and I drift along oblivious to the small things that drag me down on other days. The cold. The dark. The walk to the bus. The mountainous task of making a cup of tea. I honestly thought it would be the early mornings that got to me most. But I soon discovered that mornings have the same distinct brand of hellishness, no matter whether they are 5am or 7am, and I was already accustomed to it. I arrived in the summer, and of course as the months wear on the sun rises later and later. The pitch blackness of the sky in the mornings now is like a cover, keeping me hidden from a world I haven’t the nerve to face yet.
Mostly I survive by switching myself off. Long ago, following several embarrassing incidents where I spoke my mind, only to discover later it wasn’t my mind at all, I developed the strategy of keeping quiet until midday. The truth is, I am not myself until then. I need mornings to become myself. Or rather, I need them to become the self that is acceptable to people, that fits in to this environment. My morning self is too raw, too confronting, its view of reality is peverse and too skewed towards the dismal and the tragic. So I keep it in check, until approximately midday, when I find it has mostly subsided, curled up like a sleeping dragon.
Today is Saturday, but I try not to remember that. And I try not to think of the 12 hours I have to kill. In fact I try not to think at all. Which is bizarre, because a mind like mine should not have to be switched off like this in order to get through a day. I have a mind that should be working, in all its waking hours, producing something to show for its enormous potential. I shouldn’t have to switch it off. Perhaps I shouldn’t be here, if that is the only way of coping. I have maybe 60 years to live, and I am wasting them with a switched-off brain.
Endless cups of tea punctuate the day. I surround myself with little pleasures to detract from the ugliness of the surroundings, small rituals. Often I think of the paycheck and the days off, and these keep me going. Or on days when I cannot even fathom these, I just keep going because there is nothing else to do. On these days I am acutely aware of rhythm, my heartbeat, my breathing, the rattle of an airconditiner, the chug of an engine. These things whisper to me, offering their metaphor, offering their energy.
You suffer here; that’s for sure. But I have found that surviving in any workplace is only a matter of degrees of suffering, and these degrees are usually small. So I choose this place, where at least the flipside is total and utter escape, rather than the meagre weekend in which to scrabble after your own identity.
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| Wednesday, November 10th, 2004
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9:37 am - Birthday
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What was it all for? The day before I emerged kicking and screaming 26 years ago, a sort of calm descends and I am filled with a barely glowing anticipation, a certainty. This is no mirage, no fancy. Yesterday I spoke of my rage & its insistent disruption, as though it were trying to push through the barely calm surface & would not be shushed into silence. (I know the sound of panic / I know emergency… When I’m done shaking I’ll be simple)
There are ways of channelling. There are ways of being calm, methods to achieve this.
I need to read a book again, hear another’s voice in my head, someone eloquent, someone who has taken the time I will not take.
Fault current…(work)…I do not care. Today other things jostle for my attention, struggle to float to the surface and stay buoyant.
I have not written anything beautiful in months. I cannot read anymore what I have written and be grateful, consoled at least by a record of it all.
So should I spoil myself? Buy books? Beautiful lotions? I have no money but that fact seems pointless. Perhaps it would offend those who think they know me. Still, the sight of beautiful wrapped gifts makes me smile again, and that smile is like a balm to soothe my aching, battered soul.
There is no job for me that provides enough freedom. Before I was born, I kicked and squirmed against that restriction of space and that darkness. Still, I rail against it, in its new form, the rules, the structures that repress me.
The anger has been summoned. It did not have to appear, but it did, and now it threatens to rip up the foundations of my sanity and my veneer if I do not give it expression.
How? How, is the question. Through what?
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| Sunday, August 15th, 2004
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3:10 pm
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I am most afraid that I will not live out my emotions fully. That what I feel, I will not have the tenacity to construct, to act out, to express. This seems to me the greatest crime.
When I slammed my car into a lightpole, quite accidentally, on that fateful day, this was the reason I did not want to die. Because I had not given expression a chance. I've been hiding my head in the sand. It is not like me to give up. But on that day fate tempted me and the temptation scared me like nothing on earth.
So now, after that, and after him, I feel something loosen and take flight that runs rampant with my life, frees me, and yet weighs me down with a new burden. It is the fine balance between flight and fatal plunge, maintaining this balance, that consumes most of my time.
Choices come before me and I do not make them on the usual grounds. I see no reason to. Their possibilities buoy me up. Their consequences weigh me down.
Today it is sunny, and I spent the night misbehaving but thoroughly enjoying myself, despite the doubt that niggles at me this morning.
I will walk to the library. The rows of books will console me.
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| Wednesday, July 28th, 2004
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10:29 am
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| Tuesday, July 27th, 2004
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11:07 am
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<whisper>
Time flies on this stuff.
Inhibitions go out the window.
I'm watching what I do as though I'm outside.
It seems surreal.
But it's actually happening
I think everything might just work out now...
</whisper>
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10:24 am - Letter #4
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Subject: Earth to...
Just tried your old address but it bounced. Good to see the frugal treatment of contractors has reached new lows out there.
So how are you?
Thought you might have left town, but apparently you're still here and just not replying to my texts you cheeky boy.
Do you want to get a coffee sometime? I feel like it ended really badly between us and while it made sense at the time, I think it is probably stupid if we keep this up because sooner or later we will run into each other at the supermarket and it will be a big deal to even say hello, which would be a shame.
Anyway, better get back to work, have a great day and I'll maybe talk to you soon.
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| Wednesday, July 21st, 2004
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7:58 am - Oh.
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Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients.
Subject: Hi
Sent: 16/07/2004 12:18 PM
The following recipient(s) could not be reached:
The e-mail account does not exist at the organization this message was sent to. Check the e-mail address, or contact the recipient directly to find out the correct address.
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