In the parallel universe where I’d rather be, I’m taking off these ridiculous restrictive shoes, and stomping on the ground with my bare feet, and doing the best version of a haka that I could muster because, obviously, I’d be doing a haka without knowing anything about a haka. I’d simply be calling what I was doing a haka, because what I often do in the garden when I’m feeling exasperated is stomp my feet, and punch the air like it’s alive, and jump up and down, and shake, and poke my tongue out, and open my eyes wide, and growl, and claw at the soil, and smack at the earth until I’m panting and exhausted, and I fall asleep right there on the ground.
I guess I’ll just stand here with my empty martini glass, like a statue. I can sense strands of hair hanging against my cheeks, and the lipstick on my lips has become dry, and developed a musky taste. I’m a dusty cupboard filled with old clothes, and shoes, and decades-old makeup. My lower back has started to ache, or maybe it’s been aching for a while? I just took a big belly breath and a vertebra behind my heart cracked.
There are fairy lights draped across the balcony, and people talking and smoking, and, from a distance, everyone looks like they’re dressed in black, or navy, even though they aren’t. They’ve been swallowed by the night. I can hear hip-hop and I can’t discern the words, even though I know that it’s hip-hop. Or trap. Or something.
I wish I had more woman friends and that I could more easily make woman friends. If I were to have a wedding right now, I have no idea who would be the maid of honor. If I were to have children right now, I have no idea who would be their godmother. I think I’m a seasonal companion. People try me on when the temperature is right. Wearing me too early or too late in the season doesn’t feel natural. So it’s best to just put me back in the closet until the right weather comes around, and I’m useful again.
The cement beneath my high heels is merciless. I’m leaning on a thick glass table with a tad too much of my weight. It’s just that I don’t want to sit down on one of the three chairs that are here, because that would suggest a level of commitment to this particular spot that I don’t have, and I don’t want to become trapped at this location by someone who misinterprets my sitting down as an invitation, or as an opportunity to distract themselves from themselves, because they’re just as lost and disillusioned as I am, yet too scared to stand anywhere on their own and just be with themselves for a minute. Plus, I want to be able to move on from this location when I want to move on from it without having to navigate niceties.
Oh, no. There’s my ex-boyfriend. He looks so strung out. Not skinny or anything. Just gray. He must be doing a lot of drugs. I’ve never seen him in sandals with socks before. Nor have I ever seen him without a beard. He’s smoking rollies, too. Geez. I don’t mind the bucket hat. Although, what’s with the tote bag? What possessions does he have to carry? He must think that it makes him look artistic, progressive, laissez-faire, and inspired, or whatever. Because he certainly isn’t artistic, progressive, laissez-faire, and inspired, or whatever. He’s a very materialistic and very conservative kind of guy.
When we were together he was in the midst of a very corporate and very cashmere phase. He was working at his dad’s company, and driving his mum’s spare 4WD, and snowboarding at Mount Buller on the weekends, and competing with his brother, and with his mates, and basically with everyone, all of the time.
Even the sex that we had was competitive. He got off on the locations that we “fucked” in, and on the price of the sheets, and on what important person might walk in on us, and on what he could “do” or have “done” to him. The quality of the connection that we had, or how our bodies felt, didn’t matter so much. It was about what “moves” we could “make” on each other, and whether or not he’d be able to “cum” and then smoke a dart, and drink a glass of champagne, and tell someone he wanted to impress about it. He was more interested in crafting an image of himself than actually being himself. It took up all of his time and energy, and, in the end, it bored me.
Although, the feeling of being pitted against everyone and everything in his life still haunts me. It stripped me of a piece of my humanity, and, ever since, I’ve been tentatively trying to reclaim it. I really don’t want to talk to him right now. He reminds me of a part of myself that I’m still angry about losing. Probably because I didn’t lose it, I gave it away.
One time we were at a dinner party with his friends and, between courses, he asked me to make some of the noises that I made during sex, and when I refused to do so, he imitated them, and everybody laughed.
“Hey!”
“Hey.”
“I thought it was you.”
“Hmm.”
“How are you?”
“Good.”
“Have you met Rain?”
“Rain?”
“My new girlfriend.”
“Oh, no. Not yet.”
“She’ll be around somewhere. She’s amazing.”
“I bet.”
“Different from you, though.”
“I . . . would assume.”
“Yeah.”
“We rent a room in Northcote. It’s huge, and it has a balcony. Rain has planted all of these little flowers and herbs in these massive pots. You’d like it, I think. And Rain is super-chill. She’s a naturopath and a photographer. She also models. Used to model, sorry. You’d get on really well, I think. Or maybe you’d clash? I dunno.”
“Cool.”
“You seeing anyone?”
“Umm . . . No.”
“Really?”
“I wouldn’t lie.”
“No? Not to protect my feelings?”
“I . . . don’t think so.”
“You’re hilarious.”
“Hmm.”
“Do you know anyone here?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“You don’t mind that, though, do you? You’ve always loved a party full of randoms.”
“I guess.”
“I still can’t do that.”
“What?”
“Rock up somewhere I don’t know anyone.”
“Right.”
“You’re looking really good.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“What does ‘good’ mean?”
“I dunno. Fit?”
“Ah.”
“It’s ok, I don’t want to force it.”
“Are you nervous?”
“About . . . meeting her?”
“Yeah.”
“Ah. No.”
“Lol! You haven’t changed.”
“Ok?”
“What?”
“Nothing?”
“What?”
“It’s ok.”
“Well. There’s someone I need to go and say hey to. We cool? What’re you doing for Christmas? The usual?”
“Yeah. The usual.”
“Ok, well. Have a merry one.”
I don’t know why people try to be friends with their exes. I mean, we were never friends, so why try after having decided that an intimate relationship isn’t going to work? Friendships are intimate, too. You can’t just, like, turn the connection down a notch and hope to make it better. It’s still the same connection, and if it’s faulty it’s going to stay faulty.
I have no idea how I lasted eleven months with that guy. It’s hard to fathom all of the brunches, and mornings in bed, and awkward dinners with his brother, and with his parents, and friends, and all of the hours spent watching violent films, and driving to the beach and back, and to the snow and back.
Even during the space of a five-minute conversation, he couldn’t resist directly and indirectly comparing me to another woman at least three times, as if we were differ
ent models of car, or vacuum cleaners with slightly different functions.
He’s certainly taught me a lot about how shitty people use competition and constant comparison as a distraction so as to not have to take responsibility for their shitty worldview.
When we were together, he would often go to the extent of trying to create competition and comparison between others so that his own shortcomings went unnoticed.
Whenever I’d call him out on how he related to women and I’d say something like, “Hey, I think you might be objectifying/infantilizing her a bit,” or “Hey, maybe get a bit less touchy feely with people you don’t know very well, because it seems a bit invasive,” or “Hey, I think the way that you were staring at her might have made her uncomfortable,” his reply would be, “Oh, you’re just jealous that I’m talking to her,” or “Oh, you’re threatened by her, aren’t you?” or “She’s like one of the guys, ok? Some chicks are like that,” or “She’s just super at home with her sexuality. You could probably learn a thing or two from that.”
Even talking about other women, and observing their behaviors, and analyzing their choices, was always interpreted as an attempt to impress him, and to make myself seem more superior. It wasn’t deemed to be a mechanism for better understanding myself or others. It wasn’t indicative of a desire to learn, or to grow, or to, you know. Think. He assumed everything I did was a way of trying to get his attention and approval. He couldn’t comprehend that what I felt, and what I thought, wasn’t always about him, or happening in relation to him.
It’s true that some people put other people down in order to make themselves appear more desirable. They’ll, like, talk themselves up, and act in a way that they think highlights their strengths, and magnifies others’ weaknesses. Women are especially good at this. We’re experts at manipulating and maneuvering other people’s perceptions of us because, once upon a time, our survival depended upon it. Knowing how to push a man’s buttons, and how to shape his reality, was a matter of life or death. However, in the case of the relationship that I had with this guy, survival was dependent upon my leaving him. Not upon my impressing or manipulating him.
I feel sorry for Rain. Because it really doesn’t matter how beautiful, sensitive, talented, or intelligent you are: being treated like an object can destroy you.
20.
I’m finding it hard to breathe. I suffer from this condition where I really hope that socializing is going to go well, and when it doesn’t, I feel helpless, and I don’t know what to do with myself, and I start spinning. I’ve fainted before, too. Like, in this same situation. I’ve totally blacked out. I read somewhere that falling into a coma is a way to escape from someone that you don’t want to have to deal with.
I used to negate difficult feelings by trying to tell myself that “nothing much” had happened during what I had actually experienced to be a distinctly unpleasant and/or disorienting encounter. I’d delude myself into thinking that it literally hadn’t happened. I’d be like, “it was nothing, don’t worry about it” or “whatever” or “I’ll just quickly forgive them!” or “it’s fine!” or “it’s their responsibility, not mine,” or “it doesn’t bother me” or “it’s all good don’t worry about it” or “sorry, my bad!” or “it’s cool, so what?”
I couldn’t be fine with shit not being fine. That is, until I learned that the ancient Egyptians didn’t believe in the concept of “zero” or “nothingness.” They saw it as poison. Even nothing is something.
Energies and emotions affect physical reality just like sound, and gravity, and electricity, and music, and oxygen do. They breathe, and expand, and throb, and rush, even if we cannot name or understand them. It doesn’t matter where we’re from, or what we believe, or what language we speak. Millions of us are feeling the exact same way, right now, and we are united because of it.
21.
Maybe I’ll go for a walk around the block and get some air. I like to go for little walks while I’m at parties. It gives me a chance to come into contact with myself again, and nobody notices. Besides. I’m already walking nowhere in particular right now so I may as well just . . . walk out the front gate. I don’t know. I’m constantly feeling a need to “go outside” and “get some air” even though I’m already outside, breathing the air.
Oh, I just saw this girl I’ve occasionally had brunch dates with. She’s one of those people who I think I’m supposed to get along with. Like, there’s an affinity between us on some level. I’ve often felt obliged to make time for her, yet she’s always spent our brunch dates describing the people that she’s dating or crushing on as being “small” and “unsure” and “needy,” and generally coming to the conclusion that the downfall of almost all of these relationships has been due to the fact that the other person was “small” and “unsure” and “needy” and that she doesn’t “do” “smallness” and “uncertainty” and “neediness.”
She calls herself a leader, and a teacher, and a speaker, and a content creator, and she shares images of herself in bikinis doing yoga poses on different beaches with captions telling everybody to “look deeper” and to “go within,” and I’ve always felt a bit unnerved by not knowing who is taking the pictures.
The act of being photographed often looks like it happens by itself, or by chance, even though it doesn’t. I once read a story about this thirteen-year-old model in Brazil who said that more than thirty people were involved in curating every single image ever taken of her, even when it looked as though she was alone and super-casual and taking it of herself.
Anyway. This girl also sees herself a writer, although for some reason she frequently quotes other writers, and playwrights. I’ve never really known why she, or why anyone, would do that. Especially when we have an entire universe of thoughts and feelings and languages and words at our disposal. Using someone else’s seems a bit lazy and a bit inaccurate. The world needs new experiences and thoughts and feelings, and new ways of expressing them.
Sometimes, when she quotes herself, she writes her name at the bottom, I think in an attempt to copyright what she’s said. She even puts little quotation marks around it, and chooses a special font, and a pastel-colored background. Maybe she does this as a way to stand out, or to stop others from plagiarizing her work? Actually. It must be a way to encourage others to quote her quotes. Yeah. Kind of like a salesperson, or a marketing pitch. Like, through presenting her words in this way, they look like they were written or spoken by a famous and important person. She definitely wants to be seen as a famous and important person. Not a needy, small, uncertain person.
The only problem is that truly famous and important people don’t put their names at the end of sentences that they’ve written. Like, other people do that. Shakespeare didn’t go, “to be or not to be” and then put a dash and his name after it in capital letters with a funky pattern and a pastel-colored background.
The line “to be or not to be” was created in a very certain context, in the throes of a very certain reality, and it came from the mouth of a very certain, and very complex, character, who was both an extension of Shakespeare and, equally, not Shakespeare. It was Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. So. To put Shakespeare’s name immediately after “to be or not to be” is factually incorrect.
“Babe!”
“Hello.”
“You’ll never guess what just happened.”
“I might?”
“Really?”
“I won’t, though. You seem eager to tell me.”
“I am!”
“What happened?”
“He’s here. Yep. Over there. Can you see? Lol! Don’t look! You’re hilarious. Is he looking? Actually, don’t worry about it. Have I filled you in? Well. After everything that happened the other week, he and I didn’t speak, or have contact, and he just turns up here. Like . . . Fuck. Me. It’s weird because when I was getting dressed tonight I had a feeling he was going to be here. I was ove
r there just talking with this other guy, like, completely innocently, and he comes up clearly wanting to be included in the conversation. Like, what the fuck, right? After everything! It was so off-putting to the dude I was talking to. He was cute, too. He works as a bartender at that place that just opened. Well, it opened a year ago. It was in the paper. Anyway. I didn’t know how to introduce them, so the other guy offered to go and get me another drink to, like, make shit less awkward, and he never came back. I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t mind that beer now, though. Ha-ha. Oh, well. Your skin looks fantastic ATM, BTW. Are you still into all of that amazing probiotic and prebiotic shit? And going to the gym and whatever? I was trying these green smoothies for a while and being really diligent about it and having them every morning and soaking the oats and refrigerating the flaxseeds and blending the celery, doing all of the things and after a while I just stopped for some reason and I’m not sure why. Anyway. Where was I? Oh shit, he’s totally looking! Did you see that? I fucking felt it before I saw it! We’re so connected. It’s killing me. Is my hat ok? Is it better when the feather is on the side, or at the front? Or maybe at the back? I haven’t tried the back. Did you see that other fucking girl with the felt hat and the feather? What a mung bean. I’ve been wearing felt hats with feathers for, like, months, and she’s totally seen me out, and now here she is, wearing the hat, thinking that she owns that look or whatever. Anyway. So. He and I left things the other week at like, ‘Let’s cool off and think about what we both want,’ and he didn’t contact me after that. We hit the classic point where the guy gets scared, because he starts to question what it all means. Like, what does she expect? What do I do? I better start airing so that I don’t have to take responsibility. You move an inch past being a guy’s fuck buddy and he flips his shit. Merely raising the fact that we might need space to think about what we both wanted was probably what psyched him out. At the time he seemed chill about it. It was just when I was reflecting on the whole thing during that luxurious week I had without any fucking contact that I realized he had most definitely freaked out and most likely ditched. And tonight he was all like ‘Hey, how are you’ and I’m like ah . . . are you on crack, mate? He actually had the audacity to act like everything was normal and, like, chill, or whatever, and I’m like, wah?! So I go, ‘I’m fine . . . How are you?’ And played it really cool. Except that he actually started talking about his week. You know, like, the hours he spent at the fucking hospital, and an article he read about some black hole void thing eating up some part of the galaxy, and whatever his stupid single mother was up to. I don’t want to be rude, it’s just, like, tedious. I saw his mum from a distance one time when I left his place and she was fully made up and neurotic skinny. Whatever. All I know is that when he was talking about all of this mundane and irrelevant shit I could barely concentrate. We had this amazing weekend together and now he’s acting like it never happened. Fuck. He’s probably already seeing someone else. Some other fucking skank probably snagged him during our week off. I know, it’s terrible. It’s just how shit fucking works, you know? Men can’t be with themselves for, like, two seconds. I don’t understand how they can keep attracting so many distractions and compartmentalizing their experiences. Women can’t. I know that from when I was dating what’s-her-name. Everything is more flowy with women, you know? Sure, we might have no boundaries. We’re designed to be, like, emotionally unstable, right? I dunno. I’m loving your kimono by the way. Anyway. I feel like, as a woman, everything is holistic, and it flows, and things don’t need to be so clearly stated or structured in such a regimented way. So I was, like, dude. Why haven’t you contacted me? Yep. I said it. Just like that. My heart was racing so fast! I’m not sure how many drinks I’ve had. Do you want one? I might get one in a minute. And you know what he said in response? He looked confused and he goes, ‘Well, you didn’t contact me?’ and I was, like, ‘Don’t play games!’ Then he accused me of playing games. Man, I think I’m just going to let the whole thing go. I don’t have time for people who are so deeply entrenched in emotional and spiritual blockages like that. Let the other skanks have him! Then he was like, ‘I thought we were taking time apart to think about what we wanted.’ Yeah, he had the fucking audacity to throw that back in my face and before I could say anything, he said that he really liked me. I didn’t even know where to start with that one. He can’t have it both ways. He must think that I’m stupid or easy or something. He probably just wants to get laid. Guys just go with what’s right in front of them, you know? So I played it really cool and I said that it wasn’t the time to start using flattery. He’d had all week to do that and he had chosen not to. Boom. Then he pretended like he didn’t understand where I was coming from. People and the narratives they cling to! I swear. I need to travel again to get away from all of this shit. I’m over it. Men in this city are suffering from some serious defects. Dating defects! TM! Although, the sex with him was. Fucking. Amazing. That’s a whole other brunch date to look forward to! I just . . . life is too short to spend so much time dealing with people who are on such a different level vibrationally. Like, no judgment, it’s just that some of us have cultivated a vibration that’s a bit different and a bit higher maybe, and I think he’s just a bit below me right now. He’s so basic. Maybe that’s why he was such a good lover. I wonder how many people he’s been with to know how to do all those things that he did. You know how I did that workshop a few months ago? Well, he was the first guy I actually felt comfortable enough to do some of the techniques with. He wasn’t freaked out at all! He seemed happy to, like, slow down and touch me in the ways that I would suggest. Oh, man. Sex with that fucking guy. It was mind blowing. Do you think he’s good looking? Part of me thought it was sweet that he and his mother clearly have this weekly ritual where she visits him and they have salad together. It’s probably the only solid feed she gets all week! She does his washing still, too. He wasn’t ashamed of that at all when he told me about it. He said that it’s a great way for them to spend time together and that she ‘loves’ doing it. Like, seriously, dude. Your mum doesn’t love you or doing your laundry that much. Get a top loader and grow a pair. Oh, I’m being mean, aren’t I? I just don’t know what to say to him. I don’t know what he wants. I feel, like, used or something. I think he just wants me for the sexuality classes I went to. You throw words like ‘sex workshop’ around and people just lose their shit. Do you want another drink? I think I’ll go in and get one. I just saw him go somewhere and I’m not sure where he is now. Can you be here when I get back? I’m nervous!”