Confessions One

If every name has a meaning, and every meaning a shell, molding a formless personality, so that Hope wishes eternal, Faith believes it will happen, and Dolores simply weeps, then mine should have been Stalky Stalkerina, or perhaps Pippa Tommygirl.

I am an incurable stalker of the grainy yet miasmic, disjointed world of bits and bytes in cyberspace. Friendster is my happy hunting ground, and anonymous browsing my veil of woven twigs. I can and will track down many, many people, and can spend great indigestible globules of time clicking, clicking, clicking, hovering like ghosts above the unsuspecting.

I am not picky – I will sight, through my dusty screen and hand-marked keyboard, just about anyone at all. I will winkle out that boy I liked in primary school, and the girl that he liked, just to see if she is still as pretty as she used to be. (Yes.) I will swim through profiles upon profiles, each a little slice of person that they want others to imagine is the whole. I will glut on the acres of cheesiness, sown with “i love u 4eva eva eva eva my darlingest piggyboo”s and many many many pictures of “my hunniebunnie and mE~!!”. I will, occasionally, be caught up in tangled elation and envy when I find someone much, much more interesting than I will ever be.

This, too, is possibly why I will, despite having a monthly tram/train/bus ticket, walk whenever and wherever possible. Otherwise it’s hard, you see, to slyly slide a sidelong glance to peek through windows and doorways, to throw out nets of hasty looks, catching puzzle pieces of different lives, yet fitting together, somehow.

There was the girl with coppered curls that turned brown under the Subway lights who ordered, without fail, two salads every day. One set of cutlery, two napkins, thanks. There was the small group I glimpsed, a wandering inkblot in the city in their long black clothes, gothic eye liner, drooping dark spikes of hair, and a startling smudge of black for lips.

There was once I walked down a road alone, and I saw a couple walking, sweetly hand in hand, when suddenly he lunged at her jacket zipper, yelling, (I lie not at all) “They need to be FREE!! FREE!! Set them FREE!!”

I’m not insane. Not really, anyway. It’s more like this: I have always had an insatiable, gnawing curiosity to know, to really, really know what it’s like to be someone else. To be that salad girl, or that lanky, smoking goth guy, to know how it is to have lived forever in a dimly-lit apartment, on a second-hand couch, faintly beery, to know how it’s like to have grown up wanting, wanting so much you don’t know what it’s like to have, to be that happy, carefree person who really doesn’t care, to be that man who meditates every day in the park, lying on the cold damp grass, to be that guy who walked, naked, into the sea in winter,  to be that woman, crumpled with age, who still wears her hat and pearls when she hobbles out in faded satin heels, to think what that girl is thinking, the quiet schoolgirl on the train whose uniform looks like it doesn’t quite fit, like her skin, like the trendiness of her ipod against the untrendiness of her.

In other words, to be anyone but me.

I wonder, sometimes, just where curiosity ends and desire begins.

Three letters, nothing more

Sodden, damp, and sickly warm, all squash and squish in a crowded tram; sharp, cold, stinging clean of crumpled grass and fresh-washed air.

Vague discordant whining, slipping in and out of hearing, leaking from a hundred different pairs of earphones, of a hundred different playlists passed; an oldish man with wispy hair, gently strumming melancholy chords under a greying sky.

Rocking, swaying, head-hurting uncontrolled moving, bumping, nudging, edging through endless elbows and sticky-out feet; light feet stepping, skipping, tripping on pavements, paths, the solid earth and fragile grass, no one pushing me but me.

The noise of voices raised, and the infinity of inane conversation, ringing phones and muffled curses, the honks, the growls, the jangles of transportation; a single solitary couple, lying under a slowly-dewing tree, he sleeps on the warmth of her, forming a ‘T’ of sleepy silence, capped with an ageing brown fedora.

“Hello, miss” or “Have you heard of..?” or “This won’t take long”, or sullenly thrusted brochures and leaflets galore; a waiter, lazing in the dusty yellow of a lamp not a foot above him, a cigarette hanging from two fingers, seemingly-forgotten as the smoke twirls upward, disappearing in the misted air.

The city crawling up an ever-tightening spiral staircase, twisting to giddy, dizzy, unwelcoming heights; the people unwinding, like carelessly dropped yo-yos, left to rest.

M-o-n and F-r-i differs little, really, and yet could not be more the opposite.



[Especially when it comes to walking in the rain.]

How Lee Harding almost became an Australian Idol

I cannot watch television. To be completely accurate, I cannot just watch television. No, I must eat, or read, or sew, or knit, because I simply cannot sit down with empty hands and open eyes and do nothing.

But on Sunday night, I was too late, and caught unprepared, and because Australian Idol was on and music trumps almost all, I had no choice but to sit and watch with undivided attention.

And then Lee walked onto stage with a song of beyond caring and slammed-door leaving; of Tainted Love, and…

It was as if the room, the audience, the sofabed, the everything was gone and I was in a thumping, heat-slick club, like a beating, beating heart, and out of the people and the music and the crush of noise and rhythm he slid in front of me, leaned me against the wall so close I could smell an incongruous warm freshness, and…

Then he laughed, but not unkindly, and melted away into tinny, television applause - and I was back.

Now. If he had this effect on me, a twenty-two year old accountant…

One can only imagine what he did to the millions of hormone-crazed teenage girls around the country…








[A gripe, though: He just had to get knocked out the very next day, didn’t he?? Bloody telly.]

Loathing, but who?

I live in a quiet, guilty kind of fear – the kind that makes me hold my breath ever so slightly, tense a little, cringe a little, shut my eyes tightly in a childish belief that this will keep them (and me) safe, or at least ignorant until it’s too late.

But it’s quiet, and secret, and no one quite knows about it. My breathing doesn’t quicken, nor do my jaws clench, and I try to look like I’m simply dozing and not shutting out the world.

All this, because of random news pieces and an e-mail I received (who believes in e-mails nowadays? Who doesn’t?), cool words and disassociated tones that starkly meant my route to work every morning makes me a potential target thanks to an unavoidable station skirting the heart of town.

And so every day I cringe a little more and wonder a little longer if I’d see or hear it coming, if I’d feel it, and how much, but then nothing happens and I can breathe again. Yet the day seems a little bleaker for the fear.

It makes me a little angrier, too, and snappish. I read comments in the paper saying we shouldn’t let the fears control our lives, that we should go on as we always have and show them we’re not afraid – and then I feel a curling sneer when just below it says “Ballarat”, or somewhere similarly far away from it all. I want to yell, then, “What do you know?” and “You have no right”.

I now nudge my way through crowds, ever moving ever slipping in between the cracks; all I want to do is get out of here, and I couldn’t care less about you.

Anyone swarthily foreign is instantly suspicious, and rapidly avoided. I now find a new abhorrence towards anything religious; the frequent borderline fanaticism and the potential for perversion to neatly fit human insanity is ever now forefront in my mind.

At times I wish the government hadn’t done anything, had just stepped back and left the rest of the world alone.

And I know, I know, oh God I know, just how irrational and stupid I’m being. I spend so little real time at that station that my fears are basically groundless. People are not callous, but concerned. Racism is ugly, even in the smallest forms. Religion is a tree, a rock, a mountain that anchors most of the world and keeps us sane and gives us hope; it is but a tiny few who wield broken branches and throw sharpened stones. Doing what needs to be done, even flawed, is necessary and far better than doing nothing to help at all.

And so this, this is why I hate terrorists.

Because they, and the things they do or say they will have made me into this…coward, selfish and despicable. What is worse is that perhaps I always was one, but simply never knew.

See, some days it seems all I care about now is me, but it’s a me I don’t recognize, a me I don’t even like.

And so perhaps, in some small way, they’ve killed me already.

How...appropriate

The morning sky was sulky and the air a tepid heaviness that hung as I stepped outdoors.

The escalators in the stations had cunningly switched themselves, and the tracks now ran, not a comfortable escalator’s width away, but gaped instead; a closed emptiness just over the side of my slowly descending steps.

The buckle popped off my pants as I got up to board the train, and I spent the day wearing a bulldog clip at my waist, scratchy and conspicuous.

I stepped out of the office to find continued petulance had descended into large drippy tears which soaked my shoes, rendered my freshly-washed clothes cold and clingy and left a steamy, musty smell of damp wherever people were.

I was starving when I reached home, and had forgotten half the things I was meant to buy on the way, which made me pout (no one noticed).

Clammy, gloomy, brooding Monday – so typical it was uncanny.

Six feet from the edge and thinking

It’s a story I’ve heard before.

Same silly girl who loved a lying boy. Same happy beginning, same bitter end. Same torn-up families, children like snapshot pieces scattered on the floor; used to hurt each other, but ending up the most hurt themselves.

Same friends who comfort, console, condemn. Same words falling like burning pitch from an overflowing mouth – too painful to swallow, but the hurt already done.

“I trusted him.”

“He lied to me, all these years.”

“After all I’ve done.”

“I don’t care, I’ll get him, I’ll take the children and he’ll never see them again.”

Steady words with rising anger and a slowly building cynical edge.

Sometimes even a little bewildered in the pain, “He said he loved me.”

Clichés that don’t mean any less for their having been said a thousand times before.

And so they live again, and again and again as new “bedtime stories” – but only for the daughters.

“Never trust a man.”

“He lied to her, all those years.”

“After all she’d done.”

“Now she’s going to leave him and take the children, now her life will be so much harder.”

The most cynical of tones, “He said he loved her.”

Round and round and round it goes, tales of tales told, only the names are different; the lies and lives the same.

And every well-meant fable is one too many, because it’s getting easier to listen to, and worse, easier to believe.

To believe that this could happen to me is not the problem; I’m afraid that one day I’ll believe it will.

Surely going around believing that, given the opportunity, Boyfriend will become just another in a list of oft-sung songs is not the way to live. It matters not that he has never given me cause to believe he will, because, hey, all those girls said they hadn’t seen it coming either!

It used to be effortless, once, to take the high road and declare that I would not be one of them – the watchful, wary, wily women who slyly trapped their men in nets of careful guarding that they didn’t even notice. No, I would trust in mine, I would treat him as I wanted to be treated – with openness and honesty and respect.

But the spiky fables will not cease their nagging, prodding me to depths of insecurity, and heights of distrust I’d never known.

Is this the way it should be, then? Love no longer blind, but hawk-eyed? Trust not a feeling, but a piece of signed paper with ugly words, but pretty numbers? Forever not for ever, just as long as I can make it so?

Don’t mistake me; it’s not arrogance. I don’t think myself, or Boyfriend, better or worse than any other person out there, I don’t think what we have is “divine” or that it “transcends the ordinary”. I don’t think that “no one else has ever felt this way”.

In fact, I’m positive almost everyone has felt this way. The quiet comfort of not hiding who you are. The happy thoughts about the future. The proverbial rose-tinted glasses you cannot help but wear.

But to have a future at all, a happy one, it seems that it is all this I must give up. I must be clear-sighted, hard-hearted, and calculative. Love is just the beginning of a protracted secret war fought only on one side.

‘Tis better to have loved and lost?

‘Tis better to never lose than to love with all of you.

Is this worth it?

Bitten tongue

It wasn’t too long ago (June, actually, but seems like forever right now) that I would have gladly smacked anyone upside their head for saying things like, “Oh, I miss studying”, as one graduated friend moaned one day as I sat, pulling my hair out, trying desperately (in the same way someone caught in quicksand struggles, with much the same results) to understand (remembering was something I couldn’t even think about, for fear of degenerating into a gibbering mess) twelve weeks of lectures and tutorials, two textbooks, and many, many past year papers, gloriously white and untouched.

And then I graduated (sort of) too, and rejoiced that I’d never have to feel it again, the streaks of ice that shoot up and down you when you turn a page to realise that there’s a majorly important, morbidly obese, chapters-long topic you’d completely forgotten about, which means your ETA of four a.m. is now, oh, fifteen minutes before the exam begins.

(I joke, I joke? I kid, I kid? Not in the slightest bit.)

I welcomed working life, despite the mind- and bottom-numbing hours, and the long commute. I could read on my way to work and from, or stare out of the window, or listen to the radio, or simply nap, and had no cares other than what to cook for dinner, and which show to watch that night.

Work stayed at work, and never came home with me, and this was wonderful.

Then Saturday night found me walking a familiar walk to the computer lab on an errand for one exam-embroiled. Every step slipped me further into the past, and soon the report I was carrying was not a report, but one of my many lecture files, the jacket on my arm not a jacket but my faithful book bag, crammed with everything I’d need for an all-nighter (books, obviously, an extra sweater, stationery, snacks, and once, memorably, a head of lettuce). I still had the same mad hair and wonky glasses, dirt-stained sneakers that crunched on the same muddy pavement.

And so I went in through the same wrought-iron gates into a world ghostly-lit by large white globes of lampposts, and went up the stairs to look for my busy, busy friend. And it was all the same inside as well. The scuffed-smooth tiles, the smell of caffeine (and adrenaline too, I’ll bet), the endless clicking of keyboards and the smooth-sounding scratch of pens and pencils.

‘It all came back to me then’ would be a cliché, and erroneous, because there was nothing to come back. It was simply there. Everything I’d loved about uni – the buildings, the air, the feeling of the tens of thousands who had passed through the very same hallways, possibly thinking the very same thoughts, the late nights in the library, surrounded by a mix of frantic students and laid-back chillers, and cups and cups and cups of hot chocolate, coffee and tea.

Everything seemed so eternal, and it was – only the people changed.

Maybe that’s what I missed about it, the solidarity of being just another in a steady stream that poured through the corridors and in and out of classrooms, yet somehow uniquely all your own. You had a tiny, tiny bit part in a never-ending play, but you got to say your very own lines. Everyone around you, give or take a couple of years, was at the same level you were. Everything you worried about they worried about too. Grades and assignments and exams and balls were conversational staples; we spoke about the same things, if not always in the same language.

Now I’m on my own, and go where I choose, or feel compelled to choose. We’re all working, but in different places and in different fields, for different sums. Everything’s different now, and it’s lonely sometimes, knowing no one else around you feels quite the same.

I want to go back, sometimes, and yes, I think, I miss studying, too.

But don’t, like, tell anyone.

Wouldn’t want to get smacked now, would I?





[Is it just me, or do I seem overly-fond of hyphens?]