Nothing Spectacular.

She sat in the back corner of the room, next to the bar. She must have been one of eight people who had actually arrived at the venue on time, and she was feeling anxious – she could understand why people drank alcohol at these events. She was also conscious that she was less dressed up than the others, wearing a simple ensemble of shirt and skirt, and a pair of weathered black converse that had seen Sydney, Melbourne, and even the likes of Spain, Italy, Paris, London, Korea and Croatia. They even had a hole in the top of one, which she had tried to hide with an intricate permanent marker illustration that skilfully blended polka dots with stripes with imagery of umbrellas and polaroid photographs. She wasn’t wearing any makeup (Save perhaps passionfruit lip balm), but her wrists were adorned with possessions and paraphernalia: her right wrist a hair-tie and faux leather wristband (She would never wear anything real leather), her left an electric pen drawing of three cherry blossom flowers connected by a shakey line that could mean wire or vine or anything really, a winnie the pooh bandaid, a papier mache bracelet, and her graduation bracelet. All in all, it was probably her decided unspectacularness that set her apart – or made her spectacular compared to – the rest of the people in the crowd, who were already starting to show signs of intoxication even though it wasn’t much later than eight.

Friday the 13th

1. It’s five am, and I’m standing on top of a mountain. A mountain. It’s fucking cold, and I am wearing as many clothes as I could pull on before my friend picked me up: a night dress, a t-shirt, a hoodie, a coat. I look ridiculous, but nobody is looking at me. Because on this particular morning, and for the first time in who knows, four planets are visible from earth in the same sky. Jupiter and Mercury make a dip via Venus, leaving Mars in tow, so outshone by the other planets that it doesn’t even retain its usual yellow glow.

Almost everybody else I know is still asleep. But I didn’t want to miss this. How could I have justified sleeping through something that won’t happen again til 2056?

How do I know I’ll still even by alive then?

2. I’m in the CBD. If normal people kill time, then I am a mass murderer. Either I cancelled my plans, or my plans cancelled on me. So I walk, I watch people. I sit inside food courts and read Italo Calvino until for some stupid reason or another I tear up, and have to close it. I hate being that girl who cries in public, but these days more than ever it is becoming commonplace.

3. I can’t shake the feeling that being in the central nervous system of the city would feel a lot less lonely if my father weren’t interstate. I never see him anyway, but there’s a certain comfort in knowing that he is tucked away in an office somewhere, nearby and accessible if I need.

I imagine a phone conversation.

She’s dying now. She’s not going to make it through the night.

Shit, I’m sorry.

Yeah. I got the call this morning, she’s getting worse. She’s not going to make it through the night, I can just feel it.

I’m so calm, so collected. I don’t know if it means I have come to terms, or if I am just emotionless. But I realise I’ll miss her periodical greeting cards – birthdays, Christmas , all portrayed in a flurry of scratchy script and calligraphy pens.

I even feel like shit for writing about her.

4. I’m about to go home, I’ve had it with this empty place and these empty people. So I’m sitting at the bus stop, waiting. Then I get the call.

5. Now I’m sitting in a seedy bar, at a table composed mostly of strangers. But we chat, we laugh, and suddenly life feels something larger than it is. I have less than two standard drinks in me, but I can already feel the twinge of inebriation. It feels good. I feel happy. I feel ready for anything, and I perhaps share this sentiment too readily with the others: the one who compared my hair to baby duck feathers; the one who compared a girl in line to an anteater; the one who sadly has no animal-related anecdote to identify with.

This is my life. I am drunk. I am young, I am fast, I am indestructible. I could do anything right now.

6. There’s this girl, and she’s surrounded by something like ten strangers. She’s confused, she’s lost, she doesn’t know what she’s doing there. She pours herself glasses of purple cocktail, and when that runs out, beer. She despises this. She was always a bad news-good news person. She wants to be anywhere but here.

And then almost seamlessly a prince arrives, and he takes her away from the place. He takes her home and takes care of her. He kisses her on the forehead and puts her to bed. She sleeps, long after he disappears. He has a kingdom to run, and she is nothing more than useless.

Anyone? No? Dust.

I’ve made it home, but for how long? Twenty-four hours, perhaps. If that. I hang my coat next to the door, and as soon as I do this I am at an absolute loss for what to do. Like any sense of direction I may have once had evaporated as soon as that coat was lifted off my shoulders.

My bedroom is exactly as it was when I left it. How long ago was that? I was never good with time, I sweep my days under carpets and somehow am surprised to find myself feel old. I sit down in front of my computer; that old, dusty, noble machine. On the noticeboard behind the screen, a polaroid of you.

It was a lifetime ago. Who even uses polaroid cameras these days? You thought technology was a means of shortcuts, of cheating. Old cameras are more honest, you’d argue. Everything you get – the spontaneity, the mistakes, the beauty. It’s just...honest. You handwrote thank-you letters and only befriended those who lived within a bike ride of you.

In this particular photo you are laughing. These were the days of smiles and nervous butterflies. You are wearing a sun hat and a summer dress, unknowingly a splash of ice cream on your nose. Ten seconds after I take this photo of you, you discover the ice cream. Strawberry. Always your favourite. You yell at me and try to wrestle the photo out of my hands, still laughing. I know the motions of this memory well.

I throw the photo in the bin. How are photos ever honest? They’re like watching your favourite soap out of one pixel on a television screen. They can mean anything, but they’re honest because they’re tainted by memory. What utter bullshit.

I want to check my e-mail, but there’s no point. You never used computers, and who do I write these days? I leave the computer on and walk to the kitchen. Everything has kept, because everything is canned. I’m the direct opposite of your everyday beauty and local markets, aren’t I?

I pick up the phone. I know your number by shape, not by digits. But my phone has been disconnected, and potentially for the best. Technology does always tend to know what’s good for us, after all. I leave the phone hanging, the dull tone filling the silence of the room slowly, like smoke.

I leave the house. I climb inside my old car, also dusty.

Everything in my life is dust.

So I drive.

15 year old me, on writing.

for me, writing is so very therapeutic - it's a visceration of sorts, to try and lay down the beautiful thoughts i sometimes have and fold into them some sort of everyday warmth.

and they always speak to a particular 'you' - no one exactly, i've never quite had a special 'you' to talk about, so perhaps i'm writing to myself - secret messages between the part of me that thinks and the part of me that feels, passed through a wall grown so thick beneath the shamrock vines that mean nothing short of security - but now both of these parts are so closed off, so lonely, so beautiful, and so long-forgotten about and underestimated that they're compelled to make me question and wonder;

what's the point?

lovers & disposable cameras

There's a certain magic in disposable cameras that the reusables could never measure up to. They're like lovers. You spend a short amount of time with just the one camera - making every photograph count, every time you wind the reel a special moment. It makes everything all the more precious, because you know it's about to end. And then at the end of the roll when you turn your camera in, the temporary lover is gone, but the memories remain. Then you move on - buy a new camera, start a new relationship with it - as if the previous one never existed outside of your dreams.

the two who left the dinner table

and so they walked and walked out in the cold and she cursed herself for forgetting a jacket but she knew it was too late and they couldn't go back - going back would mean giving up on everything. and so they talked and talked and talked and when he wasn't looking she scrawled secret messages into the frosted car windows, things like "i'm sorry" and "i'm too sad for you" and "if god is watching, the least we can do is be entertaining".

This is me writing about something that legitimately happened.

I sat down next to the window, and watched the bus fill with people. I noted that a young man from my work was standing in the aisle, a few seats closer to the front. Such was to be expected of this bus route – it was near impossible to use it without running into somebody you know from somewhere. I decided against saying hello though, as I did not want to draw attention to myself in front of the rest of the commuters.

As my eyes wandered, I saw another familiar figure. In fact, she was standing directly in front of the man from my work. She was an old friend of mine, had been for years. I hadn’t seen her in a while though, also for years. She had the same honey-coloured hair that fell down to her hips, starting out dark before growing lighter and lighter. She was perhaps skinner than when I had last seen her, her plain baggy clothes falling off her in an almost alarming fashion.

She had always been small, but throughout high school I watched her waste away. It was perhaps around the time all of that started that she and I began to drift apart. When I should have been there for her, I pulled away because I was unable to cater to the self-destructive lifestyle she led.

We used to walk home together after school. I would go to her house twice a week, where we would make afternoon tea and she would show me her doll house furniture. She was quiet and lovely, and at that time just as innocent as I.

Even now her hair looked the same. But her arms were so thin. I felt a pang of guilt. I had no idea how her life moved these days, and from the look of her, it seemed to have taken a turn for the worse.

In our last year of high school, we rarely talked. We shared one class together, in which she would tell me about her new antidepressants and their expected side-effects. We would have to take her socks off, and we could all see the incisions that crept up each leg almost decoratively, but for the horrific reality of what they were and why they were there.

A year before that, we would sit together and she would tell me about how she had been reading through the court files, from all those years ago when she was four. She would leave out most of the details, but tell me how they would make her feel physically sick. The ones she didn’t leave out made me feel physically sick. It was around the same time that she stopped eating, and eventually could no longer stomach an actual meal. She would throw up at school every day, and I distinctly remember her nibbling on the corner of a block of peanut brittle one day. I’ll get fat at this rate, she had remarked. This was the moment I realised that she was not the same person I had known, and I became scared.

But all I felt on that bus was a strong, overwhelming sense of guilt. Neither of us had done anything to deserve the disconnection we had undergone. So why does this happen to people, for no real reason? In that moment I wanted nothing more than to walk up to her, and re-introduce myself. Start again, as a friend who would take her for exactly what she was. A friend she deserved. Not one who got selfishly scared when life solidified.

As the bus pulled in, I was still debating whether to approach her and say hello. It had been a while, and yet we were still on reasonably amiable terms. I watched as the people poured out of the bus, keeping my eye out specifically for her. I watched her walk up the hill, in the opposite direction to the majority of others. She turned her head, and suddenly something clicked and everything I had been feeling for the past ten minutes changed.

The person on the bus hadn’t been her at all. In fact, it was actually a boy with incredibly long hair. I smiled to myself and went my own way, sincerely hoping that her life was doing better.