Post Two Hundred and Four: Death Does As Death Pleases.

Death is the ultimate no no.

It's astonishing that life can actually exist in the first place, being that sperm and ova have to do that delicate little breakdance at the right disco to the right jam. But death can occur at any time from day one to day one hundred and something, and it's governance seems to be delivered like a round of apple bobbing. Do we play it safe or live theatrically on the edge? Death isn't actually weird, it's just the opposite of what we know and so we, as tiny humans in the big world, are a little scared. We're scared of blood and guts and anything hairy because they are things that could land us on cold silver tables.

I don't have any more answers than I did when I first entered the mortuary. All of the dentures and cotton wool and human waste has not shown me what it looks like behind a corpses stare, if it is a place to see or be seen at all.

Happy Third Birthday, Until it Kills Me. Let's keep looking.

S.

Post Two Hundred and Three: Home Is Where The Horse Is.

I'm sitting on my bed and drinking a glass of wine. It feels good to look around at my things and acknowledge, although admittedly egotistical, that my material possessions have shown enough value to remain close and slowly collect as do the wrinkles on my hands.

My walls are still largely undecorated but small and sentimental treasures have begun to emancipate themselves from their cardboard penitentiaries. I have a wardrobe and a bed. A lonely old guitar is propped upright, well behaved but under appreciated on a rack intended to house a family of five. There's an old suitcase that I've planted against a wall to throw some books on. My typewriter is beside my bed, and although far from being practical it serves as a reminder that articulation is my right hand man.

I had only just settled in early February before an old friend asked me to look after his home. Being full of positive energy from the move, I was quick to welcome another gratified opportunity. Four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a spa, an entertaining deck, tropical gardens, a mahogany four poster bed and a well stocked and well hung adult DVD collection. For seven weeks I was to lord over the Queenslander, taking sole responsibility for the ferns and the fish and all of the fancy towelling that I could ever possibly wish to launder.

I've looked after homes before but there was something about this one that lent itself to calamity. Within a few days I'd forgotten how to take apart the pond filter. Within a week I'd over exhausted the jacuzzi. Within two I'd killed the plants. The washing machine died. The dog ran away. By the end of seven weeks I felt as though no matter how genuine my intent, I'd failed this crib. The demands of an opulent kingdom had overcome this honorary King.

It's fair to say that I over extend myself. I say yes to things because there's something organically good about being reliable. I thought that to be accommodating and adaptable and willing was to be a top notch citizen.

So no more house sitting. I have no experience in palm arboring nor do I possess a knowledge of orchid growing conditions. I can't remember to take the rubbish bins out every week. I can't guarantee that I'll dust the rooms that I don't step foot in. I certainly don't always remember when I ordered that Indian takeway. And I definitely can't turn away a gathering of beautiful young people desperate to drink champagne in a jacuzzi. You only live once.

There's a lot to be said about your own castle. Maybe, just maybe, this is mine. The horse is waiting outside and it's bloody good to be have four walls of my own.

Peace,
S.

Post Two Hundred and Two: Princes and Thieves.

When I was twelve years old I told my best friend that I was going to marry Prince William. I blushed in telling her, supposing that I'd be consumed by a sudden and furious celebrity exposure. Perhaps it was his downcast eyes and alabaster skin. Maybe it was his family tragedy that I found appealing. Consider this; Was Prince William the Edward Cullen for kids in the 90's? White, sad, historically significant and really really loaded?

(Ok, so I know nothing about Twilight, apart from the fact that the glitter spangled guy is British).

What I find interesting is that at one stage I felt destined to be a princess. The freshly-evoked feminist in me raises her brow in nervous apprehension.

I am not stereotypically lady-like. I curse like a sailor and dress like a perpetual camper. I stitch together body parts for a living. What part of Disney's 'finding my prince' phenomena did I not find metaphorical? I called bullshit on the Bible, so what in the fairytale kept me under spell? And lastly why, when no other personal qualities offer explanation to the attraction, would I deem myself an appropriate royal?

I was talking to my dad about my romantic failings recently. My sister was sitting with us at the dinner table, thumbing through pictures on my phone camera roll. I snatched it off of her when I realised what she was doing. What sort of person looks through another adults camera roll? I suggested that I might have pornographic images stored, to which they laughed. "What would YOU be doing with boob photos?"

It dawned on me. I've been treating the whole partnership thing way too seriously and even my family can see it. I'm making dot points so that I can beat down this illusion into simple anti-romanticised take home messages.

1) I've been waiting for someone to come and collect me in a motherf*cking pumpkin for sixteen years. Given, I've also expected him to shred like a demon and look like Johnny Depp. At any rate, this whole 'Prince' caper is a sham. It is no more right for me to uphold this expectation as it is for a man to expect his lady friend to be able to bake a goddamn Cherry pie).

2) I need to celebrate my boobs more.

and

3) My family are hilarious but I will probably never tell them about boys or bad dates again. My dad might do something protective like ask for their email addresses again.




Peace.

Post Two Hundred and One: Mr Bus.

If I have kissed you I apologise. It was possibly shit.

My first kiss was on a trampoline at Cassi Devine's birthday party. She was a cool kid and everyone in our grade that mattered* was there. I was about sixteen. It was fucking terrible.

This young lad decided that he'd try and pop his digits down my fake snake skin pants after about fifteen seconds of making out. He was strong and handsome and I remember the initial excitement as his mouth pushed into mine. And then I realised that he was PUSHING. I had never kissed anyone before, but I knew that in this maiden exchange I wasn't supposed to feel conquered. Luckily I valued that little basket o' virginal goods and high tailed off the trampoline in time, dignity still contained in those god awful pants. In the peak of a Brisbane heatwave I hid my lust-damaged throat for the following week under a blue turtleneck. If you're reading this El Trampolino, you literally sucked. (And thanks for hooking up with the birthday girl almost immediately after me, swiftly schooling me in the ways of the school representative footballer).

I had a conversation at that party with another young man as he stood, leaning away from the crowd with his back up against the house. He was smoking a cigarette and I said to him that doing so would harm his babies. He had honey skin and a set of big brown deer eyes that caught me by surprise. I wanted to acknowledge his odd composure but I was distracted by my near miss intercourse with ol' mate Mr Trampoline.

It took a few months for us to talk more during class. One day he asked if I wanted to go shopping with him and his mother. I wore a Cat in the Hat shirt and his mum drove us in to the Queen Street Mall.  His mum dug my shirt. She loved olives and used to eat them from the jar so for many years to follow I pretended to like them in the hope that I looked as cultured as her. Damn that woman and her casual weekday elegance.

I was almost seventeen when he and I started officially dating. About a week passed after the shopping trip and he asked me if I wanted to take a walk down to the Scarborough shorefront after school. We carved our names into a tree and exchanged stories that still trigger an emotional reaction in me after all this time. As we walked to his bus stop I knew that this kid was seriously special. My first 'real' kiss happened as the bus waited for him to board, his fare awkwardly clasped in his hand that pressed against the small of my back. Is your first love so special because retrospectively you can see that you were naive to the pain of what it was to break up?

Obviously we did break up a few years later. In my first year as a Psychology student I was in no position to successfully diagnose or treat his problems (and nor should I have). I think he got another girl pregnant soon after. I don't even know if he's still alive. I really loved him, and then I really didn't.

So that's a nice story for you.

Fast forward ten years or so and here I am, thinking about all of the kisses between then and now. The few good ones, the few shit ones and the much more common fantasy ones thanks to Joseph Gordon Levitt. I wouldn't mind a kiss. Not like with Mr Trampoline, but like Mr Bus, with focus and connection and intention. Bring back the kisses that stop time.









* And by mattered, I most certainly do not mean by whom was and is most interesting, nor successful in later years.

Post Two Hundred: Another city baby, Another town.

It's odd, coming out the other side, eighteen hundred and twenty six kilometres away from where I started. Or at least from where I was, if it were not the start but some sideways skip. They say that running away from your problems will never make you free of them, but I propose that driving far away isn't a bad approach to giving your own engine a good run. I know nothing about cars but any shit writer would have enough fuel to connect a Ford with the human mind and pump out a bunch of 'destination vs journey' analogies. 

For the last three weeks I've been sitting at a desk. I haven't been out driving hearses, preparing bodies, arranging funerals or carrying coffins. It's been entirely uneventful and largely underwhelming, but necessary in it's sweet relief. Do not be alarmed, I'm still involved in the funeral business, but I'm the voice on the other end of the phone at present when someone calls to say "Hey, Nan's dead. Come help." 

It's nice. 

From the impregnable safety of the office blanket fort I can think a lot about why I left Melbourne. There were a bunch of reasons. A perpetually empty wallet. An exhausted body. An overthrown character. Chiefly though, I needed to shake a habit of catastrophising and being a general dickhead. I didn't have a good grip on what problems were actually problems and what drama I was creating out of exhaustion.  This whole relocation has stopped me from throwing my car into a ditch somewhere between Caulfield and Camberwell.  

I saw a coworker the other day rushing around the funeral home. Watching her from my desk, I could see that she was consumed.  Frantically, she stammered about wasting time. This lady, drowning in panic, undermining what time she had in hurry. I could see that all she needed to do was stop and breathe and open the cupboard to find what she was looking for, but I was struck with the awareness that in my own pressure I had failed to stop and understand what was right in front of me too. 

I didn't need to go anywhere, but wanting and changing shit for health and happiness is a bloody good move. Thanks perspective, you're great. 

Peace. 

Post One Hundred and Ninety Nine: Raw

Sometimes thoughts kamikaze into consciousness. Today, enjoying a coffee and reading the paper,  my concentration was interrupted by the mindful realisation that I was indeed relaxed. Why my brain felt the need to say "Oi Sarah, you feel tranquilised" was curious in itself, thus manifesting in a ditched Courier Mail and a half an hour of me staring at the wall, cogs turning recklessly.

I'm on holidays, initiated by my relocation after the Molotov cocktail that was 2012. Most of the year was spent with my days dictated by work and the pressures of kicking it in a busy city. The job itself in Melbourne was not that difficult, yet I found myself feeling like a falling Alice. I observed people toying with logic. There were constant limitations. I felt like an outsider. I had a yearning to return home. There was an overriding theme of death, a sense of urgency and an obsession with time and self analysis as I woke up. There, back in the real world, half way through my soy latte.

 Being in direct contact with death for forty to seventy hours a week shapes you. It smooths your corners during the day; it softens your tone of voice and sharpens your focus. When families thanked me, I had the go-to phrase of "That's what I'm here for." In reality, that wasn't what I was there to do. I was there to arrange for the disposal of a body and to co-ordinate a memorial event. I took the rest on, because I thought I could.

A hangover of this dedication is the exhaustion that I'm facing now. As a twenty seven year old, I came home mentally depleted and could govern nothing more than a bath and half an episode of futurama. I wished for my time in Melbourne to be spent growing and learning, but instead I could feel my batteries wear like a torch left on in a drawer. In my private life I felt hypervigilant, perhaps due to my constant exposure to high stress situations. Being the one in control of arrangements I assumed a responsibility to alleviate heightened emotions. The more aware I was of this responsibility, the more sensitised I became to stresses outside of work. I was highly strung. I catastrophised, and this is potentially the root of many of the problems I faced in my personal life. It no doubt caused rifts between myself and others that I cared about, and explains why I felt like such an alien to my peers.

So these thoughts stole me away from my otherwise passive enjoyment of caffeine. I am glad for the deviation. I am glad that in knowing this, my year will take a different shape.

Peace
S.

Post One Hundred and Ninety Eight: Travel Light.

I've been reluctant to write, knowing that I've been ruminating over denouement, pensive and sober, my feet stuck in the drying mud.

Times like that; black, hungry times. The crushing ones, the ones that make you throw things and cry out. Should I have shared them? I could have given legs to my pathos and let you take them for a run.
Finding the words that match the way I feel, to colour mood with more dark than light, allowing others with minds that paint with words to see alike.

I enjoy the idea of words dying as time does. Of laying them out like corpses to say goodbye. Yet in shock and tragedy perhaps the close of such a heavy book is best done with a private funeral.

I'm moving. Come along and read with me. I'll blow air into a new balloon with words that float, born of the hunt.  


S.