1. Melbourne
Some days when the vacuum cleaning cord keeps ripping from its connection or people’s inability to clean their own shit from the sides of the toilet bowls makes me swear aloud, at least I get home to a room that is neat and organised and I can wear my navy velvet dress that matches my bed sheets.
Life appears calm.
I look into the mirrors and see arm muscles that have grown from so much vacuuming and scrubbing people’s shit. My hair is in a ponytail like I’m five years old. But I’m afraid because I’m not five years old, I’m afraid because I feel so alone in my thoughts:
I don’t want to get caught in this good life.
Annie comes by.
She’s holding a bottle of wine and swings her shoulders from side to side. She looks different, she’s wearing navy blue. She’s just been to Sri Lanka, she’s smiling
We pour wines and eat peanuts and sit in front of the veggie garden, smoking
Seventeen years we’ve been friends. Seventeen years.
From awkward adolescence, caught in the politics of friendship circles. To angsty teenagers, passing out at parties, restricted by isolation and expectations. Through the directionless twenty-somethings, at the clubs, thrilled by life, living for the nights. Then we complete uni degrees, get full-time jobs, travel, make mistakes, learn from them, make more mistakes, don’t learn from them, become familiar with sadness, and propelled by happiness. And now we’re thirty, sitting in my living room in West Preston, talking about books.
A five year old: “WHERE DO BABIES COME FROM?”
The round moon hangs low in a purple sky that sparkles. It’s another new day. The air is stale.
Dashing to the car, balancing my $2 thermos in one hand and a bag heavy with cleaning cloths in the other, I stop and smell the roses.
I drive the empty roads and slurp my coffee. Slow drivers irritate me.
It’s one of those days: A day where the spoken words of Audible’s stories hold no meaning. A day when I clean with music thrashing through my ears; swinging to the beat, working through the confusion in my mind.
A mind too consumed by its own thoughts, thoughts of far away lands and all that could have been.
The eve of a public holiday, a boozy night. We pour wines and sit on the porch with Josh’s famous anti-pasta. It’s warm enough for t-shirts.
Through the windows we watch shapes metamorphose, the changing light bounce around the house. And then it’s dark and it’s midnight and we’re deep in passionate conversations I won’t remember.
What I will remember, though, is how happy my heart feels when with its homies. And how lovely it is to see friends fall in love.
ALTERNATIVE THINKING IN PROGRESS, the neon lights on the exposed brick wall scream. At the Collingwood office, all the desk are the same. They hold photos of girls who my mum wanted me to be. Successful in marketing or HR or something meaningless to the greater good of the world.
Political correctness. We all tiptoe around around looking for labels opposed to solutions. A spade’s a space. A piece of shit is a piece of shit.
A Tuesday, the other side of Healesville.
We walk for six hours.
Trees thick with silver trunks collide with clouds that grumble with thunder. The air is cold enough for jumpers that soon end up on our waists.
Conversation wavers with the slope of the worn dirt path; we talk more about writing and dreams and failures and the sort of tree we’d sleep under if we had to spend a night out there.
We see a deer, we walk in silence.
We sit facing each other with our legs either side of a log, we share a sandwich and a salad for lunch. We disagree about society’s relationship with food.
We keep walking, up a steep hill that takes our breath away.
We see no one else.
November in West Preston: rain, roses and resident magpies.
“Out beyond the idea of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” Rumi
When the door is open it makes a hole in the glass wall; easy access from the living area to the veggie garden.
I stride through it.
In the kitchen I sway to some blues. My t-shirt, sweaty, sticks to my back.
I’m home alone.
It’s somewhere in the afternoon.
I’m sitting on the table, before the stone wall, holding the guitar.
A breeze comes through the hole and brings with it the beat of drums. I haven’t heard this before, this sound of someone practicing drums in the neighbourhood.
My thumb stays in the same position and I go between C and G.
C, G, C, G, C, G
The simple stuff, I’ll miss the simple stuff.
C, G, C, G, C, G
Like how tonight I can make a curry for dinner and listen to Discover Weekly.
C, G, C, G, C, G
Like how I can spend afternoons in the veggie garden and nights curled up in the big cane chairs talking with my housemates.
C, G, C, G, C, G
Like how I can eat muesli and coconut yoghurt from Naturally on High to my heart’s content.
C, G, C, G, C, G
Like how I can sit for as long as I want on this table, staring around the house, playing guitar so badly.
C, G, C, G, C, G
I’ll miss this life when I’m gone.
C, G, D
It’s Spring. One of those crisp, blue-skied, sun-shining mornings. Light bellows through the wall of windows in our living area, reflections dance on the end wall. Foundations for a gentle day.
The sides of my mouth are rough with coffee and toasted walnut bread from the markets.
We’re sitting on the orange couch; me leaning back into the light blue and yellow floral cushions strumming C & G on my guitar, and Steve sitting forward with his guitar resting on his knees.
We decide to sing a duet before our days begin.
We sing loudly, in accents we don’t recognise:
And I scream from the top of my lungs: WHAT’S GOING ON.
We finish on a high note and I see the time is 11:11. “Nooooo wait, it’s 11:11 on 11th of the 11th,” Steve says, with eyes wide and mouth straight. We high five, jump up and do a dance to synchronicity.
But if I’m a bird and don’t have the hard feelings of human, would I not feel love? And is losing love worth it? I ask Maggie.
Maggie doesn’t reply.
Days were grey with a cold that slid through my veins. I was still hidden inside, hibernating. They flew between my woven hanging basket on the porch and their nest in the dead branches of the tallest tree in the backyard. I don’t have a woven hanging basket anymore, but they had a new home.
—
It was a Friday afternoon with a windblown white sky; it’s warmer than it has been, it’s sticky. I can’t smell anything, I’ve been cleaning. Steve and I sit on the porch and Steve points out the baby magpie balancing on a tree branch by the fruit orchard. I go to argue that that’s not the baby magpie because its feathers are fluffy and its chest is grey. Then I watch it hold on for dear life, taking it’s body with each gust, using it’s growing strength to stay balanced.
—
Mornings are easier now, I get out of bed and put on only a t-shirt. I open my blinds and look up to their nest. I have become accustomed to waking to its incessant chirping. It wants food and some love, I want a coffee and some love.
—
It had been a month or two, maybe even three, that they’d been spending precious days in the veggie garden.
I sit in the living room, at the big table overlooking the front yard. They potter about paths I once traced in dirt, paths Steve and I secured with bags from Ceres.
—
The baby observes: I walk outside and it instinctively flies away. Its mother stays behind, turns and looks at me. Later, when I walk outside again, the baby watches me with a brave face, and waddles away.
The baby learns: it picks up a piece of straw and cries for attention, its mother scuttles across the young zucchini and taps baby on the head. No, you fool, that is not a worm.
The baby grows: the family, the four of them, they are in the veggie garden. They wander separately. One lies down and spread it’s wings across the dirt, basking in the midday sun. I tiptoe closer to see if it is baby or parent.
The baby sings: It’s alone on the front fence. It doesn’t stand, it flops down, making noise. I walk to it, it looks at me.
The baby leaves: Flies away.
Another Sunday in this Melbourne life:
On my bike I wind down Merri Creek, to cars banked up along Brunswick Street and the hum of overflowing cafes.
We’re at Michael’s birthday party, Fitzroy.
There’s friends in love and cheese platters and sangria and chocolate ripple cake and photos, so many photos. The sky is bright and clear and we watch the sun sparkle across the buildings as we smoke cigarettes in the back alleyway.
The first day of summer. We have a house in Capel Sound; a thirtieth.
The first few to arrive go down to the beach. We drop our towels and wade out through seaweed, we walk a kilometre before the sand drops. There, we throw a cricket ball and dive for it, landing in the deeper water.
Back on shore, body covered in clothes—protection against the sun, we drink a beer and cloud the air with cigarette smoke. As a wildcard, I watch in awe to the seemingly natural dynamics amongst these friends.
A flock of black geese fly over us. A Pomeranian called Harley runs into the water. The day turns white, it’s party time.
—
The heat wanes and we sit on old plastic chairs on dead grass out the back of the Air BnB.
I listen, intimidated. Everyone sounds like they get shit done, cool shit, shit that comes from having your shit together.
Inhaling champagne, I find a voice and my conversations begin to flow. At least it feels.
And then the night takes a turn. Things become a blur. All I can hear is my voice.
I wake with a blanket over me and can’t remember putting it on. I see boys asleep in the bunk beds around me, I can’t discern who they are.
I’m conflicted by my early departure in the night. What did I miss?
With left overs from last night’s banquet, we make a breakfast feast. I suck down mango like it’s going to give me superpowers. It does.
As I fall asleep in the back of the Corolla on the drive home to Melbourne, I think I’m glad I fell asleep when I did; it saved me from even more dread of what the fuck was I talking about last night?
The Best Sunday: a morning hug, brunching with a babe, considering words with write club, picnicking in Edinburgh Gardens for Rachel’s birthday. Back at home we have a housemate dinner, then Jesse comes by. He has bread in his pocket and I give him food in the fridge to cook. He sings us a song and plays guitar with Steve. Behind them, the sunset on the veggie garden is memorable. I’m early in bed, reading my book.
Sweet dreams.
Another Monday morning changing the world and cleaning offices. We sit in my car, between jobs. I read Ginnie her horoscope.
Silence.
You know what, I tell her, we won’t remember today, will we? I mean we do this same routine every Monday morning, every Monday morning is the same old shit week in week out and rarely is there something memorable for us to one day look back on and be like, hey, I remember that day. Instead, maybe, we’ll remember these Mondays as one.
We finish our jobs, barely breaking a sweat, and I drop her home.
Showered, I ride to Nova to sit alone in the dark with a movie, just like any other Monday of late 2018.
I can’t recall what erred my mood. Maybe it was going in to work on a Saturday to find a whole Christmas party for me to clean up.
Oh, the cleaner will do it.
I curse them and their waste as I pull bottles from the 20 individual, plastic-lined rubbish bins under desks.
It’s the middle of the day and lie in a dark room on my bed. A date cancels last minute and so I have a beer and cigarette, wait for 6pm company.
6pm company, pot luck; prawns and curries and Moroccan Soup Bar and dips and pizza. It’s summer solstice and the light is sharp. We’re all moaning, full. Conversations are pleasant, mostly-sober and sane.
Where did that curry come from?
I could eat prawns forever.
I slow down and cycle backwards, allowing a girl to pass the dwadling mother and child. She smiles and says thank you and I like that she smile and says thank you. I dream of that, saying thank you aloud, more powerfully than my shy smile that hopes hope people know what I mean. I pass a man trailing his child swaying on the path. ‘Anything’s possible,’ the man tells the child. Then I smile to a woman who smiled at me, I smile to the man whose paths happened to cross mine at a precise moment.
I love this photo. It captures a moment of time and it encapsulates a time of my life.
It was the night of New Year’s day. It had been the sort of day where the sky shone blue and the weather was so still you could hear the notes of the birds singing. I watched it from bed. By late afternoon I got myself to Rachel’s in Thornbury. We ate fish & chips on High Street and then went to Westgarth to watch Colette. When we came out it was dusk. We stopped on Ruckers Hill and looked to the city in silence.
2019.
Mum and Andy go to New Zealand and so I drive their car to Port Fairy. When I overtake it accelerates with power. I go fast, it’s fun.
—
Gabrielle is pregnant. We lounge around town, the water too cold for swimming.
At night we watch Mystery Road on SBS On Demand and eat Tim Tams.
—
I take the long way back to Melbourne via the Great Ocean Road. I stop in Wye River in search for lunch, instead I take this picture and carry on to Lorne.
In Lorne I get a park in the backstreets and buy a salad and cheese roll and mineral water from a bakery. I eat it in a carpark before the ocean and feel so much love to this coast, to the thoughts connected with it.
In Anglesea, at Point Roadknight, I go for a swim. The water is soft green, clear and crisp. Being alone, I float.
Jesse meets me at home, we ride down Merri Creek, cut through the backstreets of East Brunswick and go through the Plane Tree shadows of Rathdowne. Jesse talks to me and I’m distracted by how beautiful the day, and the time. We’re losing it. We park out bikes up the top of Bourke Street and join the end of the protest. Jesse chants, we smile, feeling an elation of seeing the possibilities that lie in combined positivity and ideas united.
It was 2011, I was living in East Brunswick near the velodrome, we would ride down here and smoke joints.
It’s now, Summer 2019, I see the entrance when I whirl along the trail to the North Fitzroy Library.
The concrete path is amongst the shrubs, I wheel my bike down and come onto the hardened-dirt landing. I lean it against a bush and take a seat on one of the wooden logs.
The spot overlooks Merri Creek. There are trees and bushes and shrubs with plastic hanging around, left behind from the water swelling with the rains.
It is only in this spot that I hear these birds talking to each other. It is like tag team, one cries out then another follows, and then another and another. When I look through the trees around me I can’t see who sings the never-ending song.
A lady walks past on the dirt path that follows the bank, she’s in a white robe with bare feet, a shaved head and serene smile. Beautiful spot you have, she tells me.
It is beautiful.
I’m there in the moment, listening to the invisible birds. Then I try to concentrate on my breathing, but I fight with excitement against all the different places my thoughts can take me.
I turn to a noise; a man in a orange high-vis t-shirt is holding onto a pit bull, another taller, skinnier man is following him down the concrete path. G’day, how ya garn, the man holding the dog asks. I tell him I’m garn well. Just come down ‘ere to smoke a joint, he goes on.
Slowly, I peel myself from the seat, take my leaning bike from the bush, and ride home.
It’s hot, we drive, out of town, my car slides across the dirt road and I’m reminded of a dream I had in the nights before; 4WD’ing my way out of a dark forest, alone. Only now Josh is with me, and it’s day time and we’re ready to eat our salad rolls and lounge around and exchange few words.
The water is green, there’s algae, we don’t dip our heads under. Still, my submerged body is cold enough to make my spine dance. I move slowly over sticks back to the bank, I put my swim top on a branch to dry.
When I Josh to his apartment in North Melbourne, I remember that the swim top is still hanging on the branch.
Monday afternoon trying different spots along the Yarra in Warrandyte. Cass and I pace circles around each other. We sit on rocks, we sit in the shallows, we dip our heads under flowing water. We drive to the main street. From an old lolly shop we buy ice creams and eat them in a boat in a playground. The ice creams are average at best. I get a speeding fine when dropping him home.
January. It’s going to be a 40 degrees day. Dad’s gone to bowls, I close all the blinds and drink my coffee outside. I breath in the morning air, already dry, and see a double-sided mirror hanging from the pergola. I twirl it around until I remember I need to be working, editing, getting shit done. I need to finish this story I’m writing, move on, explore more than what I see in the mirror.
Another Monday morning. A rainy morning. Ginnie and I at TCYK. Me in the kitchen and Ginnie on the desks. Me on the mop and Ginnie on the vacuum. We listen to our earphones. Opera, or something like that, a high pitched female voice, singing into my ears as I carry the rubbish outside, around to the alleyway. It’s drizzling, calm and consistent. There’s a balloon in the sky. The balloon’s the same colour as the colourless sky. It’s top melts into the clouds and the fire lights up, noting it’s not a dream. I stand in the rain, I snap back, pouring recycling into the bins. I skirt the puddles. The alleyway has a thick smell of piss.
When I lived in Broome Josh came to visit. It was the start of the wet season, every day and every night was hot. My house had a pool surrounded by palm trees. Everyday we were on floatation devices in the pool or riding our bikes on the footpaths around town, loudly learning all the lyrics to Courtney Barnett - Depreston. We’d pick mangoes from trees and then drink mango daiquiris on the floatation devices. Melbourne felt like worlds away and I never felt like I was missing out.
—
In Melbourne, a year and a half later, I decided I would try settle down, maybe meet a nice guy, earn money, reconnect with lost friends, live that expected life. The idea was the routine and stability thing would start with a nice house that I could fill with plants and possessions. On Gumtree I found an ad for a share house in Preston. I thought, that’s ages away. But the search had to start somewhere.
—
Now, here I am, in my dreams, a little depreston.
We met in Hawthorn. John lived in the apartment above Luce and me. When we’d sit on the balcony, which was all the time, he’d stick his head out of the window to talk to us. I spoke to him a lot; he has good humour, a great taste in music, and likes to speak about current affairs. The world, man.
Ten years later, when we go out for dinner and he’s hobbling and pale and looks like he’s been electrocuted, people stare. But I don’t care. He’s a brilliant person, a fascinating mind.
A new rose, the tall one closer to the front door, blooms in peach with lots of petals. The sound of the crickets barking mad takes me to my childhood in the country.
—
The veggie garden isn’t as extravagant as last summer. The heat has been brutal, I have lost motivation.
It’s afternoon. Not a hot day, not a cold day. I’m on the couch, procrastinating from writing by staring into space and thinking too much about a hypothetical future. I hop into bed and fall asleep. When I wake, I’m home alone and so I ride to Coburg lakes and sit on the grass and watch people. He replies, the kind that surprises me, with words and emotions articulated. I wish he didn’t do that, I wish he kept it vague and blunt.
I want to move on.
A hot day. Too hot to care for appearances. I slide into my velvet dress and boots, hair dirty from swimming in Warrandyte, and go to the party.
Twenty-six different artists are on display through the bare rooms and the yard of the recently vacated sharehouse. The bathroom is lit by candles, I stare into a cloudy bathtub with colourful lights that transform from flowers to people. Outside, I’m too stingy to pay for a beer and leave by 8:30 for home time and bed.
—
The next day, the Sunday, I took some Swedes to Point Addis. There was a blue sky and then it turned grey and then white and then blue again. We went for ice cream in Torquay, drove back to the city.
Josh’s 30th. I took him on a surprise horse ride. We drove down the coast and rode under overcast skies. The lady said I was good at trotting, and she said Josh was okay.
Eye want to wake up and not consider what day it is. Not consider that soon it will again be Friday and Saturday. And that on Friday and Saturday I need to seek out company so the loneliness of Sunday won’t sting so hard.
Eye want to run away. Not from myself, not from my friends or my family or the pressures to get a job. I want to run away so I can get lost, discover.
Eye want to make up my own mind.
Eye want to understand.
Sometimes I state the days because sometimes it feels like the days matter. Like my memory of late on a Wednesday morning. Jesse and I circled each other in the kitchen, laughed that it was a Wednesday morning and how little a desire we had to be off at a job in an office.
Jesse has made silverbeet broth with eggs; he has his poached and mine are fried. We sit at the table across from each other, we slurp, we splutter words. We get down to business and debate the origin of humans as beings. Words to help define life’s current callings. Words romanticising a world beyond Melbourne, and how taking a chance could take us to places we now can only dream.
I get distracted by the magpies wandering the veggie garden.
We sit around the table; three country girls and Steve. I love our West Preston family. We’re each other’s TV. We talk about thoughts and feelings. We laugh about the same things. There is peace and comfort and it’s precious. This is home.
Time changes and everything’s fine, it’s good. There’s possibilities, lots of them. They’re endless, aren’t they?
I’m in my room.
Bell Street buzzes through the window, sometimes it seems so loud and sometimes I barely notice it. I like to think it keeps me real, a reminder that I’m still in the city.
My room is my sanctuary. I arrange it, I rearrange it. Get comfortable, get bored, rearrange. The desk was by the window, then near the door, underneath the post its, surrounded by plants.
My bed is comfortable, the sheets soft. I can star fish and toss from side to side hugging my pillows.
And yet, I know something is missing.
I’m in my room.
Bell Street buzzes through the window, sometimes it seems so loud and sometimes I barely notice it. I like to think it keeps me real, a reminder that I’m still in the city.
My room is my sanctuary. I arrange it, I rearrange it. Get comfortable, get bored, rearrange. The desk was by the window, then near the door, underneath the post its, surrounded by plants.
My bed is comfortable, the sheets soft. I can star fish and toss from side to side hugging my pillows.
And yet, I know something is missing.
How alone I feel with water flowing as thoughts to the destruction of society in which we readily place labels. I know there’s others out there, but I don’t know them. I know they think gender expectations and works expectations and society expectations are based on the opposite to happiness. Whatever that is. But whatever happiness is, it’s not having lots of money or being able to say how great a job is to friends. Happiness is love. What is love, though.
I will remember these reflections vividly. I will remember it as a great time of life. Of security and housemates who spoke about feelings and made me all fuzzy inside. Of my dashes to the kitchen. Of coffee and books in my toasty soft bed. Of the veggie garden and the setting sun sending splashes of light around the house. But there was anger. Many evenings alone. Everything cost money. And I couldn’t settle for half-full on over-priced water in plastic bottles.
I’m not running away, am I? I don’t need a plan, do I?
The birds, they talk to each other. A chirp or a whistle in sync but never at the same time. There song is backed by the hum of Moreland Road, by vibrations from an afternoon house party lapping up the Indian summer. A breeze comes through and reminds me that my getting up at 5:55 isn’t a coincidence. That I’m on the right path. A path off the track and alone amongst the crowd. I play with the rough patch of dermatitis on my middle finger.
YOU’RE A FUCKING IDIOT. The driver is slow. The voice is mine. I mutter, swear. It’s not uncommon.
Maybe it’s time to go. To take a chance. Because I can’t think of any other way.
