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I once sat next to a woman who had never been on a plane before. Buckled in tight with our limited leg room and ears bathing in the suction of white noise and air pressure, I watched her marvelling. Completely open to every new detail making up her imprinting experience of “for the first time.” As we flew over the mountains, she stuck her nose to the window, let out a giggle and noted the new observations and sensations with an innocent commentary directed my way. Amazed that she could be up there in that compression tube in the air while terra firma - the grounded world - stayed down below. She was on her way to a new place, a new self who ‘has been on a plane’, and that seat in the sky she occupied was the enabler. I remember feeling emotions move around inside me, joyful and tender, for having witnessed such a pure reaction to the privilege I so long took for granted. Soon a crackling noise and the pilot’s voice travelled over intercom with a quip about the bright and sunny weather conditions awaiting us at our destination. “Woah…..”, she turned to me and said once our phantom pilot disappeared back to his invisible zone, “that was a bit different ae.” One week ago, I did not board the 29 hour flight that would have finally taken me back to the place I have so ardently, so dedicatedly, organised all my daily efforts around returning to for the last 8 months. Instead, I stood at the end of a quiet road and felt emotion moving up and out of me this time. Heartbroken, that I could be down there on terra firma - the grounded world - while that compression tube in the sky with the seat to another place, another self, directly above was on its way without me. But I didn’t miss that plane. There was no external barrier or objective reason I could not board it. For the first time, there was only an intuitive voice making announcements over some sort of internal intercom saying ‘not yet…’ Bit different ae. ~ The month before my impending return, I had a dream where I adamantly explained to someone, “Greece is a journey for me, not just a destination.” Apparently my subconscious is ridiculously cheesy, but also speaks to the uncovering that seems to happen there. In a way it’s a sense of poetry and pilgrimage - there are questions and answers that are meant to be treated with patience, and committed return. So why then, would a deep yearning for something stop you from moving towards that very something? Your guess is as good as mine. Is it not a big deal? Is it timing? Is it like that scene in Good Will Hunting where Robin Williams tells Matt Damon he should just call the girl. The girl he’s become so enthralled by. And Matt Damon says something along the lines of ‘but this girl is perfect right now, I don’t want to ruin that.’ But that’s just it. I’m no longer the 13 year old girl on the other side of the world with Greece existing only as an impossible ideal inside my head. I’ve seen it in all weather, all temperatures and modes now. It’s made me cry the good kind of tears, and it’s made me cry the hard ones too. But the feelings never waned, only grew. The roots of my Greek infatuation have no link to my own ancestry or DNA, nor do they have anything to do with Meryl Streep or beach bars or wanting to lounge by the pool of some impossibly glamorous villa on a hillside. I’m actually not sure where they come from. All I know is fumbling my way through weather chat using language abilities still on par with a 3 year old, trying to act cool after slipping on sheeny Athenian sidewalks, and hearing the funny tone on the metro before the nice lady’s voice announces my stop, feels like being in a float tank. Bound and held by everything and nothing, all salty and suspended inside a novel little universe. This was the first time I was to be there with no exact reason as to why. No accommodation confirmed beyond an initial week in Athens. Nothing but a serious pull in that direction to perhaps give a clearer one to this very rudderless year. I just had to be there - to recover some part of me that I feel I’ve left behind. Like in a Disney film where a spell is cast over the princess and she loses her magical singing voice until she reaches the end of some seemingly impossible quest set before her. “You’re in love…” a friend said to me as I tried to justify myself in the lead up. I worry sometimes that one lifetime is not long enough to wrap myself around all and everything I owe so much thanks to. So many big whooshes of gratitude and longing and trepidation and anticipation and memory - that is love, right? Things being illuminated, like you are at once profoundly old but oh so tender and entirely new. Then so too comes the bypassing of all logic... After putting the kibosh on that flight, I saw with more accurate measure where I’ve been completely hijacked by this thing: coming home from Greece 5 years ago so completely enamoured and declaring like total fact I would return there in a couple of months, even though I had come back to New Zealand so broke I couldn’t afford a bus ticket to the city to attend the launch of the very magazine that enabled me to write from Greece in the first place. But it’s also been the thing that allowed me to make some of the most fortuitous ‘illogical’ decisions while I’ve been there. Like hopping on a bus moments before it departed, with a stranger waiting at the stop who asked if I’d like to join him on his adventure - that stranger who became one of my most special and consistent friends. Those of you who have read my writing for a while will know I tend to struggle with the same recurring themes: curiosity, memory, time, and letting things end. While working on a farm on one of the islands last year I repeatedly listened to a mellow song by Searows, called ‘I have more than enough.’ So much so it began to take on a sacred meaning when on one of my final days, as I sat reflecting on the time that had been spent, it mysteriously came over the speaker of a local restaurant in downtown Athens and I got teary in front of the man delivering food to my table. He sings: Sometimes I'm scared, that I'll only ever feel everything once And can never feel the same thing 'cause I change too much. And as I listen now, perhaps the very sentiment I was so moved by is being alternatively fulfilled. I may never know what I gave up, or gained, by not getting on that flight. ~ Things don’t always make sense. When you look up at the vastness of the sky and see tiny little planes zipping through into nowhere, or sit inside one and look down to see tiny little boats zipping out across open seas, it doesn’t make much sense. But we believe in them. When you’re forced to make a decision and don’t have much tangible evidence telling you why it feels so conflicting, it doesn’t make much sense. But you learn to believe in yourself. When you’re in love and you just want to disappear into that feeling forever but know that doing so will risk changing everything else, it doesn’t make sense. But you may just find yourself more certain that it’s real, that it will wait, than you ever have before.
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The first time I ever heard Jennifer say something she never actually talked. Conventionally speaking, no words pushed their way through her lips to reach me. And I too, did not offer up any feedback, follow up, or even first question. We just sat. Knees touching, eyes locked, divulging our vulnerabilities pressed behind the chagrin of anticipated “too muchness” - the burden all women seem to feel when comes time to speak up. But this time, it was in the staying silent I heard it. We were at a locals workshop for amateur poets, in an intimate room with rectangular desks organised in horseshoe fashion. The facilitator for the morning - an actual poet - starts a timer and gives us instruction for the unexpected ice breaker: we are to turn and lock eyes with the person sitting next to us, unflinching and sincere, until she says time’s up. Being a bunch of wordy people, it’s then encouraged we take notes. To pen what came up, as we were finally released back to our own selves and the safety of secret revelation. ___ I’m reading (inhaling) Trent Dalton’s book of Love Stories this week. His anthology of human hearts in print, collected in 2021. His method was simple: to sit in his cheap collapsable camping chair behind a shitty little desk on one of the busiest streets in Brisbane. But to also leave another one, spare, open for anyone in passing who felt like being just that. It has me reflecting on all the people I’ve sat with, or who have patiently sat with me over the years. Those well known, and those who came to be known through the very act. For me, conversation is such an exhilarating and transcendent past time. And while I know it is an excruciating trap for some, alongside the others who don’t mind a bit of a preverbal bush-bash beyond starter-pack chat, I’m here to rally for your escape... Because I believe what might be just one whack through the ‘Wuu2?’ ‘Nm. U?’ conventions from whence we teenagerly came, could be the clearing that changes your entire view. When I was in Spain last year I spent a few days staying in a 19th century farm house just outside a very small village in the desert of Almería. The host was named Maria, and she lived with her daughter and a man who was either her brother-in-law or husband - I never quite figured it out. Their property was very silent, and it was very vast. Overlooking the distant village with its little white houses and their clay roofs interspersing the orderly lines of olive trees down in the valley as I stared from the open patio. Maria hugged me when I arrived and the man, who was reclined and reading a book in his chair, turned and said “Hola Rosa!” followed by “Mamma Mia!” when he caught sight of my sizeable suitcase. When night fell, we would all naturally congregate out there on the patio under the sky blanket. Maria always smoking a cigarette with one of those holders like Cruella Deville, acting periodically as translator between me and the man, whose English was as bare minimum as my Spanish. She disappeared inside at one stage leaving just him and me sitting there, contemplating the galaxy together. We attempted common remarks, which just sounded like three English words peppered in here and there, but mostly conversed through “mmm” and “¡Sí!” and gesticulation and nodding and pointing. Then it trailed off, and the nervous energy dispersed into a more profound shared experience - a wordless dialogue. We were talking about the bigness of the stars. The peace. And I know exactly what he said, even though he really actually hadn’t. ___ Sometimes we sit and we just stare. Sometimes we just sit and we share, non-stop. On many occasions now, I have found the humble bench seat to be the great enabler. Two people, four legs. A practical foundation fixed to hold the weight of whatever truths and witty remarks arise as we sit. And in the case of Jennifer - our makeshift bench made of knees, adjoining and secured by the discomfort of pure anonymity - a moment to feel seen. Relieved and terrified all at once. With a big deep breath, I tried, in some telepathic people-pleasing format to say the words “you don’t have to smile..” Then I nearly laughed. Another deep breath, before I nearly cried. As Janis Freegard said, “you’ll never see me unless you look.” Bypassed. From stranger to friend in the course of a minute, then never to be seen again. The ‘perfect circle’ experience Becks had always assured me of when I got stuck on the “and then what…?!” of seemingly perfect, but finite, interactions. Far from disempowered, as I once believed…Instead, we are emboldened. Like after you spend a whole school term rehearsing your Year 11 English class speech and then, after the fated and final go at it, you want to relive those two mortifying minutes all over again. Because scary things make us a little bit more alive. And fleeting things send us onwards - to find another, again, more. Because maybe we don’t always need to leave the awkward middle seat between us and that other person waiting to go into the appointment. Or automatically slide in wordlessly through the back door of the taxi. Or pull the “headphones in” trick on the airplane. Maybe sometimes it’s nice to snuggle in close and hear the story, even if it’s the only one we’ll ever know. And, if it’s not already being spoken, to maybe try writing one together. Start where you are.
Never too late. Keep going, keep going. Do the next most obvious thing. On the phone to one of the elderly women I know in Greece last week she asked me, “Rosie, how is Neverland?” A couple of calls prior she’d also questioned, “are there any jobs there?” I never have the heart to correct her, because, reviewing right now, her perception of my life on the other side of earth is proving quite uncanny. Like many many people in 2024, I’m into month five of applying for consistent work. Month five of being in a provisional week-by-week career costume as I try to wriggle myself back into the comfy uniform / life I once predictably wore each day. The one where decisions are made for you by obligation to a salaried 9-5 contract and where spare time feels sacred, not laced with the exhaustive shame of misplaced and misunderstood ambition and skill. Making things work ‘as they will’ for a while has meant time is at once so pervasive and insistent, but so irrelevant and non-linear. I’ve been finding joy in the liminality of it like never before. Like a child completely enveloped in a present moment task or idea that is, through an adult lens, impossibly trivial. One such way I’ve been making things work is babysitting for a single dad down the road who is also doing his best to make his own things work a couple of nights a week. The revelatory nature of childhood has given me such fodder, as I (re)observe the priorities of daily life according to a 6 year old girl’s bedside table. In neat and colour coordinated order are: one pink box of tissues, one magic jewellery box, one fluffy note pad, one Pom-Pom pencil, one glitter heart diary, one unicorn totem, and one Smiggle water bottle. Each evening, I’m plied with questions such as: Scuse me…do you know anyone? Scuse me…can you tell me about the good times? How was the first person made? Do numbers ever stop or do they just keep on going always? Scuse me…do you play the ukulele? It’s a venture into a world of total wide-openness, and suddenly I’m the bearer of all knowledge. A recipient of categorical trust, despite my lack of qualification in the matters. Some of those questions are just way above my pay grade. And getting back to jobs I’m actually qualified for - the one I gave up and ones I’m now working to secure….. With the elimination of status (in relation to societal and capital relevance) and the collapsing of certain ideas of self (in relation to who and where one intended to be), I think I’ve found a remedial place. A kind of Neverland. There’s tumult and discomfort, but also joyful abandon. It feels perilous, dangerous, to risk all perceived security to follow a thing that has no immediate ROI or justifiable reasoning. But on a seeker level, on a whole body-whole self level, it’s the only thing that makes sense. As Jhumpa Lahiri packed up a life in America to move to Italy on a curious linguistic pilgrimage, she wrote extensively of the exile that occurred within her own self as she became entangled in her commitments to multiple languages: one that she was raised with (Bengali), one that society required of her (English), and one she had grown so desperately fond of, so rapacious for, one that would never really need her (Italian): “When you’re in love, you want to live forever. You want the emotion, the excitement you feel to last forever. Reading in Italian arouses a similar longing in me. I don’t want to die, because my death would mean the end of my discovery of the language. Because every day there will be a new word to learn.” The first time I went over to Greece, three months in and feeling a little jostled by the daily task of being somewhere unfamiliar for an extended period of time, I remember riding the metro to the Port with headphones in listening to Frank Sinatra Christmas carols. It was August. Something about Frank’s euphonious timbre always anchors me back to my body - or at least makes it feel more ok not knowing where my body is in time and space while moving along. That afternoon I’d also adopted the rather self-flagellating mantra: “YOU chose this Rosie. You chose this.” Like the gum chewing, sweaty-browed baseball coach yelling over the line to his weakest player, “don’t you dear quit on me now son.” I wrote about a similar notion on here last June, just before I Pimped My Life and decided to throw all known variables into the wind. I knew exactly what I was doing - dead set on a documentarian approach to life, commissioned by no more than the nonsensical siren call of a dream. So why am I surprised the metamorphosis has now brought with it some days of longing for a rewind or fast forward button? Once again, we shall turn to Jhumpa Lahiri for a morale boost: “I have to admit, though, that travelling between the two versions turns out to be useful. In the end the effort makes one version more articulate, clearer. It serves the writing, even if it upsets the writer.” The undertaking is in reordering the versions. Deciphering which dreams are worth sleeping in for, and when to just let a dream stay a dream. - On the topic of sleep and dreams, the month of May has thus far seen me stalked by the profundity of REM…Both the band, and the brain function. On multiple occasions now, whilst out and about and quietly tending to my lush and invisible (/unpaid) side hustle of daydreaming, I’ve been interrupted by the voice of 1990s Michael Stipe and his brilliant men of music. The nights that followed have been marked by very vivid, chaotic, and relational dreams. While I may have just qualified myself as the poster child for apophenia, I do believe in grabbing onto whatever mysterious forces seem to spit out in such timely patterns for us to fall into when we are a bit lost at sea. Generative or simply there to remind us our small brains don’t ever really know what’s going on, the best we can do is keep marvelling at them. Trusting what’s going on in our body and the essential feelings that come up as we do our utmost to keep as true we can. That is what will lead to a very dynamic and creative life - ‘the stuff of dreams.’ - ‘And how does your character solve the problem...? Are they brave? smart? magical?’ I saw these words written on the wall at our local art centre a couple of nights ago, alongside instructions for a kids writing workshop. Reminding me that maybe sometimes the way to solve the problem isn’t to get real - truncating our values and finding all sorts of creative ways to worry about everything not yet known, but to be brave enough to keep on dreaming. So back to Greece I will go. With Valentine’s Day just passed, and my Instagram ad algorithm’s current persistence in telling me it’s not too late to ‘get paid decent money’ to donate my eggs, I thought it might be an apt time to touch on friendships, bodies, and what defines good love. A few weeks ago I was asked to reflect on the ways love has been expressed in my life. What came to the fore initially was a mini tide of shame. Caught red handed - have I even been in love? How very Victorian of me. Next was a revelation: the many years I’d spent waiting for this magical thing to just descend on me. The kind of teenage hope that feels like a Keane song. A nondescript dimension, a piano in the forest. Nothing is practical, nothing makes sense, but it feels warm and safe and like it’s entirely made up of your own secret cringey heart pangs. When I was in primary school I remember saving up to buy a pair of those Adidas sneakers with the 3 silver stripes because the boy I liked wore them every day. Joining the soccer team just so I could share extra hours trodding the same patch of grass as another one who’d taken my fancy. Trying to appeal to boys by mimicking their behaviour has always been a strong route to friend-zoning myself. But, ah-ha! In the embarrassment of tracking back down memory lane it became apparent that the meaning did not lie in the securing of attention from those pre-pubescent males. Instead, in my own naive willingness to test out the theory of friendliness begets friendliness. Fast-forwarding back to the question of ‘have I ever?’, maybe it doesn’t matter. Could it be that a whole lot of the yes is in seeing our love life, friendships, and self, as one great unspooling. Punctuated less by dates and conventions, and more by seasons, states of being, episodes, and epiphanies. As we understand there is nothing, especially not love, lacking. Despite society’s great insistence. Is it that womanly freedom is not just about bodies in relation to a partner / lover. More so about self in relation to self. Can one spend prolonged periods of time alone and still feel valuable, valid, loved? While I’m not saying delaying relationships is powerful and the way to be a truly liberated woman with agency over her own body or life, I am calling into question the popular narratives that simultaneously enforce diminished, self-loathing, subordinate views of single women. Sometimes the fact of ‘almost happened’ can be the greatest act of love. “Boys shmoys…” were the words that came out of a friend’s mouth as she tucked me into her 7 year old’s bed under a roof of glowing star stickers the night I was stood up by one. The next morning I noticed a card written in a child’s handwriting and pinned by a magnet to highlight the centre of the fridge door: “I hope you have the most powerful day of your life!” And later, sitting around in our pyjamas by the fire with fruit toast and coffee as she proclaimed “is this happy hour?” the parallels were comical, and struck me. The safety net of fine friends and the comfort of being known and supported. Sometimes love isn't slick and cool. It’s not the guy at the bar with the suave lines and the suggestive guiding hand on the small of your back. What we are socialised to perceive as thrilling or what will make someone fall in love with us is often times not actually what feels sexy at all. A man making a family phone call, or cooking, or being honest, or making sincere eye contact, or caring for a baby, or going for a run, is far more appealing than half the stuff I have witnessed that is supposed to feel X-rated. Think of completing insignificant domestic tasks together; sat in the passenger seat of a warm, sun-stained car early in the morning. Spending a day offering up information about yourselves, eliciting common things - sharing favoured anecdotes, eventually falling asleep on a couch tucked under an arm, head on a shoulder. My favourite movies are those ones with two people just walking around and talking. There’s humour, and much awkwardness. Watching the tingling energy of uncertainty and desire becoming manifest in the language of their bodies together so patient and restrained. Because so much of eroticism is in suggestion of the actual thing. But then, so too comes doubt. The obsessive brain circuitry that keeps us guessing and pre-occupied. Not just as we write our own personal Rom-Com, but in general. Life is a constant feedback loop of will it, won’t it…isn’t it? I find it ever-intriguing how we can become so convinced of a feeling and consistently revert back to a worn out thought pattern we know is not actually intuitive or meaningful, but merely the outcome of repeat exposure. Just a pressing into one neural pathway over and over again. How suddenly the dissonance stops as soon as something else throws it off or puts an end to it with an objective or definite thing outside of our control or expectation (colloquially: “it takes two to tango”)… I’m big into crushing, and the collateral damage of such a habit has often meant ignoring what is known cognitively and rationally in favour of disillusioned replay and retelling of events, duping oneself into addiction. Returning back whenever a bump of romance was needed to become convinced my story could and should be building into something after all. For a while there I found myself caught on the idea of overlap. How intersecting and invisible relationships are, and how everyone basically always has someone on their mind they are either wanting to know, or waiting to forget. I wonder if there’s ever an empty pocket in time for anybody’s heart…probably not. Like when that one boy wanted me and I wanted his brother. Or when my friend was devastated about her old love but turned it towards a new one, and now can’t turn it towards anyone else without the newer one cropping up and comparing. How even once an older woman told me she still thinks of the man she had a romantic fling with when she was young but it didn’t continue because of logistics and time and place, though she is happily married to her husband of many years. Perhaps affections towards various crushes are just a misaim. Ignorant of who is still floating around their mind or fuelling their desire and focus. It’s not that we don’t want others. We are just skipping the older tape and kind of self-torturously enjoying the fractured sound. How can it be so easy to overwrite, when in the immediacy of it all it feels impossible to consider any other mode of operating. A few nights ago I underwent a trial at a local restaurant in hopes of earning a bit of extra pocket money. It was like live relationship theatre in there, and the whole time all I could see were the parallels so evident. Dates with trial and error - in every sense. Before leaving, Dad had told me (with a semi-smirk on his face) to wear “waitress makeup.” I got in there and held my breath the whole time. It was so fast, and I was so aware of myself on show yet of no importance whatsoever to visiting diners. Was it objectification? And too, was I guilty of objectifying them? Staring, as fellow staff members so effortlessly coordinated their bodies in the tight space with an appealing, swaggerish dance. I spat out some sort of nervous gibberish launching into my untrained recital of the menu, and proceeded to pour two drink glasses for the man who had seconds earlier told me, “I’m alone, it’s just me”, because I was so focused on appearing friendly. I only lasted six weeks in my previous attempt at a hospitality job and was told by the owner, “Rosie, I’m not paying you to stand there and have a chat with the customers.” It’s humiliating, but after a good sleep and a refresh to the nervous system….kind of exhilarating? Is this what we are all doing to each other?! An older gentleman came up to me as he approached the door to leave, leaned in and whispered with the soft authority that comes from decades having of skin in the game: “one day it’ll all seem so easy.” The tail end of a year really pushes for some serious reflection doesn’t it? Usually what happens for me is a surrendering to measurables, meanings, and mottos. Recent Decembers have offered up salient phrases that seem to stick out more than the rest. I know in the moment, as the usually brief stack of words order themselves in my head, they are going to be somewhat of a guide in the months to come. This time? Better-Than-Fiction living. I’m once again having a wild reckoning with the results of an episodic existence. I’m here in New Zealand again, and I’m back to instinctual and longstanding ways of operating - feeling like no time has passed - but my phone buzzes with messages from friends I didn’t know existed months before. The projector in my head flickers with shining recall of places that once held no weight beyond map dreaming. It’s like one of those early 2000s movies where people swap bodies, or wake up in a different era and no-one else realises it’s them but not really. How amazing is the accumulative aspect of living a life? Just going about garnering story, making a memory. Having it show, but most often be invisible. The soul is changed. The person is continually renewed, all the while ageing. I’ve been considering the concept of ‘rolling vs fixed term’ moments in life. And if there really are starts and endings, or if it’s all just one big loose thread ongoing? I think that’s why I didn’t want to come home. Some fear that it was like a finish line, or the neat and tidy closing to this big, marvellous and sprawling existence. So into the plunderous depths of the journal pages we shall go! As Anaïs Nin said, “we write to taste life twice. In the moment, and in retrospection.” I’ve been running into notes written during moments of public pause. Communal spaces - the role they play as you travel and nowhere and everywhere is home: “I needed to get out of my own story for a minute. To inhabit it better when we left the room”, was the sentence scrawled after sinking into a cinema in London 4 months in. I remember doing this one day in Avignon too - not sure where I could escape not only the heat, but my busy head and preoccupation with plans and panics and aloneness. Big feelings. But dissociated, far-from-profound feelings. And again, on a sleepy autumnal evening in Athens when I found myself inside the Metropolis Cathedral, following gentle ideas and heading in to sit amongst the safe and sacred. I closed my eyes and heard the older lady in the pew behind me take five very deep breaths, sighing audibly as she released them. Then soon after, soft sobbing noises. There was a very well dressed younger woman across from us, also with her eyes closed and hands held in prayer, who soon began to weep and shake. I wondered if they were both crying for the weight of existence in that moment - a heavy month for mankind - or if it were something more intimate, more personal. I felt overwhelmed by an urge to go over and hug her. Not just to comfort her, but for myself. To feel a vulnerable, honest, bare-emotioned human in my arms. The connection and safety we offer each other in our unguardedness. This is the stuff of life: not only the joy weeps, but the tender, raw, hurting ones. What else are we all doing here if not to share in full spectrum living? Take the edge off and allow all flavours to ‘leak out’, as Deb might say. Nothing is a given while travelling like this. It’s an entire gamble, a leap of faith. And as I revisit the familiar for review and recalibration I’m really seeing how faithful the world and its people have been to me. Even on the puzzling, maddening, defeating, destroying days when nothing went as planned. Yet - there was no plan. There is no plan. I’m just mucking in and bumbling about living a life I believe in. Frequently harkening back to the words of Jorge Luis Borges: “I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.” The more I bolt around this world and gather stories and things to say, the more I feel I have nothing to say - in a most humbled sense. The more I understand that my voice and experiences are no more important than all others out there. How facile an act it is to speak just to say something or to prove and feel relevant. But, complementary to this is realising the power we have in writing. Uprooting or staying put, how often do we long to dive into ineffable feelings? The ones so vivid inside us not satisfied by the work of anyone else, or any film or photo or explanation. Here is where we can bring it all to life. Make it visible, tangible, permanent, with our own choice of words. To be dizzied by it over and over and over as we hit the right note. It comes as much during the writing as in the reading. And in the living. May I remind you…You are alive. What a jackpot. Riveting stuff. Congrats! How cool to constantly be putting yourself in the firing line of chance and story. One day in November, Iro and I sat eating at a hilltop taverna on Syros, listening to the sexy dialogue and weird pleas coming from the neighbouring table that we fabricated a story out of in the car afterwards - grossed out and laughing. An older man and his married lover who had surreptitiously arrived from Athens. It was nothing to do with us, but I jotted it down anyway. In Catania too. Those few hot and sweaty days of improvisation and chaos with Ayla. Lugging our bags around the streets trying to coordinate with Layla while she was stuck at Gatwick Airport haemorrhaging cash. Ayla in her mini-skirt and sneakers speaking Italian and getting us by. Drying myself with a hostel foot mat. Trying fresh pasta for the first time in nine years. Reading Virginia Woolf excerpts to each other over lunch in the shade, as she drank organic orange wine and I stuffed in as many tapas as I could manage. These kinds of encounters used to be fuel for me as a writer. I almost sniffed out the unusual, shocking, idealistic, in order to have a front row seat granting permission to then fictionalise it in pen. Everything was intoxicating, and almost too much because of this. Cities were rife! But as the months went on I started to feel less like a passer-by and more like an everyman. Far more present - it was quite new and stable, but not a stymy to my craft. It’s the thing of actually engaging with reality just to be in it. Fleeting or whatever. Before, for me it was constantly to collect. To put myself in situations just for the content and write up that could come after, and ranking things as valuable or not based on how much juice was squeezed out in words or documentation. Now, life just feels more real and rolling, and the captures - words or otherwise - are a coincidental or considered by-product, but not the goal. I took a handful of copies of my little book Then, Now, Maybe with me this time, and decided to leave them in public places (how fitting). Inscribing a cheesy spell on the endpapers I will now always stand by - Dear Stranger, your life is a poem. Ask me about what happened some time…. and until then, go on writing the next line of yours. We all love reading it. I’m not sure how best to tackle the beast that is the profusion of notebooks kept during six months away from familiar grounds. So for now, here are some very simple, very indulgent scenes from the less complicated parts of a slow December’s return. May your holiday rest - be it winter or summer - bring a sure pause, or the thrill of non-stop aliveness. Whatever you need. And by no stretch do I write in ignorance and denial of the hideous current realities of humankind, and deny the voices of pain that should be pondered over my jotted privileges. But I do write in hope that by greeting with thanks these pockets of tenderness in daily life, that some form of magical comfort be extended over oceans to those for whom daily life as a concept of choice no longer exists. 15/12/23 - Always asking: If I do what’s the cost? And if I don’t, what’s the cost? 16/23/23 - As I walked out of the building, she declared her wishes for a “really low-key, unglamorous, classic Kiwi summer.” And I knew exactly what she meant. 18/12/23 - Tonight, in the bottom garden... Overgrown and splendid. Cushy greens exploding life. Golden - the South kind - turning tawny mountains velvet, or horseback. A moment of return, in that happiest mode, fashion-less and functional: crocs, trackies, a cotton shirt. Chatting as we dig and pull and plant. Dinner at the beach, chased with a cold plunge. In these simple minutes we are untouchable again, no scary thoughts of discontent and desperation. 21/12/23 - What a nice thing, standing barefoot in the garden shelling a pea pod to pop into your mouth. Or taking sweet and tiny offerings from a glorious and unruly berry patch, bushed and busting to show you what it has done. 22/12/23 - Summer solstice. I’m domestic, but grubby and gruff. Wearing Frith’s gumboots, puffing and sweating, then delighting. Sun red cheeks all flushed I strip down to my undies and lie like a starfish up on the grassy bank in a heavy summer rain. I imagine being watered - blooming with abundance, beauty and provision. Part of a bigger picture. End up laughing at myself, gleefully. 24/12/23 - Not the ‘will’ but the ‘does.’ 25/12/23 - Knee deep in the river flow, I hold her hands from upstream so she can “kick kick kick” like a little kid. We joke about her placebo wetsuit - vintage Body Glove. How melted the chest neoprene is…“it’s like someone’s taken a blowtorch to the neck!” 26/12/23 - I’m constantly terrified of losing this feeling. But then I keep finding it. Again and again I find myself meeting peace. 27/12/23 - June holds the leash, looks up and says: “she sure looks happy next to me.” I look around, see who is next to me. I sure am happy next to them. There was this one Christmas where Grandad Bruce won a small profit from a Lotto draw, after 30 years of diligent weekly patronage. He decided the most appropriate way to divvy out the dosh was to shout his entire family a skydive on Boxing Day. The morning of, it was quite a spectacle to observe the pyscho-dynamics of our largely facetious and performative clan curdle in the face of existential reflection. It’s funny how we flirt with what we fear like this. On the surface it’s self sabotage, but chip a little further and what we usually find is a ‘yes’ to external risk is in fact a way of short circuiting our pride. Recalibrating, as the illusion of control is exposed as a dubious, self-constructed cuddly blanket. We know we need it, we just can’t admit it outright. After a near 3 years of diligent weekly patronage, I've quit my job. And just like what was witnessed on that (totally fine and anti-climactic) skydive day, I handed in my notice feeling petrified I would never have the choice to reclaim what I gave up if I went ahead. As is true of any weighted decision across the board, this is typically the most appropriate moment to jump. It’s scariest having an era or phase end knowing you made the choice. You rocked the boat, killed the switch, let the leash go. But maybe these changes are the biggest, most grown up, most hindsight-rich ones. When you weren’t forced into it or given no option but to adapt. Instead you looked, at length and with honesty, and decided to follow the flickering thing that appeared inside. *And forget not how utterly privileged you are in even having the freedom to do so when you can. Being a serial idealiser I can attest: it’s fun to rehearse the fantasy. Untouched and unlimited. But on opening night, when the murmur of the expectant crowd is on the other side of the curtain and it’s actually happening? That’s some serious nausea. I had spent countless (salaried) hours lost in puckish playback-loop fantasies about this very liberation, and now wanted to immortalise all it had given by holding things tighter than ever. Suddenly fetishising the banal dimensions of office life, entering a short lived and ill-fit phase of watching ‘Suits’ just to hang onto some thread of corporate doublespeak and the ever curious arrogance of rapacious professional males. In truth, it was a feeling of distrust. A kind of limbic friction that at the time didn’t allow a full tipping into excitement for this newfound freedom…With unbounded options and a free-for-all sense of time and self as I go forward from here. Emotions rampant and open, attractions elevated and charged by the romanticism of travel and its gift of glorious self-delusion. I don’t know if I trust myself without obligation to, or direction from, some form of structure and contract anymore. I had liked the version of myself that this job nurtured: sort of detached, effective, clear, on schedule, mature. When everyone is off on weekends it feels ok to relax and unfurl. Safe and sound. Soon though, when they’re all back at it and I’m the one blissfully unreachable and unemployed, there’s likely to be an ambient charge coursing through me - unrest. Is it a bit woeful to have toyed with the idea of staying looped into Teams chats and the knowledge of projects ongoing? (short answer, yes.) Not because of some sick addiction or love of the actual work, or a persistent FOMO. But because of a need to feel important - like I am contributing to something. Feeling required and involved. I’ve just seen and known the perils of too much spare time and self enquiry. Necessary to a point, but then the toiling and turning over of thoughts and personal perceptions needs to be dropped. Some commitment to a common, bigger thing needs to rescue and reclaim your attention. Now I find myself excessively journaling about it. Like I’m in preparation for some inevitable amnesia and the things that have me so enraptured in the simple and predicable now will no longer be retrievable once the context is altered. Journeying through this flawed ideological position saw a compelling first stop at the rational vantage point: ‘if it’s not broken, why fix it?’ And was called to a welcome halt as I plunged into the epiphanic words of a wise and amiable foreign waiter, “There is no better thing in life than travelling. Oh wait.. maybe actually being in love. Wait! No better thing in life than being in love AND travelling.” And so a little test drive trip to Australia last month served as a decent marker. I returned resolute and certain… It’s never not the time to prioritise the life story. As one friend and I often sign off obscurities brought about by the self-splitting trance of adventure with: well well, one for the memoir! Beyond empty ‘glamour travel’, this is what reminds us we are alive. Grooving in time with humanity, part of something bigger. In love with a person, a place, or just a perspective - who cares, all great! Placing that same yearning I had mistakenly outsourced to a particular business efficiency app back into the hands of the mystical idea we call destiny. On-site at my last work event a few weeks ago, Senior Aboriginal Man, Uncle Mickey O'Brien, shared something during his Welcome to Country that has really made its way down deep: in Aboriginal language there is no directly translatable word for goodbye, because it is their view that relationships - however brief or monumental - remain with us forever. An acknowledgement that the ending of one experience will soon transmute into the next beginning. So bubbye, bon voyage, life’s work is waiting. This really is feeling like the sweet spot age. Decisions are starting to actually matter. Speaking to friends, there’s more trueness. People’s honest hearts are being revealed. As the dust from the frivolous years settles a little more we sink into an acceptance of what we really want, and being ok with how big or how seemingly small the most desirable way of life looks in our mind’s eye. As the access-way to youth narrows, everything else is broadening. It’s a co-existence inside new maturity as we declare with more firmness who we are, all the while remain a little unsure. Perhaps even more so? We woke up here, and playtime was of a different brand. This time with more money, and some (hopeful) wisdom and experience behind us. We are storied. And a little battered and bruised, making interactions interesting, tender, electric. I haven’t been able to cry in months. I don’t know what it is, I’m the happiest I’ve been in my entire life - but things have been running deeper. Everything feels potent, beauty feels immediate, time feels fragile. But here was I, suddenly impenetrable and unable to showcase the experience of such revelation with even the smallest of tears. Nothing seemed to be able to break through this surface apathy. Until Sunday. As a glorious autumnal morning broke here in Queenstown, I lay in bed with tears leaking so freely they did that thing where they paint lines down around your ears and neck and onto the pillow. These were relieving tears. Life-affirming tears! Borne of the list of music a benevolent stranger had so perfectly curated and, without intention, took me back to some of the most important people and places in my 20s - ones that I’d forgotten to pay a mental visit to. Sounds I’d skipped over lately. Each hit of the play button, as I tracked down the imbedded audio files, was so familiar and relevant it was almost comical. It seemed in that moment perhaps we were riding the same head/heart/sound-wave collection. She’d taken time to articulate the magic of music, and she’d told us to turn it up as loud as we could. I pondered, ramped it up loud as I could like some kind of spell, and the magic sure as hell worked on me. I’ve often thought of this… As I utter thanks for the joy of living like incantations. Can we maybe place a charm on ourselves, and others? Can we influence another merely by kind, focused thought? Could it indeed be true that if I’ve been on your mind chances are you’ve been on mine? Maybe that’s enough. A sense that isn’t owing to externals or some specific alignment of variables tipped in your favour. Just a lasting buoyancy created by the sweet nothings of unknown others, waking with you at dawn and not capitulating to even the most mundane daily stressors or realities. Better yet is the real deal I’m sure. Lately I’ve come to truthfully acknowledge that all the things I want, I don’t need just yet. That all of this is plenty. More than enough. A flash frame I’ll never revisit, so all the more urgent it is to soak in and not temper with any time-bending. I used to think I would be many things by this age.. But for real now? Now real things are afoot, and require a most dynamic approach. One that doesn’t block out those wishes or favour distance and denial, but one that recognises finite youth and the questions still latent inside me as the me of today. In short, I’m just feeling happy. And it appears to be a compounding kind… Or perhaps, for the first time in forever I’m choosing to let it take me over - fully - without foreboding caution that it’s too good to be true, that I’ll jinx things, or sound ignorant or privileged, or whatever. The world needs happy people right now. More right now is enough people. Sidenote: The month before I turned 29 last year, I lay isolating with Covid and so decided to launch an investigation in service of all us common compatriots from the land of maybe-now-its-time-to-panic? The case was closed when a fall into the abyss of Google’s dropdown menu for ‘people also ask’ confirmed I was not alone, diluting the sting and replacing it with a deep tummy chuckle: Is 30 years old old? Why is turning 30 such a big deal? What age do you start looking old? Is 30 middle age? Turning 29 as a woman Turning 29 spiritual meaning In a moment where slim reserves for energy were being directed towards eliminating a novel infection, misspending brain power on arbitrary, socially imposed concerns such as invisible age thresholds paled into complete irrelevance. All this to say, that week was an unshackling. A maturation into a new philosophy of timelessness. The preoccupying scarcity and deadline panic transformed into an almost laughable subplot and I was all of a sudden back on my own terms. Gosh, speaking of new plot-lines….am I a bit of a sentimental idiot? Please tell me if these offerings are getting old! Sometimes it’s like a disease, with the medicine of maudlin as much the cause as it is the cure. As often goes with trips and dreams, nonsensical musings are better off kept to oneself. Yet here we are, on these platforms that appeal to our vulnerabilities in endless panopticon fashion for the many and the few. Choose your flavour, push your own brand. In sticking to my own, I suppose I’ll sign off with a trusty on-the-mind list - throwaway thoughts, conversational tidbits - in hopes they land somewhere good in you, perhaps even welcome a deep sigh of recognition, or little tear if it’s needed:
Here's to ageing with an impossible agelessness. As laughable as the thought of thirty being a crisis-point of ‘ageing’ may well be to us all. In some great redemption offering following the last thought I left on here, I’ve been gifted a couple of very subtle, but wholly significant, opportunities for acceptance. Levelling out ways of seeing, of organising my head, and remembering that bracing hard for firm and steady is in most cases a cheating of self. A denial of the constancy and flux of emotions we are so generously gifted to explore - no matter how exhausting at times. At this very moment nothing feels fractured. All is open and flowing, it’s a very good life. This week we've had three men ripping up the carpet from 9-5. At the end of each day I come down to find they have duteously transported the furniture back inside, atop the spongey new layer. Working from their fresh memory, with zero attachment to a prior existence and place, the furniture is almost always categorically placed wrong. The initial moment sees me slammed into cognitive dissonance. A confrontational internal tantrum of sorts - 'that’s so not how it was..' But who is to say? Reaching for some philosophical interpretation inside the example of three sweaty and aloof carpet layers who just want to knock off and have a beer is likely a big push.. But, it has me reflecting on the phenomenon of constructed memory. Where we go to to find comfort amidst change - both intrinsic, and out there in the tangible world of things and furniture and faces. I’ve been listening to George Harrison’s ‘All Things Must Pass’ (in that recursive playback fashion only suited to when you listen to music alone) and finding little glimmers I’d missed before. It’s sparking a recall of something a very special sage of a friend said to me on the phone once: “the end of an era punctuates or structures one's life. It leaves you asking: what are/were those years?” Or even on a more quotidian basis - what was that moment? How do I carry it, or conversely, just leave it be? A further realisation of the non-linear, reason-season-or-lifetime aspect of this brief dance on earth we’re all involved in. Same goes, perhaps, when romantic rumination takes hold. For an experience to be meaningful does it have to have been felt and kept alive by both? What’s our business in really knowing whether the other person was truly in a moment sincerely or just reviewing us in kindness anyway. What do we owe each other in that regard? Not all experiences usher in continuation do they. Can we let a one time feeling be enough and not discredit it or become convinced it isn’t a worthy part of our story if it doesn’t get built upon in some Disney-like fashion? Perhaps connection is not always a solution to our yearning, but there to serve as a mirror of it. A kinship over the longing for some kind of self-clarity. Permission to be seen, rather than a petition to be saved. Or a chance to encounter another beyond cognitive effort. Sometimes it’s not even about catching lightening in a bottle, but about bodies. Almost like skin hunger. The need to be tactile. To be felt, and feel yourself having an effect. Not in a lustful or salacious way, but a curiosity about how another’s body fits alongside yours in time and space. How they look and feel and exist in close proximity, kiboshing the hyped up story of distance and detachment we can weave our own physical relativity into when we are alone. In my existential moments, I find I trip up on the same old thing. The truth that certain things in time - places, feelings, abilities, ages, connections - will eventually need to either pass, be let go of, or allowed to change. Then comes the pressure to reinforce the sentiments and relationships in a grasping effort to keep them from slipping or being forgotten. Not a bad thing, just very tiresome. Writing often serves as a way of trying to solidify it. But is it just compulsion, or a necessary teasing out? This has evidently become one of my themes for 2023 - to remind myself when I’m rushing or pushing to linger ‘just a minute more’ (thanks Le). To soak it in as it is, before or after the frame shifts. To document a little less! To just feel and experience, rather than outsource my memory to a platform or collection of pixels. And any which way, it is good to feel the pen snug under fingers again. To be fixed on intention and radiating thanks onto a page after the blur of lengthy fallowing and self-doubt. To be floating each morning with a heightened awareness of beauty, intensely alive and here for it all. The bare bones simplicity of this summer routine is working a treat.  (Image: From the Earth to the Moon: A Direct Route in 97 Hours, 20 Minutes, 1874 edition) I’ve always had a habit of commemorating ordinary things with unnecessary sentimentality: ‘This is the last time I’ll eat breakfast as a teenager.’ ‘This time two years ago I was eating breakfast in another country.’ ‘I wonder if the person driving the old green Corolla - my first car - thinks about who drove it before they did?’ ‘I wonder what about me will be different next time I stand in this exact spot, in front of this very vantage point?’ It’s a form of being utterly seduced by the insistence of progression and improvement, while trying to retain the familiar feelings of an assured ‘what is.’ When you’re viewing things from a sort of melodramatic isthmus point, where the could of it all will soon be rearranged into ‘what was’, it’s like being suspended inside a realm of possibility. I’ve often thought how torturous it must be for people awaiting the results of some big diagnosis. Or, those few days after receiving one, trying to contort their huge visions for the future into a harsh and dulled new self restricted by physical fallout. The small pocket of space when someone wakes and comes to, in a groggy, warm moment of forgetfulness and hope for a day as normal before the reality sinks in. In a more collective way, it’s kind of piteous watching our society try to reconcile our bygone era of hyper-reality and excess with the stark, confronting modesty and restriction of these recession years. We are wedged inside a dichotomy: where we balk at paying $9 for a cauliflower, yet avidly plan our somewhat unjustified, Instagram-driven travel to Europe for a moment of escapism. Despite the continent being in crisis, our drive is still only concerned with grasping for, and consuming, a dissolving ideal. Believing that because ‘that’s how we’ve always been’, that that’s how we always should be. Does anyone else out there find it way too tempting to preemptively analyse the zeitgeist of ‘our times?’ And what does that even mean?? I have to be careful to moderate myself as I try to comprehend things. To find a kinship and focus beyond mere observation and critique. Because there’s a rawness of care that seems to arrive when all the old hiding spots feel ill fitting or off limits, leaving you asking the all important question: “am I a comfortable dwelling place?” In the wake of instability I’ve come to parse out this sort of confronting realisation that human partnerships are unpredictable and intertwined. Like in Titanic when Kate Winslet is in that busty dress on the wrong side of the railing and tells Leo DiCaprio to go away but he just says “I can’t. I’m too involved now.” Or maybe it’s also like what my friend’s dad said during his speech on her wedding day: “love is risky business.” Yet how beautiful it is to blindly track on towards a future of unknowns with others. Being equally invested and affected by their private worlds, having let them become entangled with yours. There are so many more variables to contend with. A greater susceptibility to loss of control over your own desired outcome or aspired long-term plan, but a worthy sacrifice knowing it goes both ways. And that mutual choice to stick around “despite” must feel like a pretty good and grown up thing to want to do. |
