April 29, 2007

I am surrounded by punch bowls and little black dresses and thumping music. I'm swirling my mojito and silently cursing myself for the hundredth time that night for forgetting it was a cocktail party. Or rather, cursing myself for failing to make the connection between a cocktail theme and the expectation that one would come suitably cocktail attired. Then I curse my friend for having moments earlier left me and the party. I had been enjoying myself poised next to her in her canary yellow op shop cardigan, the two of us taking effortless swipes at the barbie doll brigade in the corner. Alone, I watch another gaggle of black dresses and sleek bleached heads bubble past. I slink back to the bar to get another mojito. I'm searching for any other female in the room wearing pants. I'm disappointed. After a couple more bad mojitos and increasingly inane conversation with forgettable party goers I start to loosen up. I quit dodging the circling disco lights determined to illuminate my misbehaved dark blonde curls. I jiggle about to the music in my flat shoes. I begin to enjoy the ostentation, I fondle the ice sculpture and gawk at the busty waitresses in corsets and fishnet stockings. I start to think the mojitos taste not half bad.

I am at the point of drunk where inhibition has left me and mischief has made me her friend. Unsteady and slurring have yet to arrive. I have attained that perfectly balanced inebriated state of confidence and wit. I look around the room to select an object to lavish my charm upon. The room spins ever so slightly. I look to my left and down. And there it is.

It's a security card, like the ones we use in my own office to get out in to the stairwell and use the bathroom. It is attached to a lanyard, one of those stretchy ones. Temptation leans over and kisses me passionately on the lips. I reach out and tug the card towards me and then release it with a snap. And then I look up, into a twinkling blue abyss that has already claimed me as its own.

April 26, 2007

It's dark and I'm sitting slouched in a dark 4 wheel drive that I know neither of them would expect me to be driving. It is drizzling a bit outside, and the water wraps around the car, cocooning me. The street lights reflect off the dewey windows of the car and I dare to press my face up against the glass, squinting through the window of the bar I'm parked outside of but it is late and they have the lights dimmed low.

I'd tailed him and then parked up and watched him walk inside. Less than 5 minutes later she she arrived, wearing a cute print dress and leather boots up to her arm pits and her dark shoulder length hair all swingey, probably freshly shampooed because she's been out running for twenty kilometres again. Even though I can't actually see them once they are inside, I could visualise her smiling at him as she walks up to greet him, because she has radiated at me like that dozens of times before. That one stumps me. Maybe she has a different smile for him.

I'm still sitting there forty five minutes later and I can't tell if the water is streaming down the glass or across my pupil anymore. This isn't as much fun as the first time I followed him to the park and watched them sit and eat sandwiches together. He doesn't even like sandwiches. I'd offer to make them for him, nice ones with ham and mayonnaise and lettuce and tomato or chicken and avocado. But he just didn't like sandwiches. And yet there he was eating sandwiches with her, both of them wearing dark designer sunglasses, him in his suit, on his lunch break. Her just swanning around in another cute print dress with all the time in the world.

But this time all the fire has gone out of me. There's no noise in the car except a surreal splash each time a car drives past, reminding me that I'm just sitting there waiting for nothing and nobody at all.

April 15, 2007

The cellphone made an impotent thud on the carpet. I hadn't even hit anything. I gulped and hiccuped but I was too feral with anger to cry. I threw pillows haphazardly around the room but the desire to do any real damage was fast siphoned out of me by an overwhelming hollowness.

I picked up the offending phone and scowled down at the time. It was still too early to get out of bed. I hated Sunday mornings most. New-born eyes unfurling to see my piano-playing long fingers stretching out across to the other side of the bed and finding....a cold pillow. The pillow is very quickly strangled underneath my armpit, as I attempt to strangle any semblance of comfort from its downy form. I always woke up too quickly, startled, not by anything in particular. Just instantly demanding attention and animation from everything around me. He was sluggish in the mornings and found this morning person lying next to him an anathema.

So who the hell did she think she was?

I got out of bed and walked sullenly past Vinnie, the abominable snowman of a cat that belonged to my flatmate. Vinnie launched into full-scale accusatory meowing, I'm hungry, I want petting! Ugggh, I wanted to get down on my knees and wag my finger at the cat for his demands. I'm tired of all this co-dependence, I would say in cat-speak. Leave me be!

I re-wound, played again, increased the volume, re-wound. The slight slur in his voice, the flurry with which he announced where he was, the feminine giggling and merriment in the background. And before I had had the opportunity to say much more than an awkward hello knowing that she was listening to everything he said, the line went dead. And the phone flew vehemently out of my hand.

I finished eating my soggy vegemite toast, completely devoid of any flavour, mindless chewing, resenting the alienness of it in my mouth. I needed to move. I began to get dressed, and reaching for my underwear drawer I got a glimpse of something silken, the colours of cocoa, honey and cinnamon, it was twitching on the apple green pack of sanitary pads sitting to the right of the drawer. It's antennae making little circular motions. I fished the cockroach out with a tissue and transported it outside, feeling some perverse vindication that something so insidious could be found amongst my very own panties.

April 14, 2007

I want to shake my booty

I've decided i love to dance. And i want to take classes. But not Ceroc, or whatever it is that the ex-boyfriend is doing with all those divorcees.....ick. But i love music, and i love my gym class that is dance moves....i want to move it, move it. You like to move it move it. He like to move it move it. You like to.......MOVE IT!

I also need to do something spiritually rewarding. I signed up to greenpeace recently. Felt sorry for the spanish boy who asked me why nobody in my crappy old conservative town would talk to him. Also empathised as I had recently been collecting for the red cross, and had similarly got disheartened about how invisible i was until i pulled out the big guns and fastened my dorky red cap to complement my dorky red pinnie. So now I'm a greenie. But maybe i need to do something more hands on. Will mobilize myself, and report soon.

Peace, love and moonbeams.

April 13, 2007

My first memory

I was about three and a half when my parents brought my little sister and I back to New Zealand. I was actually born in Adelaide, Australia. I have no memories of Australia itself. But I do remember the flight over. I guess it must have been a momentous thing, being on a big 747. I remember the moss velvet green curtain that separated one section of the plane from another. I don't know what it was, maybe first and second class. But I remember that curtain. It was heavy and shimmery and slightly pleated. And I remember being in the car park in Auckland after we had landed. I remembera bunch of adults standing around, suitcases being slung around. It is all water coloured and static. Perhaps a memory of a memory.

I remember having a big proper birthday party when I turned 5. I remember we had pin the tail on the donkey.

I remember crying for my mother my first day at school. And then later being adopted by some older girls who took me out in to the field and taught me how to make daisy chains. Oh, true independence.

I remember stumbling upon a still-born calf in the paddocks bordering the lifestyle block I grew up on. I remember crying (pattern developing) as I stumbled away from it, my pudgey little thighs pushing through the dense, tall grass as I shook and gulped. I wasn't sad for the little slimey dark shape, all legs. I didn't like dead things.

I remember building forts with the prunings from the kiwifruit vines as my mother worked and fantails dashed in and out of the canopy. I remember peddling our little three wheeler bikes around and around inside our massive home - the kitchen, dining room, lounge and family room of our house were relatively open plan and made a perfect circular track.

It is all light years ago. Another person. Oblivious. The Christmas school break of six weeks or so were an absolute eternity. Years have now become months and days have become minutes. I didn't have to shower at night to wash the day off of me. I didn't slip out of the sleep canal, my first waking thought identifying an error I had made the previous day at work. I dreamt of getting married, of having children, of being just like my mother. In fact, I don't even think I dwelt so much on goals or dreams or expectations. I was too busy running everywhere, or waiting, impatiently, at the large tyre swing at the giant lawson tree for my gum-booted dad to swing me to oblivion.

April 08, 2007

When life is getting you down, there is always comfort and solace to be found in a gorgeous, completely impractical and unnecessary pair of new shoes.

I have had a lovely day to day. Took a ferry ride, took in some jazz, had a seafood salad for lunch (very fresh scallops and prawns) and bought those shoes.

Just finished watching Borat. Horrendous.

And am off to bed, because I am covering the cells in the morning for all the over night arrests. How cool is that!

April 07, 2007

Four years can pass........like one of those sketch comic books where you flick all the pages to get the picture to move. And if you hold the picture still, if you have to listen to your own thoughts for too long, it seems disappointingly two dimensional. I'm sure I have come along way since that first year where I was treading dark syrupy water and buried myself under my duvet, but I'm back in the place where I last saw her, and I feel desperately cut off from everyone who I could possibly gain any comfort from. And I'm angry. There's some huge music festival on in town, and I couldn't even get a park near the office so I could go in and drown out my thoughts with the mounds of work I have in there waiting for me. No purpose. I even contemplated just going and sitting up at her tree but I always get there and find that it doesn't bring me any closer to her. It's just another place where she isn't.

And it's all in my head anyway right? I mean what is the significance of a date. And is that even what's really bugging me, or am I just feeling miserable because the boy has been even more distant than the thousands of kilometres he usually is of late. Everyones just busy dealing with their own shit, and there's nothing significant at all in the fact that I need to deal with mine.

April 05, 2007

Read all about it

I was in our local paper this week. A big article too. Quoting me saying semi-noblet things, and associating me with a woman who's pet mastiff snapped this little terrier's spine in two places, but nonetheless describing me as a defence lawyer. I really like my name in print. And suddenly I have so much work...I'm not flying under my bosses wings as much. It's exhausting and terrifying and fun.

I was at this meeting last night, something i do to compensate for the lack of social life i have up here, i work, go to the gym, read a lot and belong to nerdy clubs. Anyway, i was with my club visiting another club, and there was this old fulla there doing the time keeping, and i honestly looked at him all hunched over and shrivelled, and thought, what, are you like a hundred or something. But I was suitably chastised later in the night when he was presented with a birthday card for his upcoming 92nd birthday! There was a standing ovation, which he met by standing, beady eyes twinkling in his glazed head, little sweater vest hanging off his bony frame, barely reaching up to my knee caps, and he announced:

Aren't you all a little premature? My birthday isn't until Friday. What makes you so sure I'm going to last until then.

I fell in love with him on the spot.