The Dogs

I joined a dating site once because I thought that people were the answer to any sense or boredom or lack of motivation I might have been having at eighteen. I was alone. The men were sad, like dogs, carried away on the howls of other disowned pets. They were lonely or lusty and they had their own bitter stories, women who held their arms open just to let them rust at the hinges and fall apart. The stories were, in fact, the reason I signed up in the first place. But I never had the chance to hear them, their lungs had given way under the pressure of repeated ‘I Love You’s. Or I was eighteen, and only good for one thing. And I did feel bad, at the end. I never had any intention of letting them touch me.

What struck me wasn’t the lecherousness of these men sending out pictures of their shaved genitals to women like me, or even the poor grammar used by these educated adults, it was the complete lack of passion towards the whole idea of intimacy. Even with the shirtless photos exclaiming I Know How To Treat A Woman Right, a winking face implying acts between the sheets (or more likely anywhere, anytime, the back seat of my car is more than equipped), it was all put forward in such a way that just reeked of obligation. Like, this is what you do when you are single at forty-four. This is what you do, right?
But I suppose the others were worse, the ones who might just cry against your back in the early-hours because this might not be love but what if it is and they can’t even feel it? 
It didn’t make me sick, it made me sorry for them. But you can’t fuck someone you feel sorry for, not really, I can’t. There was no searching underneath their hobbies to what they do when they’re completely alone and there was no anticipation of a touch, only repulsion at the thought.

I did meet one guy, his name was Mark, he sent me three phone numbers so it would be convenient at any time to talk to him, whether it was at work or at home or when he was out. I stared down at these numbers, which I had written on the back of my hand in an internet cafe, and I knew there was no way that I could turn him down. Mark was in his late thirties and had a habit of sending two-word txt messages which made him appear sullen in the image I created of him in my mind. He didn’t mention kids or a wife, what he did for fun, if he had fun. I never felt more loved than when I talked to him, so surrounded. I was alone, I lived by myself, but I was completely enveloped in the lives of others, I was one of many turning points for my friends to spin lazily around, and I had these turning points of my own. Mark didn’t seem to have this, or didn’t recognise it so readily. He eventually tired of me, or found someone. I do hope he found someone. Not because he particularly deserved it but because it was obviously something he thought was necessary. I’m not even sure that he wanted a someone but I do think he felt he needed them.

To every Mark I meet now I am kind but not overly. I see the false hope that comes from hearts on coffee-tops or the stealing of a cigarette outside of a bar. And that sense of obligation is still there, I do wonder at what point in my life will that need ever come to me, and if I will not notice its descent until it’s too late to reason with it.

How frightening it must have been to be you, Mark, on this dating site with me. Or even in the western world with me. As a man in his thirties with nobody who might have known your morning routine or what your favourite television show was. But so many women who knew you by your genitals and not by your face. 

The Crawl Inside

The woman behind the desk at the library asking me if I have a partner.
I can’t quite decide if this is a reference to my age and no longer feeling comfortable referring to my significant other as my boyfriend/girlfriend or if she suspected I like women and didn’t want to offend me by assuming one way or the other.
No, no, I probably just got old. 
When I smile now I get these thin half-moons under each eye like brackets to my happiness (I’m growing up but it’s getting better, maybe).

There’s a contrast here. Here in this hospital ward where I sit next to my father. The chemotherapy is making him retain at least four kilograms of water and his face spreads so much that he has no wrinkles at all. His hands are like my hands, except mine are ugly, his are just sad and worrisome. Or that’s what they say to me through his muted sign language.

My Step-Mother has taken it upon herself to completely absorb the role of being the matron to my father’s sickness, which in turn makes me sick. If there is a part of the nurse in this revolting production, I think I would fit it much better than her. This is not a competition, but I love him more than you. You could just as easily, in time, find another love. I think it would be much more difficult to find another father.

I think the worst part of this is that as proud of me as he is, he may never have a palpable reason to be so. I might never pay him back. He is the best of his ten siblings and they remain well and bitter and money-hungry. If there is anything in life itself that will not make any sense it is the means through which said life will end.  

In unison, or hand-in-hand, I feel so foolish every time my face falls at the thought of this, or when I allow other people to offer their condolences, and I take them like sour berries that stain my throat and smile. Because your parents, you are born to watch them stretch and crease and fail, and I am not the first to be handed a death sentence from the same hands that aided my own steady growth. You are branded with the promise of loss before you have taken a first breath or recognised the faces you will in time be without.

But he deserves grandchildren, the kind that I can never have.

An Expression You Once Used

Having lunch with my family, who are growing up and also growing old. At times I catch glimpses of my father and there’s a likeness to the man I recognise, but mindless errors, faults that are breeding with age. Dad, I wanted to say, you need to trim your eyebrows. Dad, you have a coldsore, you shouldn’t be so stressed, eat more B vitamins. Dad, where did your comforting middle-age go? 
It terrifies me, he is closer to death now more than ever. That’s obvious, I realise, but I have not paid attention, my extreme youth too frightening for me, too consumed to notice it draining from his face.
My older brother turning thirty and my youngest brother only five, with a dragon painted on his left cheek. Making jokes about gluten. I’ll Have Her Gluten, the thirty-year-old says, the little ones laugh too because there’s this sweet and delicate period of time where things can still be joyous even when you don’t understand them.
I feel like a pickpocket, stealing their conversation away from them. I don’t deserve this much. My words fall flat. I desperately want my face painted too.

Before, though, I was leaving somebody’s place at nine am and meeting my mother and my blood tests have come back and I am:
Extremely Healthy.
We laugh and smoke with our fruit and vegetables in the backseat, redeeming everything.

And after that I was in tears because it’s the twenty-sixth of February and I ask my flatmate for filters, placing the extra firm nectarines he loves, that I bought for him, on his set of drawers. The slightly marbled wood reflects my face, all of my fragile skin, aching eyes, waterlogged or shipwrecked. And he asks Are You Ok? And I say Yeah and also I have a red capsicum, because he is strange with preferences I don’t understand. I leave quickly and I hear him come into my room, he doesn’t say anything. 
He just hugs me for minutes and I cry and cry and cry. Because it’s Today and I have an infection in my tears ducts I need to cry out, right? All he does is let me, and stands shirtless, I feel illustrated. He hands me a cigarette and opens my window, staring at me like he has just realised who he’s been living with or talking to. 
And after that I leave to go to lunch.
You see?