CHCH ONE

Christchurch is not as bleak as I imagined it might be, as others led me to believe it was. The earthquake happened two years ago but there’s still this mild feeling of alarmed gratitude. My sister’s boyfriend points out a building that should have been shaking for its spindly, scarred limbs. Like bare knees, like a newborn, like something that will eventually fall.
‘That’s quintessential,’ he says.  
If you lived here you might not notice it.
I never liked anywhere too flat, with no spaces to hide. It feels like there is nowhere to go, that the earth might indeed be flat and you would just fall off one side. The lady next to me on the plane talks only of her ailing mother in a hospice somewhere, her husband wearing dress jeans, everyone has their own ills. I stare out the window and think of my own, think of what I would say if anyone asked me. Nobody will ask, on steroids my face has lost its contours. Certainly in profile my emotions look unchanged no matter my mood. I mean, nobody could tell if I was ever upset. 

I don’t know how old my sister’s flatmate is but I am to sleep in her single bed, in this room without personality. I don’t have sex here on purpose or with a reason I can think of, something I could justify. It just happens and I watch The Avengers with his head in my lap, running my fingers through this familiar crop of hair, I am happy here. I could stay here for a long time, just like this. But he has to leave and I have to grow older and think about the scar that will be left if they have to cut my thyroid out, and then I have to make plans if I am to have a future at all. 

(The mark would be a gash across my throat, to cut my words in half, to force my acknowledgement of the world outside my pathetic bouts of depression.)

((And this sickness is much more frightening than the realisation I spent eighteen months inside my house and how I was, in fact, the very definition of wasted youth and it was not dramatic or attractive, it was just very embarrassing. And how did I emerge with these ugly laugh lines beneath my bleached irises when I did not laugh?))

In Wellington I can kneel before myself. You did it, you cut everybody out. You set a goal and you accomplished it. I may grow my nails next, long enough to pull my bones out so that I may actually command the presence of a room with what I am: Utterly spineless. 

I Loved You Once

There is no guilt left for my guilty pleasures. I just do these things now, I don’t have the effort left to feel bad about them.

Never-have-I-ever had as big of a nostalgia trip.

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You Again

New Year’s Day I woke up in Newtown next to a guy I didn’t recognise playing with my breasts. And I said The Girl You Met Last Night Probably Wasn’t Me. Except it would have been, if you were brunette with a prettier, smaller face. I didn’t say that, though. I may be utterly disgusting but I’m not completely cruel. 
Home was a third-person conversation with myself, my entire body sighing. Good One ____. You show yourself who’s boss. I’ll feel sick if I want to, I’m twenty-one, go fuck yourself. 
I am disconnected at best. I look at my own hands and exclaim WHO ARE YOU? And they scream back WE ARE OLDER THAN YOU ARE YOU FILTHY LITTLE GIRL.

And then just recently I was at a party and I called some guy out on his intentions as he left with another girl and he followed me, me, back out onto the street. We watched the sunrise while I wished I could eat my words instead of spilling them all out like cloudy smoke rings. We ate fruit together in a park and a week later when he left my place I felt sorry for him, because he’d been duped, as everyone is. I know these people they think I am truly amazing when they first meet me. I have been feeling the need lately to just get it over with, pull my skin off and show them my functioning insides that look just like theirs. 

I envy people who can say with conviction I Am A Writer and then go on to flaunt their pieces and their prose and their poetry. I Am A Waitress. I Would Like To Be A Writer Someday. (Except it isn’t going to happen and I don’t know what else to do anymore).

New Year’s Day I woke up and didn’t know where I was. But I was still wearing my tights and underwear and this is maybe one of my proudest moments. 

And isn’t that sad. 

This Business Is Not Yours

8-July-2012

My flatmate and I have been sleeping together for seven months. It’s not love but it’s deeply convenient.

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Indistinct & Rolling My Eyes

This humidity is killing me. Everything feels frayed, waiting for the weather to break. If there were thunderstorms tonight, I’d stay here, listen quiet with the windows open. As it is, the sky is merely bleeding, so I go to meet you in the park, where we can get drunk and feel static, and you can lie on top of me in the grass and pretend that only the seasons keep on changing.

My job is child’s play, really, I am certainly treated much like a child. I burn the tips of my fingers on your ignorance, your rudeness. I do not have the terminology needed to describe the anger I feel splitting my ribs apart , I am lost for words. 

As a side note, and to myself: You need to stop sleeping with people you work with. And I am glad that you are leaving. Toughnight, I call myself. The more I think about it, the more I feel it suits me, less than the dresses I wear, more like the black jeans I frequent on my finally thinning form. Evenings are the hours with the most edges. On my days off, I don’t know what to do with myself, drinking cider with my knees up to my face, I am twenty-one and uneducated. I am twenty-one, it is two am and I have the sad composure of someone with nothing left to say. My counterfeit smiles are drained, the evenings alone are depraved, I got the social quota I owe no one out of the way. 

If You & I Were To Sleep With Each Other Again

If you and I were to sleep with each other again,
We would make love, furtively, earnestly and honestly.
We would take small sips at each other’s lips and feel out the new and changed parts on each other’s desperate bodies.

I am capable of loving you so much more than I love myself.

Sleep would settle unhurried and as an afterthought, a victory not worth mentioning, my arm flung across your neat hips, my lips grazing your shoulder.
In the morning you would prowl across my naked neck, we would nest in a humble acceptance of things done with ease. We would be frank and honest with our forms.

But I can picture quite clearly you getting up, eventually, subdued and strained, I can picture quite clearly you leaving.
Pulling rags over the links I love , the stretches of skin that tranquilize me. 
Just rags. You are wearing filth that hides the brilliance beneath it.  
In my mind, as it bled, I would beg you quietly to stay forever. To tread with slippered feet through my need and to match it with your own. I would say little, of course, I would not mention what we had done as the act itself began to settle into a melancholic thought, a sad and vivid memory that I could recollect at times when there was nothing else wrong with the world. 

I love everything you hide. I love the lazy way you look at me when you are sick. I love your weary smile, mocking me as I talk with my hands.
I love the elegance of your body, the free-fall of your limbs. 

I can still feel, quite plainly and achingly, the resilient skin of your waist, your lips as they sunk into mine.

I can still feel you pulling away from me.
All of this, all of you hurts so magnificently   

Little Things, Little Girls, Little Boys

I can’t feel a settling anymore.

My little brothers, when they were fresh and laughable, would open and close their tiny fists in bewilderment. I have been mimicking them, a stick-figure drawn with uneven limbs and arms straight out and away. Grasping and holding. My fingers fall upon neat hips and rows of tidy ribs, and I think this is where I might find happiness. Lying on my back, again, the ceiling never does change, my lovers always have the same traits, with a maturity that swaggers sometimes with arrogance but bodies that remind me of being teenage.
Three minutes in, I close my eyes and leave. See, I am happy, mostly, but I have small self-destructive parts that tear open and bleed, for days or months at a time this grenadine stain touches everything and this is when I seek some kind of connection with somebody, anybody else. Then it gathers back inside, iron filings that stick to my spine. 
A sediment that blooms in bruises, where I clip my body against everything and everyone, bussing tables, my smile aching. 
And I love my job, I hate my job, I love my situation, I abhor my lack of direction, I am indifferent to my lover’s other lovers, I want to hurt all of them.  

What do you do, at twenty-one? What is it that you are expected to be doing? What should I be finding enjoyment in? At the supermarket, looking at all the flowers and knowing I can buy them because I am a functioning member of society, I am happy. But it’s mostly just the flowers, not the notion that I have money, not the fact that I’ve just left work after nine hours, the last day of my ten day week. 

Sitting at home with a bunch of carnations in an old glass coffee jug, the fan on full-blast while the sun bleats down on all the babes outside. Three minutes in, I close my eyes and leave because all of these simple things in actuality mean very little to me.

Small Things I Said With You In Mind (They Make No Sense At All)

The things I would like to do are huge. They are beasts.

You and I have stopped catching the eyes of other people, I am twisting your hair into tight little spirals instead. But the things we share are awful. Your sheets are filthy, the 3am half-dressed relationship we have is without kisses and I leave later to sleep alone, because it’s better or easier that way. 
If you were to measure my waist you’d say I am full of you and I can see the whole of me only in one of your forearms. All bones and muted skin, you are, I couldn’t even connect the freckles to create a semblance of my initials. 
We don’t get sick because we don’t leave the house. 
What does all of this remind me of.

(Don’t talk about it, though. Don’t name names. Don’t expose how exhausted your pride is.)

4:40am I watch the numbers on my alarm clock roll over. 4:46am is when I look next, I get up because sleep isn’t coming. Neither is he. He turned my face halfway through and asked if I was O.K because there was silence instead of bruised sighs and undulating moans like there are satin fingers pressing at the inside of your throat, and I said something hurt and he was concerned. And he apologised. 
And he lay flat on top of me with his cheek against my chest and everything smelled of him.
And it is terrible but also wonderful that I was lost in the thought of what she would say if she knew. 

And so I didn’t know how to tie a tie and I still don’t. For all the internet tutorials available, my harmless fingers are about as useful as thumb-tacks. When I press them to the walls after a late night, when I’m at home, I feel less than connected to anything, though. And the walls, they stay smooth and ambivalent to whatever I say out-loud.

I didn’t go with you to buy jeans because I loved your face and hair, then. 
Washed my sheets on a Tuesday, even my duvet, the weather just blinked at me. Sunny, bleak, startling, bland. Running my fingers across the odd hexagonal pattern of my mattress, while the machine spun out the smell of you. Knitting my limbs together. God I wish you were here.

If a pretty face could get you anywhere I would aim for the space between your sheets when the light outsight tells whatever time but your body against the cotton tells you this: You have all the time in the world to just enjoy yourself. All the time in the world. As if every watch on every wrist, with every person’s minutes to spare collects and gathers. And you are naked in a bed with your skin singing and a blind person’s smile, just like everybody else’s.

But you would be there with me, of course. How is time spent at all if not with you. 

All Of My Little Black Books II

 Sunday 11/December/2011 10:22pm

Getting laid is good. Even the term. Got laid. I was parallel to the ceiling and they were soft and strong. 
And my life lay down with me and to my eyes it straightened like my spine did. 

I am only ever 100% myself, with someone else, with my limbs stretched out or lilting to the touch of whoever it is that owns me for the evening. It’s just so heartbreaking when the morning demands attention and all my revelations are lost as we stand up. 

As humans we get shorter during the day. That’s what it is. To go from travelling the length of your body to being harboured within my own. And to feel myself shrinking. 

I am inside myself again, I hope you wish you were here with me. 

Down At Heel

My internet was down and I did bite all of my fingernails off in total angst because I can’t function the way I did once, when I was young and on the phone to my best-friends, face down on my bed-spread. 

I’m back now so what of it.

This weekend just been I broke a rule, or value, I suppose, I had kept underlined to the left of my already-slightly-to-the-left heart. I brought this young person home with me to marvel at my book collection. 
‘Oh I just started reading Anna Karenina.’ He said.
I don’t care, fuck me.
Which is my own way of paying homage to the person I thought I would never be: Bravo, slut, how many drinks did it take? 
But really it was nothing like this and maybe I should take a moment to inhale, listen to the birds and stop being so hard on myself. Except a bird shat on me the other day as I was walking home so I have no time for these things. And I might just remain sturdy in the face of self-love and acceptance.
What the fuck is that anyway? There isn’t really a clean-cut definition for self-love. Even if there was I’m not the type to print it out and tack it to my ceiling above my bed like: Huh, today is going to be a good day because I love myself every morning and only the light of day illuminates this for me. 
Oh look, self-reflection, and we’re back.
He was Irish and I knew not the kind to brag about his conquests, though, later he explained he actually had none so I guess we were kind-of on the same page.   Going out for breakfast the next day with his friend and my friend, who were new friends since the night before and we were crass and dirty, eating with our hands. Later we were leaving and he told me I should take his number and also hug him, so I did both, because he wants to see me again. Which is just so fucking typical. Again, I give myself so much flack for these off-kilter decisions but they all seem to work out in the most pride-keeping way possible. 

Like, fuck. 

I do wonder who and how all of you are, at times. I never seem to hear from most of you and I wouldn’t blame you if you just ignore my posts etc but if you don’t, I get this urge to know how you take your tea and what colour your pillow cases are. If you find it hard to put duvet covers back on duvets. If you were waiting for a change on a particular day but that day came and went like a selfish lover and you’ve been hanging your head ever since. 

I don’t know. It’s almost 1am, again, and the flowers next to my bed are dying just like my own plans for this year. 2012 is maybe just something I’ll remember for its many bottles of water and trips to the organic store, noting that my hands are orange from henna outside of a cafe while I try my best to think of where to go next. Where to go next.

Where do happy people go when they have only recently become happy and lost any motivation for the career they thought they would have? 
Where is my dilapidated house I could do up and crack the walls to let the light in? Where is my broken woman to love and let know she is perfect, if only to me, she is perfect.
Where are the stitches from where the tragedy that played inside was ripped out and sewn back up? Replaced with a frightening possibility?

My life now feels like a lucky dip at a fair. Closing my eyes and sticking my hand in, all the options feeling the same but one that might just scream fulfillment at me. 

TN