Foresight

GET OUT OF bed hollow eyes, turn your corners up not down. Please don’t be sad, the day is nice. We could go out to the park, around the lake or into town …no …you just don’t feel up to it today?

Uh-oh. I see the mania in your eyes. You’re excited, gushing, telling those weird pointless little lies. There’s chocolate topping to put on our dessert, you say, following a dinner dished in empty pots and pans.

Today your eyes are hard, on a mission. A focus of steel, like the kitchen knife in your hand running down the hallway like a mad woman, chasing, screaming, afraid I’ve fallen into enemy hands.

Now your eyes are institutionalised. Quiet. Pleading in some lilted, half-slung watery way: let me come home; tell them that I seem okay. I peer around at the other eyes lurking in this place to comfort myself that yours are not as bad as theirs.

Both our eyes say tentative today. We are happy to be home, reuniting on the doorstep after our separate “holidays”. Let’s hurry up and get back to the way things were before, and before next time and the time after that.

Down on the farm

SOAPED UP HORSE sweat running races around the puffing blue roan gelding, sides exhausting, head hanging low. Sticky leather traces with rugged brass buckles, prior sheen now dull. A field ploughed manually, aggressively, on another parched typical Hawke’s Bay day.

Age-veined vinyl upholstery in the nearby car is much like the driver of both vehicle and hoe: red, hard, crackled, weathered. The same Austin 1100 my wonderful big bro boasts of getting to 80 miles per hour in a straight line. The back seat is itchy and clammy, like me, as I’m laid down, under garments quickly removed. What’s happening? What is he doing? To me? What should I do? Where should I put myself? Where on earth... can I be?

“I’m a baby”, I finally hear myself blurt out in a weird sing-song voice. “Goo-goo, gah-gah.” Even though we both know I’m nearly six-and-a-half. But why else would he be fiddling. Down there? All fingers and tongue. The licking especially… shhrriiink and cringe. Dum-dee-dum. Nothing to see here, goo-goo, gah-gah. I suck my most familiar friend, Thumb.

“Don’t tell your mum. This is our special secret. She wouldn’t understand”. Words her boyfriend would whisper numerous times in different apparently opportune moments and locations from this point in.

Navigatory devices

DEAR CRUNDLESTEIN,

THIS TIME IT is I passing time in an airport, Christchurch, awaiting my flight home on a Friday night. It is, in a word and without sinking to profanity, COLD. I’ve been here for the day, supposedly toiling. Translated: on a paid holiday from the kid! You know, of course, I love him most dearly but nevertheless my ‘adult’ days are glorious treats.

Things are not great here. In the Garden City I mean. The energy around a stalwart client of mine feels pretty bloody bleak. Not towards me specifically, and I have work now for the next two months all things going well, but new management appear to have ruckled things up rather and all my friends here are exuding undeniable misery in morale.

For over eight years I’ve been happily pottering along doing what I do for work, and producing some pretty great stuff. But I kinda intuitively get the impression now, from all these recent and repeated road blocks, that it just might be time to change tack, alter course. Which is fine… change has never unduly frightened me (stagnation does, in truth), except right at this moment it’s the “to what” question that has me drawing mysterious blanks. So tonight, on the aeroplane now, velocity swifting me home (Claude would be jealous), I’m putting out there into the ether, without being TOO shouty: “OKAY, OKAY, I GET IT. NOW SHOW ME THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD!!!”

I shall keep you posted as inspiration hopefully unfurls.

Thank you for your recent letter. I am very much enjoying our correspondence too. Your words are living breathing creatures exhaling colour from observing nostrils, artful rainbows across my sky. While I publish my own letters, know that when I write them, I do so just for you.

If knowing the background re writing to my mother found you in relief, then perhaps my words too might be working if you experienced some of my grief, i.e. I guess that is the point, that others can feel with gooses upon their elbows what I have felt. I have questioned whether I should be publishing that stuff, some of it falls quite blatantly over the crest into icky. It serves a number of creative and therapeutic purposes and I’ve decided squarely that reactions to my creativity are not my responsibility. And what others choose to do with their own truths is entirely up to them. Nature, however, dictates that at the end of winter comes spring.

Upon your soon return, and after getting the mutual licks with those you love out of the way, I’m sure we can come up with some new way of writerly exchanging things.

Love,
Me xx

Discomfort

I was an accident, but a nice one. You've always told me that. Brother Jeff says I’m your favourite; the apple of your eye. But the truth is I’m not much of a daughter to you, am I Mum?

--YOU ARE EVERYTHING I WAS NEVER ABLE TO BE.

Why didn't you baptise me like my other siblings. Daddy said no, I know, but why? Why stop short for number five? Why didn't you push the issue? Doesn't the bible say only his flock will be saved?

--IT DIDN’T MATTER IN THE END, DID IT? YOU HAVE SAVED YOURSELF.

Why weren't you the supportive mother? You could have encouraged me to do activities, to make friends, to play sport, to better myself doing whatever. Instead you left me to do everything of my own volition.

--BECAUSE YOU WERE MORE THAN CAPABLE OF DOING IT ON YOUR OWN, DEAR.

“Never mind” was the best I could get out of you whenever something unfortunate happened to me. Whereas you were like some inconsequential vague nothingness that took to her bed for days and weeks in despair for no apparent reason. I was lost with it.

--AS WAS I. AND YOU COPIED ME FOR A TIME, BUT YOU CONQUERED THAT TOO MY ANGEL.

Why can’t you wake up, woman up and fulfil the destiny befitting for the hugely intelligent person I know hides under all your trivial talk about what the neighbours are doing, mauve things, the City Council and what’s on TV?

--I’M SCARED DARLING. IT’S LATE; THERE SEEMS LITTLE POINT. I HAVE PLANS FOR ANOTHER LIFETIME

Why, when you’re going through troubles now that I’m an adult, can I only seem to cry for me and not for you? You never hit me or treated me badly. You are kind and generous and loving. Why can’t I feel like most people feel about their parents?

--IT IS WHAT IT IS. IT IS AS MUCH MY JOURNEY AS IT IS YOURS. I'M PROUD OF YOU AND I LOVE YOU. AND YOU LOVE YOUR BOY.

Radio static

IT IS CONSIDERED rude of course to deliver lines to others such as "You're boring", "You're so f***en shallow", "How insecure are you?" and other shit like that. Because, I mean, who the hell am I?

Everyone, in my humble opinion, is most welcome to regale themselves with endless stories of past conquests, drunken escapades and other monologues from their glory days; times now past, but when perhaps life appeared more straightforward and less prone to feeling lost. To fill perfectly adequate silences with non-stop eager recommendations on where to buy the perfect child-sized merinos, Enjos and other must-have trivial crap. The weather perhaps? Go ahead. Knock yourself out. Complain, if you want, about something somebody else did, how much you hate your physical body, your job, the people you hang with, where you're at, yourself. Go on, don't hold back. While you're about it, why not get really self-righteous about something. There are plenty of causes to get opinionated about, just pick one and go at it all hard out - the state of the nation, the f**ked up choices people make as part of their democratic right. Whatever it is - you're RIGHT, right? And the opposers are just dumb deluded uninformed c**ts - isn't that how it generally goes? Hammer it home, fill up everyone's social media feed. There's a dude down Invercargill way ain't heard ya yet.

It's where we're all at at some point, usually repeatedly. While also being kinda dull and small-minded, at least I find it so. This is, of course, a note to self as much as anything, as I continue to be drawn towards lighter, clearer frequencies of more interesting things and the places and people where I want to spend time and go.

Said Ms Holier Than Thou.

xx

We can rebuild her

THAT GIRL IN THE right-hand column there, I vaguely remember her. Upon peering at my own reflective murk these days I actually catch myself gasping momentarily, wondering whether it's the mirror that needs a bloody good clean or my eyes some form of greater assisted sight. It is neither.

It's a strange thing giving yourself over to somebody else to survive from, to take from you whatever they need to be nurtured, physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, time, all of the above. And it's awesome and wonderful and like nothing else I've ever experienced and tiring and easy to forget yourself and the sparkly conversations you used to have. I was shallower then.

I think some form of normal transmission is resuming however, physically I mean. I've been catching glimpses of my ankles this week and there's hope. Dare I say it, but I'm sure down there be seen some resemblance of tapering and shape. Now, if I could just get about a year's worth of sleep back, I reckon it would do wonders for my face.

In the meantime I've begun showing love to my feet, which I've always pretty much detested until now. I've decided it's mega important to love your body and all it's parts. It seems that I've just moved it up to the ankles. Well done me. Wish me luck on my journey further northward, won't you.

Naturally, convention has gone out the window. Again. I don't mean for things to happen this way, it's not a goal to be the one who is 'one of these things is not like others' or anything. It's just the way things pan out, but I've come to that place of peace where I actually like it. It's pretty fantastic being me.

Duly, with age and the slopping face comes what many likely perceive as madness, but I am thriving on it. Inhale and invite more. Living by intuition is true freedom. I wish more people understood how immeasurably grateful I am every single day not to be so much constrained by BS stressful, socially acceptable, stick it up your a-hole, rational thought. Einstein says it's the way to go, and he was one really onto-it dude, no argument.

An exceedingly clever chap. I agree with him, so he must be right.

So, I just figured I'd write something here to see how it felt. Now signing off, tipping my hat and into my bed I melt. Sayonara for now.