short thing #13

such a standard ‘love yourself’ musing

I have seen all the ‘be brave girl’ blogs and memes and status updates and tweets I care to see. I get it. I appreciate the sentiments and hope that they do truly touch those souls that need to be touched. They have helped me in times, for sure...

Often they are about one’s connectedness, one’s awareness, one’s grief, one’s children, one’s special needs children, one’s desire for love, for reciprocated passion, for intelligent conversation, for sisters (biological and universal), for natural therapies, for natural parenting, for natural living, for nature, for love, for souls, for body image, for women.

For self acceptance.

I’ve read these musings.

I’ve said I’ve taken their lessons on board.

It’s all kinda bullshit.

Because in some ways, we can’t learn awareness. We can’t learn to be self-accepting. We can’t learn to love. We can’t learn to be natural and nurturing and soulful.

We can’t think through these things.

Instead, we have to be these things. And not in some future I’m going to be more self-accepting new year’s resolution type sense. ‘Just now’ works just fine.

I haven’t, in all honestly, ever struggled with my weight or my body. I’ve struggled with accepting my weight and my body for what they are...

In my adult life, I’ve never been more or less than 10 kilograms above or below my ideal body weight. It’s really not that much for someone at my height. But I’ve never accepted it when I was either. When I was less I wanted to be even less. When I was more, I wanted to be less again.

I could never accept that shoestring straps were not designed for boobs of this size.  That fashion, although not something I ever, really cared about but being able to wear it if I wanted to was.

And now at 34 I see peers wanting the bodies of 20 year olds. I wonder if in craving the body they ‘possessed’ in their 20s they’d like to go back to the brains they possessed then, too. Would they like that level of knowledge? That level of experience? That level of understanding or awareness about the world?

You couldn’t pay me to go back to some of that stuff.

I think my body at 28, whilst breastfeeding, was the best body I ever had but hello, it is still my body. It’s not like I’ve got a different body now. Like I swapped it for this one. It’s the one I was born with. It’s the one I’m going to die with. It might have changed its shape. It might have different dimensions. Capabilities. Strenghts and weaknesses. But so does my brain.

So does my soul.

So yes, I’m sure I look like a mumsy now. I know I’m not as sexy as once I was. I no longer wake up next to hunky men whose bodies were to die for. Now I wake up with random stuffed toys and a little man who can sneak in in the night without my knowing, bringing a collection of sand with him.

Yes, now I prefer comfy undies. Jeans that hold the Caesarean lower tummy in. Leggings under skirts so I don’t get sore in between thigh skin. Sensible bras.

And I still get pimples. Bad hair. And I have had an incredible reversion to the grunge punk rock boots that I lived in in my teens. But I have no desire to go back to ‘that’ body. Certainly not back to that brain.

So yes, I have fat days. Yes I have skinny days. Yes I have days were I wish I had no boobs and I could go to the shops in a swishy dress without straps. Yes I get jealous of the spunky chicks in their bikinis I see at the beach all the time.

But this is what I’ve got.

And just now is all we’ve all got.

(c) Samantha Florence, 2012

short thing #12

the desert is cold at night

She had written him a letter. Long ago. She’d sent it, too. And he’d sent one back. But now she’s waiting for the cursor to reply.

Blink.

Blink.

Blink.

He knew her words. And her his. They’d been talking for years. For hours and hours and hours. Years and years.

Blinking for years.

She wanted more than that. Now.

Once upon time they’d met and loved each other. In the physical sense. They’d known each other, so well, since then though. Known each other’s pains and tribulations. Partners. Exes. Lives. Details. And nothings, sometimes. Sometimes nothing. They had always talked. They’d had months off, too.

They lived so far away.

So blinking and talking and texting and emailing and chatting was all they had. All they’d had for years.

Except once. She had seen him. But he was busy.

He replies in riddles. Then words of love. Then current affairs and rubbish. She hates clichés. Everyone has read them before. Everyone know how the story is going to end. Every single time.

Pains and tribulations.

She misses him.

When they first met they were only there for the fun. They argued, good naturedly, even. There was no true love. Not for years. Maybe not even now. But she compares everyone else to him.

She doesn’t really know what he thinks. Most women don’t really know what men think. Really. But maybe it’s just her. Maybe she doesn’t really know what anyone else really thinks.

It sounds so paranoid when she writes that down.

He tells her ‘one day’.

She’s ok with that. She’s been ok with that forever. She certainly doesn’t need him. She gets on with her life just fine. Likes her life, too.

Most people don’t seem to admit that. Not in her country, at least. Liking your life is like being a bit of a tall poppy.

People don’t believe you.

Especially when they can see, from the outside, that you’re so obviously lacking.

When they were young and free, they loved just so. They came together in another place and they built a few memories there. Very few. But golden.

She remembers one afternoon, in a handful, when they were lying in the sunshine and he had his hand on her lower back. It wasn’t a sexual move, they were, in fact, fatigued from a morning of this, but they were comfortable and calm. There were no pretences then. There were no reasons to pretend, either way. They were chatting and sunning and friends. Maybe.

But his long hand was holding the small of her back as he held her tight to him. Her head on his chest as they laughed. His fingers just poking into the top of her jeans. Onto her arse. Into her arse crack. Just.

And she loved that.

Once he wrote her a letter that she read and read and read until it was worn out. Not so much the paper, but the words.

She read them until they meant nothing. And everything.

She wore them out.

They had once climbed a hill. It was paved in old stones and gold.

When they got to the top they kissed. But they didn’t have any money to go inside the Castle. They looked at the outside and dreamed about what lay within.

Then they got drunk. And returned to bed.

And kissed some more.

He would write to her every few weeks and then every day. And then not again for ages. They were not in each other’s pockets or back yards. They didn’t know each other’s day to day. But maybe, they knew each other’s soul.

If you believe in that sort of thing.

But most of their memories had been made with words. From great fucking distances. Great. Fucking.

She had screamed at him once and his silence hurt her more than any of the words they’d ever spoken or written or understood. His lack of reply. They had only truly had this one dispute, in all of those years, but it was real. Because the words they said were designed to hurt the other. She thought again, about not knowing what other people think. And realised she wasn’t sure. But her words had definitely been designed to hurt him.

Eventually he forgave her. And they came back together. But something had changed. The daydream had been tainted. And there was something more honest and real in it after that.

Something small and unbreakable.

Once you know the conventions of a way of writing, you can use and manipulate them to your advantage. But most often to the advantage of keeping your audience satisfied. She was dissatisfied with his conventions.

She was dissatisfied with his distance.

She was dissatisfied with every other man she had ever met since him. Yet she wasn’t sure if they were being compared to him in reality or to the memories of him.

Golden or otherwise.

The first time he’d seen her naked it was brightly lit. They had not been alone and the lights had been on. It had been the most exposed she’d ever felt.

It was also the most fun she had ever been.

She wrote a story today.

Once though, in total darkness, she remembers the strength in his hands. The way he would move her hips to a spot where it was perfection for them both.

His mouth on the inside of her. His tongue along the skin on her stomach. His teeth into too much flesh on the space between her shoulder and her neck. His arms long and twisted and strong around her.

At night, she remembers his golden warmth.

The times that had been real. And the times that had become so. The line between those had blurred so much she couldn’t quite remember what he looked like. What he tasted like. How he smelled. How he felt inside her.

She couldn’t quite remember if he had been an idea. Someone she had conjured once to get her through the cold desert.

She remembers not what happened. But how he felt.

Blink.

© Samantha Florence

short thing #11

Non-fiction -

Awake. I saw his back first, wondering who he was.

(c) Samantha Florence, 2012.

Short Thing #10

five dollars for breakfast

He remembers why he started drinking. On occasion. It was fun. It was what you did. It was what everyone did. So he did.

And then he didn’t stop.

He didn’t actually get kicked out of his house. She never actually told him to leave. The bottle of whiskey wasn’t even the problem at the time. It was the events after the bottle of whiskey was finished that had something to do with it. And although he blamed her, for years, until now, when the occasions occur that he remembers why he started drinking, he also remembers that it wasn’t really her fault.

I was fifteen years old when I first saw someone that was actually homeless. I was in the city with my new boyfriend and we were walking around town to visit all the independent record shops. We couldn’t afford to actually buy any new cd’s in the independent record shops although I did buy a poster of the Red Hot Chili Peppers for my bedroom wall. It was on special for eight dollars in an alley way store. We thought we were pretty cool back then, trawling the cobbled streets in our Doc Marten’s. Walking in and out of the only places to be seen if you were a grunge/punk/rock/metal teenager at the time. We thought we were pretty cool.

A few streets over a woman walked out of one of the exits of our city’s famous department store. She walked straight up to a man sleeping in filth in an enclosed doorway on the building next door. She put a rolled up ten dollar note into his sleeping hand. The other hand held a brown paper bag with an unidentified empty bottle inside it.

I’m still trying to figure out the story.

She knew the man. She’d seen him when she went to work every morning and was his guardian angel. She was his long lost daughter. She knew who he was but he was always too drunk or crazy to recognise her anymore. She was rich and ten dollars to a homeless man was nothing to her. She was poor and ten dollars to a homeless man was kind and she could wait to eat dinner rather than eat any lunch.

She walked briskly away.

His life wasn’t really a choice. It was a result of a series of choices. A series of events that turned into his way of life. He never assumed when he walked out that night that he’d never walked back in again. He never assumed anything else would happen other than going to get another bottle of whiskey and drinking that until it was finished.

And so he did.

On the occasions when he remembers, he replays some of the events. But mostly he lives his day to day. That’s all one has ultimately, the inevitable ‘right now’.

When I was at university a girl came up to my group of friends. She couldn’t have been much older than us. But her skin was grey. Her eyes didn’t really open. Her clothes were dirty and her fingernails were cracked. She’d asked us for some change for the train. We said no. We’d just stockpiled all of our change to buy the bowls of chips in front of us. She went to the next table. The couple said no. And then the next. The teen agers said no. And then to the guy walking past talking on his mobile phone. He didn’t even look at her.

On the night he’d walked out, she had been screaming at him. Or maybe it just sounded like screaming after the whiskey was finished with. Or maybe the baby girl had been screaming. But he had tried to shut the screaming up. Had tried to make the noise go away.

Now he remembers. It had been the baby girl.

He’d tried to stop the baby from screaming and then it had been his wife that was screaming. She was screaming and clawing and pounding at the back of him.

So he had turned around and screamed back at her. He had been ferocious, he remembers that, although he doesn’t remember what he said. Or what she said. He does remember roaring. Roaring back at her.

Once I went to Thailand and this was my first overseas trip. The first of many. We spent some time in Chiang Mai. Famous for night markets and tailors, we consumed all that it had to offer and got some suits made. On our last night in town, we were watching a street performer and his magic tricks and I nudged my husband in the side. The eight or ten year old boy who’d been begging outside our hotel was standing up perfectly fine, enjoying the entertainment. Laughing. He’d been pretending the whole time that he didn’t have any legs. I looked at him and upon recognising me, he returned to his broken skateboard and the rags over his legs. He returned to his paper cup.

The few days after the screaming are a bit of a blur now. That is to be expected after so many years. Memories are blurry for most people. He does remember sleeping in his clothes though. Maybe after being kicked out of a bar.

He also remembers sleeping in the park one night. It was summer and it was warm. It had been like camping and there wasn’t anyone screaming in the park. Only the muttering of a few crazy homeless guys.

In London, on my way to work one day, long after my divorce, a woman walked through the carriage of the Tube. She was dressed in such a cliché gypsy outfit, I had to look for a few more seconds than etiquette determines polite to ensure that she truly was begging and not a performer. The dirt on her skin, and on the skin of her small child, were the give away signs. And then she stood at the end of the carriage and sang a song in a language I couldn’t quite place. I could tell that the song was sad though.

After a while the park became the best choice. He couldn’t go home now. And he didn’t really want to. Work was something he had done for a while but then he didn’t really want to do that either. Clothes and food and whiskey lasted while his money did. And then he found other ways of getting food.

People threw so much away.

When I was in Ireland for St Patrick’s Day my best friend and I got so drunk for so many hours in a row that our joint memories are ones we had to figure out in discussions after the event. So many things happened in a twenty-four hour period that we really had to put the puzzle back together. One thing that always makes us laugh when we reminisce about that night is she sitting in a doorway of a closed shop, vomiting into the street while I held her hair back. Two shops up the hill from us, another guy was tending to his friend who was vomiting in a very similar fashion. The guy and I exchanged “what are you gonna do? They're our best mates” kind of looks and before we knew it, our vomity friends were flirting with each other. Us responsible ones, got the vomity ones out of there straight away. To enjoy more drinking and debauchery.

After time had past and he could no longer afford whiskey he took to drinking whatever he could scrape some change together to buy. People were more generous in the city but he found that if he slept most of the day and only asked for money in peak hour he was more likely to get enough to buy something worthwhile. Otherwise, asking for money during the day meant that he would also get too hungry. And he didn’t want to have to waste money on buying food. Sometimes he even had enough to get some of the spirits they sell at the supermarket. The essences people used for cooking. They hurt his throat but they were cheap.

My son and I had to cross a busy intersection on our first night in Medan. I didn’t really like Sumatra because I’d felt lost from the moment we landed. It hadn’t felt safe and the guys with the guns didn’t help much.

My three year old was holding my hand as we walked past a woman sitting in the middle of the intersection with her hand out to passing motorists. Wrapped up against her breast was an infant, sleeping.

He’d made some friends over the years. Some that had moved on or gotten ‘help’. Some that had been so crazy that someone had taken them away. Some that had a home to go back to and medication to fix things. Some didn’t make it through winter. Some did. But mostly he kept to himself. It was easier that way.

Lonelier. But easier, too.

We had a favourite street in New Orleans, Royal street. It was the epitome of everything I’d imagined the French Quarter to be, without the stink of liquor and vomit that radiated from the aptly named, Bourbon street. My son and I were a family and at nearly five years old, he loved the jazz and blues that came from every other window of every other bar and café in the Quarter. Every morning we ate breakfast at a little place that sold good coffee and beignets. It was next to the Quarter Police station. A big old building with white columns and tall black iron fences surrounding the small gardens at the side.

One morning a man asked me for some change and I smiled politely, shook my head and walked on.

Then I walked back.

I gave him five dollars and told him to please get some breakfast. To get something to eat. He thanked me, smiled with teeth missing, and told me my son was a good one.

On the night of the screaming she’d threatened calling the cops. He remembers the colour of her eyes as he held her up against the wall in the hallway. Outside the baby girl’s room. Her eyes had started to change colour and the screaming had stopped. She kicked him in the knee and scraped her shoe down his leg. He’d dropped her to the floor.

And there was silence.

He remembered it hurting his leg when he had stepped over her. He slammed the front gate behind him and walked away.

Then there was the screaming again.

...

After we had our beignets and my coffee, we passed the man again. He had a bottle of coca cola sitting on the steps next to him. I asked if he’d gotten anything to eat.

He shook his head and said he’d needed a drink first.

(c) Samantha Florence, 2012.

short thing #9

Periodical defeat

Highlights singularity

Red and blue

Waves crash upon the sebaceousness of my being

Everyone else is two or more and

I investigate through mere observation the surface

Of success in size and shape,

In height

Skin, quality, shade, artwork

I notice bands and ages

Hair and eyes, arses, jobs.

Surface must be all?

Yet

My fierce independence renders me invisible to those that I can see

They take my interest

But I am clear.

And days and days and days and nights of solitary

Confinement

Of share less stories

Of with oneself

How are you

Yeah good, thanks?

Enables the stories of criticism and cynicism to become truth and apathy

To become spirals of defeat

Waves of loss

On a red and blue shore of solo songs

(c) Samantha Florence, 2012.

short thing #8

a cup of tea

Nan told Mum about this dream. She told Mum while they were both sitting at the kitchen table, at Nan’s kitchen table. Not that that is particularly distinctive, considering that both Mum and Nan are hoarders, both of their kitchen tables are messy, both keep too many things linking them to their pasts. Both keep too many things.

Nan and Mum were drinking tea, but that is not distinctive either. Nan drinks tea black, with a small squeeze of lemon. Mum drinks tea white with one sugar. Mum prefers mugs of tea, but Nan only has cups. Nan likes cups and saucers.

Nan is wearing an apron. Mum never wears aprons. Nan is sitting at the head of the table, closest to the sink. Closest to the stove. Closest to the cupboard next to the stove. The cupboard that Dad calls the Black Whole of Calcutta. The cupboard that takes things but never returns them.

I wasn’t at the kitchen table when Nan told Mum about the dream. Mum didn’t think it was a dream but that is Mum’s opinion. Which she is entitled to.

Nan hadn’t made scones that day. Mum and Dad and my little brother and I hadn’t gone to Nan’s that morning, to go down the street, to eat rolls for lunch. To help make scones afterwards. To go with the tea

Mum had gone to Nan’s by herself. Nan seemed to want it that way. That day.

Pop had died a while before that day. Nan and Pop were married young to the sound of the proverbial shotgun. Nan was swept away but not for long. And Pop was drunken. Irish. Catholic.

Pop listened to the dog races on Saturday afternoons while we ate rolls and made scones and drank tea.

Pop never really liked Nan that much. He certainly didn’t show it if he did. That would be weak. And irrelevant, in any case.

But Pop was dead now. I had sat on the back step with dark grey clouds heavy above me the day that Pop died. I cried and the tears and the summer rain were the same temperature on my face.

But Pop was dead now.

Nan had redecorated the little house that she and Pop had lived in for fifty something years. She painted the walls in the lounge room green, in her bedroom brown and in the kitchen pink.

In the kitchen. At the kitchen table. Tea. Nan. Mum.

Nan told Mum about this dream.

Nan had been having a dream and then she woke up in her dream. Dreams distort reality, it is their purpose, Nan said. But on waking, from her dream, in her dream, Nan had gone to the lounge room. She could hear somebody crying and she was scared. She was an old woman, living alone, and that isn’t safe nowadays.

In the lounge room, Nan saw him. He was sitting next to the cabinet, curled up into a ball. On the floor. His face was stained with tears. He was looking at her terrified. He said, “I’m sorry.”

Nan said she bent down next to him. In her baby blue, cotton nightie. In her floral slippers. In her green lounge room.

She bent down next to him and said it was ok. She comforted him. She forgave him.

She let him go.

Mum held Nan’s hand. And my Nan actually cried.

Dripping into her cup of tea.

(c) Samantha Florence, 2012.