A Journey Between Worlds

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Love, February 2020: Day 5

Love, February is a strange beast. Especially this year when I nearly didn\’t participate.

Last year\’s entries are fun and often frivolous. When they were serious, they were serious in appropriate ways. I had love last year. I do not this year. I\’m empty.

But I\’m still here.

Today\’s piece maybe doesn\’t belong here but I chose it anyway.

I wrote it many years ago – more than a decade ago – and found it in a folder of old writing hidden on my hard drive. Moving files to new computers can unearth a million, dusty things.

This is one of them.

I guess that love is sometimes not enough. Or maybe it\’s just a cautionary tale for a time like now. Maybe it\’s neither. Maybe I just needed to put it out there.

Love, February 2020: Day 5

I am 30 years old, but when I was young I went to London. Of course I did, we all did.
London: land of the great Australian Rite of Passage. Others pierce something, slay something or slice something: we travel. But not to anywhere. No, we go to the land where they speak our language, drink beer, don’t know how to make a decent cup of coffee, and do drugs: lots and lots of drugs.

I am 30 years old, but when I was younger, hipper, happier, social, thinner, more alive, I went to London. It was very impressive, so everyone says, I went ‘by myself’. As though this independence is the true test of adulthood. As though we don’t really need others, even though we contradict this belief in every other aspect of our lives. I went by myself and I found, so many things.

I found a house to visit in, a house to party in and a house to live in. I found new friends, old friends, party friends and endless faceless acquaintances to drink with, dance with and forget with.

This photo is of myself, K and W, partying; this one is of me sitting on C’s lap after giving him the Tim Tam my mother sent him; this one is of W and I wrestling at Christmas; this one is of Alex dancing with L; this of all of us at the pub. Alex has the inevitable cigarette in his hand and his arm around me This photo is of the whole party-house gang, and this is of the night Alex and D paid me with wine to cook them dinner: D threw up in the living room.

This photo is of P and I dying Alex’s hair with red pointed tips for him to go clubbing. He would club all night and come home at 8am and make me tea in bed. He would take speed to dance all night and a joint to come down in the morning.

I am 30 years old but when I was younger, I had a friend called Alex who only seemed to be able to form a bond with those who could ‘have a good time’. His best friends did drugs, he was dumped by endless girls who couldn’t handle being second to his drug dealer, and his personality slowly changed until the friendly, easy-going person I knew became a self-absorbed bastard.

I am 30 years old but when I was younger I danced Sokkie in a Turkish nightclub with Alex. I had to take off my hiking boots and dance barefoot, but it didn’t matter: Alex was always a good dancer. If you ever want to hear of coincidences, hear of me running into him in the middle of a street in Istanbul.

When I was in Turkey, friends I had just met would ask me about my life in London and I would tell them of my lovely South African housemates: the hippie artist, the intense one, and the intelligent, honourable farmer. And then I would mention in passing those who came to the city to get lost in partying, the drug-fucked. When they met Alex they asked if he was one of my lovely South Africans. I had to say no. He was one of the drug-fucked.

The night before I left on my trip, he and others were doing cocaine off a mirror they took off the wall in the living room. I have never been happier or sadder that I didn’t live there. Happy because I could walk away and sadder because I wasn’t there to stop them when they started off on that journey. My friend, F, trailed out after me into the cold autumn air and told me she wanted out of there, she couldn’t stand it anymore. Their partying had turned dark and self-destructive and she now knew why I had refused so often their offers to move in with them.

I am 30 years old and yesterday I found out that my old friend Alex is dead. He sits staring at me from an old photograph but he is a younger, hipper, happier, social, thinner, more alive Alex, in London, so many years ago. My Alex was always going to get better. He was always going to go home, get a job, get married, get off the drugs of London and live the normal life we all want and need. We were going to meet up in some distant place, all of us from the same party crowd, laugh about the old days, discover South Africa and improve our Afrikaans. We were going to be people who lived.

He can’t be that. Ever.

I can.

I am 30 years old and yesterday I found out that my old friend Alex, whom I have neglected for several years, committed suicide after a long history of drug problems.
May he rest in the peace he never found in life.

Love, February

Love, February 2020: Day 4

The day dawns bright but cool.
The smoke has blown away for now. The fires rage on but here it’s calm and the sun pokes gently through dappled leaves on evergreen gums rather than searing through strange skies of orange haze.
I cook breakfast and hug a cup of fresh hot tea curled up on the couch while the dawn turns into morn and it’s time to face the day.
I shower and change and laziness loses to the sweet summer air, the cool welcome breeze.
I walk to the tram; racing across the road in the last few feet, red light blinking, to jump on as it slides to a stop, pauses, then slides off into Tuesday with me on board.
I hop off and step quickly into a cafe. Hot and bitter served by a barista hot and sweet.
He brings it to my table himself, his hipster glasses and professional indifference framing his Korean Indie singer look.
I take a sip and pull out my notebook, the minutes ticking down slowly till my bus leaves and I’m due at work.
I pull out a pen.
I write.
It feels normal.
It is normal.
I take a deep clean breath of air and think
Maybe I can
Love, February

Love, February 2020: Day 3

My favourite word, my favourite smell, my favourite feeling.

Petrichor.

The soft rain falling on the hard dirt.

The breaking of the drought.

The smell of renewal, rebirth, of life

both literally and figuratively,

Petrichor.

Now gone.

The drought continues.

The rain doesn’t come.

The trees and flowers shrivel and die and

Petrichor is nothing but

a distant memory of vibrant life

Petrichor is gone

both literally and figuratively.

Everything is dying.

The water dries up

The dirt dries out

The world burns

Koalas scream and

firefighters cry

The only smell is dust and smoke and ash

It’s no wonder I’m struggling to

Love,
February

Love, February 2020: Day 2

I had a really bad day last year.
Well, to be honest I’ve had several over the last few months.
My Mum, my Dad, myself, the world.
All seemingly breaking down around me and I lost the will to fight anymore.
I tried to get up, tried to call out, tried to get out, but instead I cried and yelled and snarled at people on the internet and then I complained, loudly, to Beanies about my mental health.
I fired up discord and found a notification. Two. Three. Seven. Ten.
What was happening?
The maknae line had decided to cheer me up through random silliness.
Tagging me into every channel on discord; while the confused denizens of those discussions greeted me with bemusement.
“Just dropping her off here”, these comments said, as I was tagged into channels on kpop bands and other places I normally never went to.
As one did, so others joined in.
“My turn to tag her!”, the next one said as I got dropped off somewhere else.
And I sat there in my living room, my computer on my lap lighting up with notification after notification, I looked at their glorious crazy.
And I laughed.
Thank you, Beans
Love, February

Love, February 2020: Day 1

\’Was that life? Well then, once more!\’

Is a curse greater than ‘May you live in interesting times’.

We’re stuck in Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence.

Life on a loop, the same great curses repeating.

Will we break free in time?

Or will we simply spiral down

Collapsing into nothing

Turtles

All the way down

I wish I could Love,

February

Love, February 2019: Day 14

I have no ode to romantic love
I have no tales of warm beds and plump babies
This month I wrote and wrote and wrote
Hundreds of words on love and
None of them were of romance
Love with a capital nothing
A litany of loneliness, landscape and loss
Empty beaches, lost friends, battered paperbacks
The sunrise in beautiful unfamiliar places
The sunsets of relationships
The love of art in films and books and television
But with people?
Just an empty nothing
I love my family
I love my friends
But that love is complicated
It’s fiendish
It defies me, mocks me
Winds around my words
What is love?
Love is
Bad Indian films at Christmas with too much wine
Laughing so hard I wonder if I will ever stop
A cup of tea delivered on a cold morning
The afternoon in the pool
A crying child coming to you for a hug
It’s cooking breakfast at 5am and
Yelling at someone in your head instead of to their face
It’s
Boring
So ordinary
I can’t write it
It just is

Love, February

Love February 2019, Day 13

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You sit on my bookshelf even after all these years.
You are worn; your cover lined and cracked and your pages thinning and drying out like aged skin.
You were nothing but a cheap paperback even then but somehow you’ve aged gracefully despite it.
Of all the books from my childhood you were the one I returned to again and again: each time I dove down was a new experience coloured by my extra years and experience.
Even now I see you for what you were and are; a cracking good yarn by a young and inexperienced writer. No wonder you spoke to me when I got you at the age of ten.
You were a post-apocalyptic young adult novel started a good 40 years before the Hunger Games existed and long before that was recognised as a genre. You were conceived even before I was and the years and years it took for you to be published show how long it took for the world to catch up to you.
You had the rawest of young adult themes; difference, alienation and a fear of how people would react when they saw the real you. Somebody is out there, you said, one day you will find your people.
You were the book I first thought of when the time came for me to buy novels for my nieces and nephews years later. But what a glorious realisation I had then! You had sequels! I had never known.
I bought you for each of them in turn, oldest to youngest, as soon as they reached their first decade. And they loved you just as much as I had. And hated me for introducing you to them. Your sequels were still being written, the series unfinished.
“How dare you, Aunt,” they cried, “Why introduce us to this wonder if the story is not yet done!”
“Mea culpa,” I said, “mea culpa. I DID NOT KNOW.”
I didn’t like the sequels anyway. When I finally sat down to read them I found them forced and contrived; sequels for the sake of sequels. Like Highlander, I will just pretend there was only one.
Because that is what you are.
The only one.
The one I still sit down and read again. The one book on my shelf that has been read almost to death. Read even more times than my collection of Terry Pratchett novels. Loved even more than my copy of The Name of the Rose.
I pulled you off the bookshelf again today.
I think I might read you again.
Thank you, Obernewtyn.
For being with me all these years.

Love, February

Love, February 2019: Day 12

Mum calls to tell me about her dream
She’s trapped in a cage and phones are ringing outside it. She cannot reach them to answer them but they keep ringing and ringing and there’s nothing she can do about them.
She sees her doctor outside the cage and she begs him to let her out to answer the phones.
He says he doesn’t have a key. Only she has the key. Only she can get herself out.
But she knows the truth. She doesn’t have the key. There is no key, no way out. She’s trapped in that cage, bars between her and the rest of the world for life.
There is nothing anybody can do about it.
I remember the night she first had the stroke.
We went to the hospital. She’d had her clot busting drugs and we crowded around her in the emergency room.
She was awake, alert, bright, grateful to be there. She thanked everyone for getting her help so quickly.
The slurring was gone; her face normal. She was normal. She seemed normal.
Now I realise we were watching her brain die. That clot, unbroken, unmoved, killing off her cells as we watched unknowing.
A black wave washing over her brain as we were talking to her.
Strokes are quick. The effects take longer. What would have been if we’d removed the clot then? If the drugs had worked? If targeted removal had been rolled out through the system? If she’d had her stroke one month later. Two months?
If. If. If.
No. That way lies madness.
Blame was the first thing on everybody’s minds. Guilt and blame. But guilt and blame achieve nothing. They’re emotional dead ends.
Mum went off Warfarin for her overseas trip. But Mum also had the memory of that trip, her dream trip, the one she’d wanted since she was a child.
Which is more important for a life?
The things is, this was all four years ago now. Four long, painful years.
An accident or an illness – however stressful, painful or exhausting – ends. It ends. Things revert. Things settle. Things change but they also change back.
When someone you love dies, a hole is blasted in your life but then that hole fills in. Space abhors a vacuum. The hole will still be there: the edges clear even after your repair. You can see it out of the corner of your eye, feel it as you walk over it. It’s just that now you won’t fall in.
Grief after death, to extend this metaphor, is like earthworks. Done right, your foundation is secure. You know that the work is done: you can see the cracks around it, feel the place where the hole was dug and then filled in. But one day, eventually, you’ll walk over it and realise that you’re no longer in danger of falling in.
Strokes are the opposite of death.
Strokes dig the hole and then ask you to pretend there is no hole. Strokes take somebody you love and know and replace them with somebody else.Those changes can be small, they can be fine, they can be subtle. Impulsiveness. Candour. A new struggle with irony or missing social cues.
Or those changes can be gross, they can be large, they can be stark. Social inappropriateness. Lack of empathy. Self-absorption. Crassness.
As humans we have a great capacity for rationalisation. But trying to grieve and to celebrate at the same time? Trying to be happy a loved one is alive while grieving for the person that isn’t there any more? That is a cognitive dissonance at which even the most nimble of us fail. Strokes ask us to dance on the hole as though it isn’t there.
It’s Christmas and Mum is crying in the bedroom because she has so many things to do for Christmas Day and nobody will let her do them. Anosognosia is a symptom associated with a right hemisphere stroke. It’s a condition where a person who suffers a certain disability is seeming unaware of it. To this day, Mum insists that she can walk, it’s just that Doctors or her nasty family won’t let her. Over the years, her Anosognosia has gotten better but there are still days like this when she’s upset and confused as to why we won’t “let” her do the things she wants to do.
It’s heartbreaking.
It’s exhausting. I’m exhausted.
I love you, Mum
I miss you, Mum
I’m glad you’re alive
I’m sorry you’re gone
Love, February

Love, February 2019: Day 10

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I love trash.
I’m a trash roomba
I lurk across the floor of dramaland ready to suck up trashy shows whenever I’m lucky enough to find them.
Why do I like trash so much? And while we’re at it, what even is trash? How do you define trash?
I think it says something that good trash, like good art, defies description. You just know it when you see it.
I may not know much about trash but I do know what I like.
First and foremost, trash has to be fun. It can’t be boring. About Time, for example, was bad trash because it was boring trash. Even the actors looked bored. About Time was one long, unfolding realisation that everyone was stuck in a bad drama and there was nothing they could do about it. Good trash doesn’t know it’s trash or it at least embraces its trashiness with glee.
Risky Romance? Blood? Even Trot Lovers? These are various forms of good trash.
But my love of trash predates Korean dramas by several decades. At Uni, I would celebrate the end of my exams with trashy romance novels. When I was unwell, I would inhale bad sci/fantasy television.
To this day, my favourite piece of trash is the Sci-Fi Channel’s hilariously awful 2007 reimagining of Flash Gordon. Never heard of it? No one has. My brother gave it to me to watch when I was recovering from dental surgery and – maybe it was the drugs – but I loved it. Every cringey awful second of it. It even ended on a cliffhanger but with only three people watching it a second season was never going to happen.
To this day when I’m feeling unwell out comes Flash Gordon. Sure I fast forward through at least the first six episodes (and any time they decide we might want to know what’s happening back on Earth – we don’t). But this is great trash, people. This is a comic book meets a gay floor show meets pulp fiction. This is bad actors running around cheap sets in funny outfits while extras plucked from the local weightlifting circuit pretend to be birds in the background or run around painted blue.
So what makes Flash Gordon good trash while other similarly-bad shows are just trash? For a start, underneath all the silly there’s quite a good, quite an interesting story going on here. Flash Gordon isn’t a hero in this so much as an impetus. He’s a stone thrown into a pond that then ripples out. Everyone loves him, of course, and he’s the ultimate walking American Ideal. But this Flash does nothing alone. If anything, his main skill is inspiring people to act themselves and bringing them together. Flash isn’t Mongo’s Great White Saviour, Flash just believes that Mongo can save itself and so the people of Mongo eventually do too.
Nobody yells out, “Flash I love you but we only have 14 hours to save the Earth”. They’re more likely to yell, “I have Flash’s support in my quest to save Mongo”.
It’s an extremely appealing subversion of the usual superhero tropes. Flash doesn’t save the day and get the girl. Flash is there supporting and nurturing those who save the day and is willing to let the girl make her own decisions about these things, after all she’s been through a lot. Also his love interest is the weakest character and the weakest actor and I kind of hated her so I was glad the romance thing never loomed large.
But there it is, Flash is a nice guy but never a Nice Guy. He was never bothered with strong women kicking ass and saving the day, if anything he admired them for it. His best friend in Mongo is a better fighter and he thinks she’s awesome. His other best friend is smarter than him and he thinks he’s awesome. His ex seems to have moved on but is doing well and he’s genuinely happy for her. And his eye rolling frustrations with the crazy of Mongo were kind of funny, even if Eric Johnston was never the world’s greatest actor.
So maybe good trash is just trash that makes you want to watch it despite it being trash. Maybe it’s just a show that draws you in even with its trashiness. Maybe you have your own type of “good trash” just as everyone has their own type of “good art”.
But for me, I unabashedly admit that I love trash.
Love, February

Love, February 2019: Day 8

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I stood overlooking Machu Picchu at the top of the world. I saw the fog rolled back and the past revealed. I watched the sunrise over Angkor Wat and the Taj Mahal and climbed the Eiffel Tower.
I saw the remnants of civilisation buried at Easter Island, was shuffled around the enigma of Stonehenge and kicked Hadrian’s Wall. I saw the pyramids and the Sphinx and rode a donkey while guarded by boys with scary guns.
I climbed to the Acropolis and the Parthenon and sat writing my journal at Delphi before wandering through the preserved cemetery of Pompeii and the restored city of Ephesus. I took a bus through the Balkans and stood on the beach at Split and the mountains overlooking Dubrovnik and wandered at the beauty in the heart of human chaos.
I ate breakfast soup for 20 baht at Kanchanaburi and scooped Tagine with sopping bread in the Sahara desert. I ate guinea pig in Peru and cake and cake and cake in Hungary and Vienna. I rode camels in India and elephants in Thailand and only later wondered if I should have. I camped with the Berbers and shopped at the night markets in Luang Prabang and sailed in the polluted waters of Halong Bay.
I did karaoke drinking cheap Thai whisky in a dive somewhere near Chang Rai and danced to Come On, Eileen at London’s Walkabout. I had a DJ in a strange bar in the south of Ireland insist on playing Downunder ten times when he found out where I was from and was forced to participate in a magic show on a ferry to Wales. Wibbly! Wobbly!
I did Hogmanay and drank hot chocolate In Bruges and ate wurst in the Christmas market in Munchen. Took a train through the majestic beauty of Switzerland and skied in Andorra.
I lived in a four-bedroom house with 10 South Africans, shared beds with strangers and even survived a night in a Greek youth hostel that was bug central. I stayed in a gorgeous room in the Intercontinental in Singapore and drank martinis in the exquisite cocktail bar with hiking boots on. I got upgraded to business class coming out of the Amazonian jungle and sat in the lounge covered in DEET and sunscreen with clothes (and a body) that hadn’t been washed in four days. I fell down a mountain in Borneo and had to walk 10km down the Headhunter’s Trail covered in bruises before I could get a soft bed.
I had food poisoning on an Egyptian train with a broken toilet and “Bali belly” in the Indian desert with only a hole in the ground and one roll of toilet paper.
I got marched off a train in Macedonia with a semi-automatic in my face and nearly didn’t make it through a mountainous Montenegrin checkpoint at midnight in the middle of winter, snowing.
I negotiated a hair cut in Kosovo and a shower in a pension in Morocco with sign language and somehow got both. I got lost in a medina and took the wrong tram in Bratislava and both times got shown kindness and consideration and random acts of generosity from total strangers.
I saw the sun set over Santorini, gazed at the beauty of Cappadocia and sailed through the geological and biological wonder that is the extraordinary Galapagos.
But most of all, I stood shivering on a ship to the end of the world. I saw the majestic wonder of the pristine seventh continent. I moved silently and respectfully through giant tabular icebergs and floated past seals and penguins surviving in the most remote parts of Earth.
And as I came back into Ushuaia I almost cried at the sheer beauty of everything.
This is love.
I love this world.
Love, February.

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