Dear You,
I didn't even realise you were on my mind until my phone buzzed with your name. I smiled, and said to my empty office, "Oh, hello you!"
I like that your hair always smells clean but looks dirty and that your beard makes you look much meaner than you are. I like that I can say ridiculous things to you and not get embarrassed. I like that I can make you laugh. Sometimes, I like that I can make you jealous.
I like how I don't have to worry what you think about me. You tell me, no one else does that. You like my hair up and think I look better in green. You like it when I sing in the shower and you like it when I draw on your back. You hate my nose ring and my brown shoes but tell me I’m beautiful anyway. You prefer me without makeup. You think I’m cute when I cry and beautiful when I laugh.
I like that you make me so sure.
I like that whenever we watch a movie you insist upon silence and physical separation but that just after the opening credits you pull me close and whisper in my ear. I like that you talk about the future without any self-consciousness.
I like that sometimes, we get drunk and act with reckless abandon, like school children and that you don’t care what anyone else thinks of me, you just hand me another drink. I like that you’re proud of me and introduce me to anyone who will listen. I like how you dance and how you look my friends and brothers in the eye. I like how I fit in your arms. I like that we look like we belong together.
I like how when I am excited about something you get excited too. I like how your eyebrows move when you tell me a story. I like how you try and scare my by going round corners too fast.
I like that you’re a really bad liar.
I like that we still alternate periods of blissful happiness and intense physical complicity with short bursts of conflict, just like we always have.
I like that we hold hands but I wish you wouldn’t kiss me in front of your mum. You keep me on my toes. I like that we’ve changed since we met and now we’re really good at being friends. I think that’s what I like the most.
Lots of like,
Me.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Untitled
As they huddled together on an inner city street early one morning, a man said to a woman. "What do you think about moving in?” A stranger wouldn’t have heard her response. It may not have been much more than, Hmmm, we’ll talk tomorrow. Her voice was low and hushed and the street was full, full of friends and lovers and drunks. She might have wanted to believe him but he was drunk and she knew that when he was drunk, he said things. The same way he said things in the morning with short-lived conviction and childlike sincerity, meant for nothing beyond that very moment. Everything he said was an act, every expression on his face has a purpose.
”I love you babe” he’d say over morning cigarettes.
“You’re beautiful”
That night however he’d fill her with lies about where he’d lost his phone, why he didn’t call and how he got that cut. Only a few hours earlier, in a bar just across the park from where they stood, a beer in his hand, a vodka in each of hers, he’d made fun of something she had done in bed, describing it in humiliating detail to an audience of his friends.
"How could you?” She cringed.
"What? You laughed about it too, I didn’t mean to upset you”
Later, they stood at the bus stop, he, wearing a ratty navy t- shirt and a suede vest and her, a mask of fury and feathers in her hair, both of them, the man and the woman glowing under the bright lights, tinged green by the nearby supermarket fluorescents, beading with sweat in the late summer heat.
If she was angry, she did not say as much only withdrew in her thoughts.
"Which bus are you catching?” He meant would she be sleeping with him that night.
"I washed the sheets. Not because I assumed you’d be staying.” He smirked.
Just as he said this, a bus roared to a stop in front of them, a brightly lit number 3 above its front windscreen. The woman kissed the man on the cheek and said,
"Your bus is here”
She did not want to be the one to remind him of all the things he’s said the night before on that morning after.
A few weeks later they would discover that he had been sharing his clean sheets with another. The woman would listen to the man, in his ill-fitting sincerity, as he explained that he loved this other woman and that he was very sorry. They would scream, she would cry and she would want to believe him but he would be drunk, and when he was drunk, he said things.
”I love you babe” he’d say over morning cigarettes.
“You’re beautiful”
That night however he’d fill her with lies about where he’d lost his phone, why he didn’t call and how he got that cut. Only a few hours earlier, in a bar just across the park from where they stood, a beer in his hand, a vodka in each of hers, he’d made fun of something she had done in bed, describing it in humiliating detail to an audience of his friends.
"How could you?” She cringed.
"What? You laughed about it too, I didn’t mean to upset you”
Later, they stood at the bus stop, he, wearing a ratty navy t- shirt and a suede vest and her, a mask of fury and feathers in her hair, both of them, the man and the woman glowing under the bright lights, tinged green by the nearby supermarket fluorescents, beading with sweat in the late summer heat.
If she was angry, she did not say as much only withdrew in her thoughts.
"Which bus are you catching?” He meant would she be sleeping with him that night.
"I washed the sheets. Not because I assumed you’d be staying.” He smirked.
Just as he said this, a bus roared to a stop in front of them, a brightly lit number 3 above its front windscreen. The woman kissed the man on the cheek and said,
"Your bus is here”
She did not want to be the one to remind him of all the things he’s said the night before on that morning after.
A few weeks later they would discover that he had been sharing his clean sheets with another. The woman would listen to the man, in his ill-fitting sincerity, as he explained that he loved this other woman and that he was very sorry. They would scream, she would cry and she would want to believe him but he would be drunk, and when he was drunk, he said things.
Scents
"When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered...the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls...bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory." (Proust 1913-1927)
The social behavior of most animals is controlled by smells and chemical signals. Being civilized and being human however, means that our lives are not ruled by scent. We "see" the world largely through our eyes and our ears. We neglect the sense of smell—and often suppress our awareness of what our nose tells us. We reject smell to such an extent that there are no words in our language (or in the other languages I am familiar with) to describe it properly or even adequately. It is almost impossible to explain how something smells to someone who has never smelled it. There are names for all the colours of the ocean but there are few words to describe that most distinctive smell.
No matter how hard we try to deny our sense of smell its rightful place in our lives, it remains. Smells retain an uncanny power to move us. It's a familiar phenomenon: a single smell has the power to conjure up entire scenes from the past it can feel as though you slipped back in time, if it was not for the other senses of your body, you might actually be there…
Fresh fish blood on salty denim is my childhood, spent in a small fishing on the NSW South Coast. Whilst today my childhood home does not exist as it once did, as I remember it and the people who filled my life in those times have grown and changed, when I smell fresh fish blood I can see the jetty and taste the salt in the air.
Lanolin and sheep shit are 20 summers spent on my uncle’s farm: a hundred mornings spent chasing lambs, catching yabbies and playing with my brothers and cousins in the red dust; a hundred afternoons spent making daisy chains and swimming in the dams; a hundred nights spent sitting outside covered is mosquito repellent listening to my uncle’s guitar and the eerie silence of the Australian bush.
A blown out match is the smell of birthdays, or celebrations.
Carrot, celery and beetroot being juiced is the scent of 1999 when my mother was diagnosed with cancer. Every morning she would drink this foul combination in an attempt to up her vitamin intake, soothe her chemotherapy ravaged body and calm her ulcer-covered mouth.
Lambs kidney, a smell somewhere between piss and meat, is the scent of winters spent in France. A whiff of a raw kidney is enough to take me back to Cerizay, dark and cold and wet.
Aniseed is my best friend and her inexplicable affinity for liquorices. It’s my sisters with a glass of Pastis on the terrace in September in Cerizay.
Jasmine is the scent of Sydney in summer. It’s long evenings walking home in the dark along the river drunk on cheap wine and giggling.
Fahrenhite by Christian Dior is the memory of my long gone, first boyfriend. It is nights spent beneath his low ceilings, listening to the hum of his apartment’s pre-war electrics as he picked his guitar. It is the details of his caramel coloured skin against cool liner sheets. Its freezing cold Alsatian winters huddled together around the radiator, him in a gray anorak me in an emerald green coat. It’s vin chaud and choucroute. It’s the cathedral bells across the valley. It’s intense and mournful and melancholy.
Citronella is India without anti-malarials and I protected myself from the swarms of mosquitoes as best I could.
To me, nothing is more memorable than smell.
The social behavior of most animals is controlled by smells and chemical signals. Being civilized and being human however, means that our lives are not ruled by scent. We "see" the world largely through our eyes and our ears. We neglect the sense of smell—and often suppress our awareness of what our nose tells us. We reject smell to such an extent that there are no words in our language (or in the other languages I am familiar with) to describe it properly or even adequately. It is almost impossible to explain how something smells to someone who has never smelled it. There are names for all the colours of the ocean but there are few words to describe that most distinctive smell.
No matter how hard we try to deny our sense of smell its rightful place in our lives, it remains. Smells retain an uncanny power to move us. It's a familiar phenomenon: a single smell has the power to conjure up entire scenes from the past it can feel as though you slipped back in time, if it was not for the other senses of your body, you might actually be there…
Fresh fish blood on salty denim is my childhood, spent in a small fishing on the NSW South Coast. Whilst today my childhood home does not exist as it once did, as I remember it and the people who filled my life in those times have grown and changed, when I smell fresh fish blood I can see the jetty and taste the salt in the air.
Lanolin and sheep shit are 20 summers spent on my uncle’s farm: a hundred mornings spent chasing lambs, catching yabbies and playing with my brothers and cousins in the red dust; a hundred afternoons spent making daisy chains and swimming in the dams; a hundred nights spent sitting outside covered is mosquito repellent listening to my uncle’s guitar and the eerie silence of the Australian bush.
A blown out match is the smell of birthdays, or celebrations.
Carrot, celery and beetroot being juiced is the scent of 1999 when my mother was diagnosed with cancer. Every morning she would drink this foul combination in an attempt to up her vitamin intake, soothe her chemotherapy ravaged body and calm her ulcer-covered mouth.
Lambs kidney, a smell somewhere between piss and meat, is the scent of winters spent in France. A whiff of a raw kidney is enough to take me back to Cerizay, dark and cold and wet.
Aniseed is my best friend and her inexplicable affinity for liquorices. It’s my sisters with a glass of Pastis on the terrace in September in Cerizay.
Jasmine is the scent of Sydney in summer. It’s long evenings walking home in the dark along the river drunk on cheap wine and giggling.
Fahrenhite by Christian Dior is the memory of my long gone, first boyfriend. It is nights spent beneath his low ceilings, listening to the hum of his apartment’s pre-war electrics as he picked his guitar. It is the details of his caramel coloured skin against cool liner sheets. Its freezing cold Alsatian winters huddled together around the radiator, him in a gray anorak me in an emerald green coat. It’s vin chaud and choucroute. It’s the cathedral bells across the valley. It’s intense and mournful and melancholy.
Citronella is India without anti-malarials and I protected myself from the swarms of mosquitoes as best I could.
To me, nothing is more memorable than smell.
Thursday, October 2, 2008
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