She
She’s writing about herself in the second or third person or whatever the fuck this is again. It just seems fitting to write like this at this time where everything is floating a few feet above the ground. She likes the distance it gives, as if she isn’t already distanced enough from everything. It is all so distanced she is surprised to find that she is still here at all.
But here she is. Almost a year since the last post that appears here, but not a year since she last wrote something on here. She deleted some of those posts, disgusted.
She is irritated to find that she still cares about what people think of her, even while she feels so distanced from everybody and everything, floating in her own little cloud of solitude, desperate for more. For walls around her solitude, and dividing walls within those walls, containing a kitchen, a bathroom, a lounge room, a bedroom and a playroom.
Which is altogether way too luxurious for anyone living in the environs of Melbourne, the world’s most locked-down city, the world’s most proud city of its status because Melbourne is fucking dumb. A Melbourne whose rents are so astronomically stupid. A Melbourne that doesn’t seem to think questioning why it is so, if the queues she’s stood in to inspect horrendously overpriced units are any indication. A zombie town that opens its mouth and says okay.
She won’t miss it. Which is good because she’s probably going to have to leave it. No one will rent to her and her mother-who-isn’t-really-going-to-be-living-there and so now its maybe-Warburton and a smaller field. She’s so paranoid now she’s not sure whether that is because it’s nothing personal, it’s just the way it is; capitalists who have a house to rent look at the list of people who’ve applied and feel no sense of civic duty whatsoever; they cannot, they must consider their investment. She’s not sure if it’s nothing personal or if it’s entirely personal, that they see her digitally coming and there’s a big bullseye on her forehead saying loser. She knows this is ridiculous but this is the way it has made her feel. She feels no one will ever rent to her again because she is being punished, and she’ll have to share with someone, in Ringwood, like the control-freak she almost shared with in Reservoir, or the control-freak she lived with for three months in 1994 in Dingley with, or the control-freak she lived with from 1970-1988.
She doesn’t want to live with other people because while yes, she is lonely, she also, to complicate things, values and needs her solitude, loves it, swims through its air, for healthy though socially not-quite-acceptable reasons, but also for reasons that are largely to do with the whole chronic illness thing, but absolutely also to do with the less well formulated aspects of herself. She is undeniably oversensitive in every possible direction and she wants to collect herself into herself and have five rooms to live in even though that’s completely unsustainable on a global level. She doesn’t care. This is what she wants.
She’s always loved living alone and now she’s going to do it again, despite it requiring family assistance to pay all the bills, because she fucking well wants to. She wants the space. She is a space slut. She likes not having anyone else around her so that she can feel only the edges of herself. She has this idea that when she finally moves – if it ever happens; she’s not entirely sure it’s ever, every going to happen; she’s going to be in limbo for fucking ever – when she finally moves, though it seems like a dream to consider so, she is going to finally have enough space around her that is, after a fashion, hers and nobody else’s, that she’s going to start writing again. She hasn’t written anything of significance for the whole of this anus horribilis, except for half of a short story which is probably not too bad, but is too depressing for her to muster up the will to finish, because she wants sweet and light and is watching all the episodes of A Place To Call Home, just don’t tell anybody.
She thinks she is letting herself download and watch A Place to Call Home because she is sleeping in a van in the driveway of her cousin/cousin’s husband/cousin’s two children’s house, and though she cries every day and feels small and shamed every day even though nobody ever says anything to shame her, the situation just dredged up what was there already, the shit embedded into the tissues, that, ooh, really does get in, and when that stuff gets in you cannot get it out easily. Years, it takes. Years of energy work. One more thing she feels happy about but cannot talk in the street about, about how now for the first time in decades, she can feel the energies running up and down her spine, no blockages, from her crown to her very depths. She thinks she is letting herself download and watch A Place to Call Home because her cousin is the one she discovered the other lands with first. The creative ones, the saving ones. She was seven and her cousin was eight when they first took to each other with glee, and those are some of the best memories of her life. Freedom tastes like six weeks of school holidays that stretched out so long, being so filled from morning till night with music, with inventing people out of thin air, from creating magazines, drawing girls, writing lists of things, pretending they were in a band called The Worms (she apologises for this name; it is terrible, and it was her invention). The Worms performed the ABBA back-catalogue, with an extension cord and a carpet sweeper handle and a blank white wall.
She has not managed to overcome her natural disposition, which is focussed on why the fuck do we live the way we are and when the fuck are we going to stand up and call out the shitshow. She doesn’t know why she’s shifted from those lovely memories explaining why she’s watching A Place to Call Home, to the zombied remains of The Great Motherfuckery’s first real major world-sweeping blow. A blow that is still not being spoken about in anywhere of significance. A blow that blows her about the head every single day. She has no one she sees in real life who agrees that The Great Motherfuckery actually happened. They cannot see it. It’s the most bizarre fucking thing ever and she has no one to look in the eyes without a screen and talk to about it now.
She is thinking that she wants to start writing again. After all, she wrote this, didn’t she. So maybe she could write it again. It’s a shame it seems to require a few (not too many) puffs of something like a Sour Diesel before she can settle in. She doesn’t know how to settle in very easily anymore, seeing she’s not entirely sure that settling in is something that comes very easily to her. One of the million ways she feels like an outsider. Which isn’t such a bad thing to be if you like to observe the world, what it could be, how it doesn’t know what it is, how easy it was, how easy, how terrifyingly fucking easy. She is thinking that she wants to start writing again. After all, she wrote this, didn’t she. She’s got an idea rolling around in her head. She wants to write about the human body. She wants to write about the analogue human experience. Everything she wants to write about ends up being so big that she can’t see the ends of it and so then she can’t see it at all. She wants to do this. She is hoping she will allow herself to do this. She is hoping her physical body will allow her to do this. She loves her physical body more now than she ever has before, even though it is defective. Even though she has payback now from going for a walk on Saturday to Buckanbe Park, walked all the way round to the nine ducks. Even though it doesn’t work properly, she loves it and talks to it now like it’s her child, loves the giant black clods of heavy dark energy sitting in her gut, watches it move up her spine, feels the bubbles flowing down to meet it. Something is going on, she just can’t rightly say what it is is.
She wants to write about the human body. She wants to write about the analogue human experience. The subjects she always goes towards are always the most enormous ones that she can’t get a proper grasp on them. But she thinks it is important to write about the analogue at this particular point in time. This point in time. It changes so much from the point in time it was last week. The feel of it. But it can’t be explained. None of it can be explained. It’s almost cool, in a way, when you think about it.
She is worried about where the world is headed but she knows it’s nothing Xtinction Rebellion is going to fix. She doesn’t know what is going to happen and so she has turned away and she is inside now, and the outside can go fuck itself, she hates it. She hates how it feels to be out in it. She hates how compliant all the zombies are. She hates how she hates all this but she doesn’t know what else to do with the leftovers from The Great Motherfuckery. She doesn’t understand how so many people seem okay with what happened, don’t even know they were fucked, don’t even know they’re a plaything, don’t even know the class war never ended. But she doesn’t even know what other people don’t even know anyway. She keeps feeling like she does, but when she examines it, how does she think she knows what the great swathe of people are thinking? The internet? A bot-rich social media? What the hell does she know?
So that’s what she thinks she might do. It may well fall by the wayside like everything else in her Persephonic life. She doesn’t quite know how to go about it. All the atoms have moved further away from each other, she’s surprised she doesn’t fall right through the middle of the king size bed she’s sitting on, in a van in a Vermont street, waiting for her life to start up again. She guesses she’ll just have to wait and see what happens.