hard year, rough week, crying in the car and waiting for it to be over. i started 2016 in the arms of so many people i love, being told i am powerful, being told i am precious. i didn't realise this is how it would end. but - i took three beautiful people that the universe gifted me this year to see the christmas lights last night and they fill me up and i feel like things could be changing and maybe i'm changing too
"wait right where you are, i'm coming to you
stay with me, stay with the car, i'm coming for you
i'm not hanging up this phone, you need to tell me you won't go
just stay with me. stay with the car. i'm coming to you"
"you don't know how much i miss him
do you think i'd see him soon if i died? if i died?
you don't know how much i miss him."
"hey,
i thought you'd never show up
i thought you'd never show up
i know what i want to be and it's never to be alone again."
L and I wander down High St, me struggling to tame my dress in the wind and her with a keyboard stand resting on her shoulder. We are twin earth signs living parallel lives and we like to talk it over every now and again. She has found herself somewhere she wasn't expecting - me too - but the universe has been generous to us both and we tell each other to enjoy while the going is good.
I kiss her goodbye and walk down to lean against the brick wall outside Lam Lam.
I shuffle away from an old piece of chewing gum and think about everyone.
The world is changing around me but I'm changing too - I moved upstairs and now my room is clean and grown up. I was sick with nerves about something and I decided to go for a run because I knew it would calm me down - not because I was terrified of being fat. I am strong but soft too, and one day I'll be completely fine with it. I had pizza last night and even now, after all this time, I feel something like pride in the back of my head.
The boys I met when I was 18 are men now - I watch from the inside out.
I have never felt older, which suits because I've never been older. I've never been smarter, or braver. I feel like I can take it, whatever it might be,
1.15am Every night is a late night and every morning starts too soon. I have been completely exhausted. Today I lay face-down on my bed listening to I'm On Fire. I am pulled in every direction. I can't think and I think too much. We sit on the porch and let the wind bully us. My hair sticks to my lips. I pin pictures to my new walls. I eat too much because I'm terrified. I paint my nails to pick it off. The moon is full and I feel it all. I drive home by myself most nights, listening to the radio and serenely looping my fingers around the wheel, safe and familiar. I imagine I'm driving to the international departures bit of the airport. I never am. I never know what I'm doing.
Every time a new Bon Iver record comes out, I seem to be going through some kind of hardship or period of transience. I guess you could say I'm going through it right now, and like a beacon 22, A Million was announced and all I had to do was wait until tonight, and then a few hours more. Tonight, with hundreds of strangers, I sat in front of a little cd/tape player and listened. It was perfect because it wasn't. I felt D's knee pressed against mine, the breeze on my face, and my phone lit up with a message from A in all caps: "DO WHAT MAKES YOU HAPPY." So I shut my eyes and listened and tried to imagine what it would feel like to be completely whole. Then we walked down the street laughing and I thought I might be in a dream, except that the rain on my skin felt too real. The universe has me under its wing, especially tonight.
My lipstick is cracked from smiling at E's baby all afternoon. I've never known a baby from pregnancy to birth and I still can't believe this real little creature lying in my lap. A little person that has so much life to live yet.
Reminds me I have so much life to live yet.
Readings is full, kids everywhere. I scan the books quietly, taking them out and putting them back, enjoying the moment and the feeling. The not knowing - which normally terrifies me, and has done so for good reason this year. Maybe I'm getting smarter, or braver.
Earlier I sat outside the library in the sun, listening to Ceres and thinking about all the complex things all the people around me must be contending with. The year has not been easy. I wonder how much harder it will get - or maybe the worst is over.
My phone lights up with messages from people that I love. Every time it does that I thank the universe.
Brunetti near Cinema Nova, 11.03am I'm standing outside, brushing rain out of my hair and looking at the cakes in the display fridge. Pulling up a metal seat I can't stop thinking about when Aunty Em would drive us straight to Brunetti's after we picked her up from the airport. Luggage in tow, plane-dazed and full of life, I tasted my first coffee at that Brunetti's, a sip of her cappuccino - licking the froth off the top of my lip, she explained good coffee to me ("this is the best coffee in Melbourne, Eilish") and now I understand how she missed it. I notice now that the waiters here have headsets, how everything somehow seems tacky instead of chic and grownup. I wonder if Aunty Em would still say this was the best coffee in Melbourne. J walks towards me from behind:
"Gilly Gilly Gilly Gilly..."
Lam Lam's, 6.30PM
"I'm just confused...a confused..."
"A confused lump," A offers, alongside a dry smile and a clap on the back.
"Yes! I really am...it's like - I want to go out and get hurt, or something...?"
Padding through the airport, dragging a bag behind me that jangles happily every now and again from the tambourine inside. I love imagining that I tread the same path all the time. I would like to be the person who is totally bored by the airport, but I get thrilled by it - I love the drive, I love the people, I love sitting and waiting with my headphones on and watching the planes pull into the gate. No matter how much I travel I don't think I'll ever get tired of the airport. Sitting in my seat I literally cannot believe that the only thing I want to do is listen to music. How can that be the thing that I want to do, when I've spent the last week (let alone my whole life) threading myself around it so tightly that I could barely sleep? Live, in big venues with round roofs where my heart swelled to meet the ceiling, or on screens, at 1am with friends, curled up on the couch in the hotel with the roaches and hair all done up in towels like a slumber party film.
I can't stop thinking about when we were standing in front of a monumental vortex of a sculpture at GOMA and beautiful, bright young G said so lightly ::
"It's good to feel small sometimes."
I looked over at her and couldn't believe how effortlessly she had just constructed a moment that I'll never forget.
(Kind of like the force of a good band playing a song you've only ever heard recorded live for the first time, and you're in it and it's happening there and then it's gone and all you can do is remember it.) They come in sharp, glowing snaps - M cheersing a hot chocolate at me in the fancy lounge, S ambushed at the party on the rooftop with the massages and the funny caterer, sitting on the train in the rain reading receipts and thinking about how everything ever is always too short, J standing at the top of the balcony in his thongs waving L and I grandly out of the hotel, running into everyone's arms a thousand times.
Yelling "I'm so HAPPY!" to no one in particular, except maybe the universe as a thankyou for being understanding.
I've recently become severely addicted to RuPaul's Drag Race, and am trying to make my way through all the seasons (if any of y'all can link me to Season 4 and Season 5 that would be swell...). In doing so, I've not only severely reduced my hours of 'productivity', but also, on a more positive note, rediscovered my looooooooooooooove for drag queens. I love them, I love the concepts, I love the creativity, I love the craftsmanship, I love the showmanship, I love lip-synching, I love pretty much all of it right down to the way that, on that godforsaken show, Rupaul takes the competing queens out for lunch and only ever has two TicTacs on her plate. I sent a fuzzy iPhone pic of that to my boyfriend because I thought it was the funniest damn thing I've ever seen on my 22 years on this planet.
Oh my god Lady Gaga and Bianca Del Rio hanging out.
When I was in New York, we went out one night and stumbled across a drag show in Brooklyn someplace. We were on our way to somewhere else, kinda drunk, and it was dark and dive-y, but I was so excited to see a *real* **New York Drag Queen!!!** that I think my enthusiasm infected the others and we stayed for a while to watch. I don't know her name, but I remember going up on stage with some weird little box that she had hidden around the bar, upon her asking us to look for it and come up to meet her if we found it. I remember pointing it out sitting on a tiny shelf, and L nudging me to go up and get it. Normally I would DIE at the thought of any kind of audience participation, even in a tiny little bar in Brooklyn where, except for the three others I was with, I could remain completely anonymous. But like I said, we were a few drinks down and I felt a strong, specific combination of Semi Drunk and #yolo so I edged my way up to the stage, in flower-crown and cheetah-print furry cape, clutching the little box. She completely towered over me, nearly twice my height, like some kind of expensive high-art installation. Up close her makeup was layers upon layers of extreme colour and texture and hours of labour. Her smile was not dissimilar to a clowns', but she wasn't clown-like...more just an exaggeration of human behaviour in most ways, appearance and demeanour. The lights silhouetted her hair-tower like the sunrise I'd just seen that day down at Union Square. That image of her is so vibrant and strong in my head, bigger than life. To be honest I can't really remember what happened after that. I think she liked me because I was smol and covered in flowers and Australian and I actually participated in her performance which probably made her feel relieved. She came up to our table afterwards and gave me free drinks and a big old hug. I've already told you about seeing Hedwig and the Angry Inch before I think - slightly different concept as the character of Hedwig identifies as non-binary and is not a drag queen, but in my mind the content of HatAI and the concept of drag performance are not entirely dissimilar. I also saw Hedwig in New York on that trip too, and that show changed me and inspired me for months after seeing it. The illussssiiooonnn, darling. I love the construction of an illusion for performance. I love the de-construction of an illusion for performance. I love performance as a constructive/de-constructive illusion. I love confusion, creating feelings for individuals in an audience that weren't there before. And I think that basically I just love theatre, but am no dancer or actor, so I rarely get to *feel* true theatre in my performative career - so I like to try and emulate it on my stage. I dunno why I love it/them so much, really. But I think that not being sure is the main point.
I have lots to say obviously, I haven't posted in a looooong time...but, of course, like I always seem to do, I've come back again. I'm cheating a little bit, because the following post is from my tumblr blog, but I thought it was long enough - lol - to transfer over.
-
last week i wrote a song about me being the literal grandmother of the group and feeling sad about not being edgy or cool in any way and i like the bridge even though it’s not very innovative or anything:
i am always the mother
always the first to bend
first to be the least interesting and
i am always the mother
always the early riser
cleaning up the morning after
feels like something i woulda written in high school but just better in every single way lol. that’s how a lot of my new stuff has been feeling recently and it feels really nice because it was a time where i wouldn’t doubt myself because of ‘cool’ standards or trends or anything, i just wrote about really beautiful and honest things - not so much innocent but with a youthfulness that is really sweet and hopeful in some ways.
i was djing with a new dear friend, who loves pop music just as much as i do, and he was telling me again how he thinks the best lyrics are completely devestating in context but, disregarding all context presented within the rest of the lyric, contain just a little bit of sparkling hope - sometimes variations of these are really cool, i thought, like sparkling but sarcastic hope, or irony, or bitterness, or acceptance - the list goes on - but the main equation is devastation + minuscule hope…it’s a great formula. i’m glad he pointed it out to me, as did his beautiful partner when we were away at falls. i think that’s why i like ‘summer skin’ by death cab for cutie so much, or that fucking song at the end of ‘for emma, forever ago’ - ‘re. Stacks’ - which has the lyric at the very end:
your love will be
safe with me
just fuck me up…and while we’re talking about bon iver, also ‘beth/rest’ from ‘bon iver, bon iver’:
all the news at the door
such a revelry
well, it’s hocked inside of everything you said to me
it was found what we orphaned
didn’t mention it would serve us picked
said your love is known
i’m standing up on it
aren’t we married?!
i ainʼt living in the dark no more
it’s not a promise, i’m just gonna call it
heavy mitted love
our love is a star
sure some hazardry
for the light before and after most indefinitely
danger has been stole away
this is axiom.
…
FUCK!! ME!!!! UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
in case you had to look it up like me axiom means a statement or proposition that is established, self-evidently true - like, ‘supply equals demand’. i love the word, once when i was young n dumb i very nearly got that line tattooed on me, but chickened out. maybe now i’m a bit less young but still pretty dumb i will reconsider. and every time i try to share bon iver with people their reaction is never as wild as i want it to be, as mine is - i bet i’ve done this in reverse to so many people who have shown me music before, it’s only natural, but it sucks! i am so crazy, crazy, crazy in love with bon iver and now i think it partly makes sense because of the devo/hopeful lyric theory.
the universe is trying to tell me something, gifting me a flurry of creativity before i have to work properly again, new songs every day - i often wonder which one, if any, will be the one, or if i’m yet to think of it at all. makes me shudder to think of the times when i have to fight to be creative, wonder why i would even choose this path in the first place - and then i remember that it wasn’t a choice anyway and i always write a billion more songs when the time is right.
falling back in. i have a list of songs i will listen to when the time is right because when those special things happen i’ve always had that magic by my side, and it’s nice to curate and control little things like that to look forward to. hearing myself on the radio, properly this time. going back to america, going on tour, sleepy-eyed in a bus somewhere across the country and remembering that this was exactly what i wanted
