Tag: friendship

We never did make it…

We never did make it to the Halloween party. Even though I was dressed as Eowyn, and you were dressed as Aragon, and we carried collectors’ swords and you carried a dagger that an elderly Asian lady on the train thought was a Samurai sword. The way we chuckled at her look of disappointment when she realised it was simply a Lord of the Rings dagger.

We never did make it to the Halloween party, and my little voice who sees the truth told me we’d never make it. It said we’d travel the train lines in humid, sweat coated circles, five hours on a Sunday, around and around. Me with my little brain voice and the louder brain voice that sings off-key in a child’s voice, singing for hope.

That is the way of it, the way of us.

There is always alcohol and drugs, and there’s always hope.

Hope that if I keep trying, that I can engage you with the world. Hope that if I only try a bit harder, you won’t need a beer, a Carlton dry long neck sipped from a paper bag at a Western Sydney train station, the Valium, a flutter at the pokies.

We never did make it to the Halloween party.

Remember

Remember that mixed cassette tape you made a friend in the 90s, before there was a Kate Bush renaissance inspired by Stranger Things, and no self-respecting teen would listen to that much electronic synthesiser in one song. Remember when you sat beside your old Sony Stereo in 1998 and recorded Kate Bush anyway, so your friend would have something to which she could laugh and listen, when she travelled to the back woods of Oregon. Because at 16 on the South Coast of Australia, you weren’t quite sure where Oregon was situated and whether they even had music there.

Remember the dreams you wrote with a friend, scrawled onto lined A4 paper, about the art gallery you would open and the cats you would own and the veranda upon which the two of you would sit, growing old. Remember another friend’s art school photography, and the collection you apparently inspired, where she photographed Henna tattoos on a belly dancer’s soft chest and muscular back.

 And actually, you don’t remember, not really. Not until they send you screen shots of the letters written, of the black and white photography, taken on a Hasselblad and processed in a photographic dark room in a time before smart phones and Instagram filters. And you still don’t remember these actual moments, but you remember how you made each other feel.

Hopeful. Inspired. Seen.

Remember friendship not merely as little moments, but also as feelings looped together on a mixed cassette tape. Today you’re celebrating friendship, not as a concept or a series of analogue remnants to be placed in a time capsule, but as feelings recorded and archived in the spirit.

And you’re thinking of memory, over pizza with two friends, one of whom is prematurely losing her mind.

This is not a metaphor.

You try not to think about the autopsy, that Alzheimer’s can only be truly confirmed after death, when an autopsy reveals a shrunken brain, filled with tangled proteins.

Today is a good day. Your friend remembers you. There will be a time when she won’t, but today over margherita pizza and fries, she remembers you, and there is laughter and, in your soul, there is a portable Sony stereo and a 90-minute cassette tape, and you remember to press record.

Five year plan

For Asha

“In five years, I will meet
strangers who wear my words as talismans, 
and those that cast my tales as anchor or sail-
I will cram ten lifetimes into five years 
brimming with laughter and rhythm and kindness, 
and my factory violin, sticky with rosin, chin rest 
fastened by lurid purple tape, 
will consume the cadence 
dormant in my bones so
in five years I will sit in the Gaelic club and over too many 
half spilled pints play a fiddle reel 
to time…

And in five years, Asha’s van will be a lighthouse, 
smithing journeylines into reclaimed 
carbon, metal, and stone.
Holly will have her pick of Othellos/but Mia will be her own Portia 
Kat K will travel lightly/but Gin will travel with abandon
and Nadia will speak sound into undulating air 
from the back room of a sanctuary
for animals saved from slaughter-
and why not include your friends 
in a five-year plan, though there is no
career enhancing movement
no property ladder on which to 
teeter dangerously.”

In the end I look at the doctor
measuring my meandering mind 
against standardised norms. 
“No,” I reply. “I have no five-year plan.”

a week of seeking solace

I feel broken, I have not felt broken like this before,

and the wise woman that reads your whispers,

 the one who breaks into Italian when she is delighted or drops her guard,

 she says maybe, maybe you are simply aware of these long-broken parts

and you speak these beautiful, awful truths to a forever friend

whose fingers are always moving and she says

think of pottery though

when the ceramic is being glazed, it looks like it is breaking,  

but no, it isn’t breaking,

and you’re not breaking, she says,

your surface is splintering but your interior is still intact

as she drives you to the ocean to comb moss

that grows like human hair on sea rocks

and there’s your friend with the renaissance soul

the latest one to make a new life and weary and sleep stolen

she introduces you as a writer first,

 not a teacher/therapist/ academic,

not a failed woman nor a would-be wife

and she says we must create because

nothing is secure and

life is uncertain

and life is short-

and this same week you are running to the river, and you are never too

quick that you cannot stop for the burst of cherry blossoms ushering spring

and this is a delight,

a kindness,

that you can stay still enough to capture the bees

dancing across blossom and bud

and across the road

you hear the man you cannot stop loving for his improbable love of unlikely song

and he’s playing the uillean pipes across the field

and you are breaking

still and the river

will take you, broken or cracking you are mostly organic, and your banyan tree will hold you amongst her buttress roots and will remind you that

all that lives

is prone to break.

beauty

“what do you like most about her?” you ask

and his brow furrows and his face tightens into a pensive line

“her braces, ” he replies, 16 and certain

also today your friend demolishes a wall to rescue a trapped kitten, five weeks of tortoiseshell fluff and squeak and

your coworker shares her hidden drawer of Cadbury chocolate for those times of internal screaming

another friend sits in the rain and captures water droplets on winter magnolia blooms

and later you’re in a car with someone who feels like safety and together on Canterbury Rd in peak hour

your voices harmonise so there is space for both breath and laughter

and today a kid who has screamed and cried and thrown Lego at the wall for a month looks at you and smiles

for the first time.

Near the tidal river

For my friend, N.

brotherfriend, she met him near the tidal river, where the jacarandas break their bloom.
he sang her Presley and Sinatra and told her of the fall-
skull-side, Broca-Wernicke side, 
brain space where words are born
after the fall and his syntax silenced and 
morphemes 
meandering.
he couldn’t speak but could sing Summertime, 
because you always remember your first
song. 

brotherfriend, she met him near the tidal river, where the terriers piss on her
buttress root stage, and the magpies munch worms in their paperbark stalls.
he watched her from his Tarago, 
but it wasn’t that sort of watching
and it wasn’t that sort of van and he chose his words
as though tasting, moving from mouth roof to tongue tip 
to lip so she caught the words in her eyes long before hearing
sisterfriend with the fiddle,
I didn’t want to disturb.
brotherfriend, she said, I was born disturbed,
beneath the sclerophyll sky, 
the air here is free
take a seat,
sing wordless for me.

brotherfriend she met him near the tidal river, where the mangroves swallow 
second-hand breath
he used to have nouns, 
abstract, 
proper, 
collective 
they used to hang from him and slide slipshod into speech. 
clever was a mask made of words, quick as the blue tailed wrens,
brotherfriend he sang to the aged, 
the dopamine deficient/ amyloid plaqued
brain dying,
-I bought him this before he passed. I can’t remember its name, three strings
 I’m leaving Sydney soon and I’d like you
to have this-

sisterfriend novice fiddler, joy junkie (connoisseur)
sisterfriend she walked from the tidal river, where the wordless gather in sound
because the jacarandas break their bloom 
and the terriers mark their trees 
and the mangroves gift them air and 
sisterfriend she walked towards heavy heat and bitumen boiling,  
a dead man’s dulcimer speaking
simply 
against her
sweat coated skin.