here?

Pfft

Let's try to get that link to work... HERE

She's back

And she's moving here.

I suppose they do say that a week can be a long time – a lot can change in that time.

For me, a fortnight has seemed a lifetime. Before, he wasn’t there. Maybe in the future he won’t be either. But in this moment, he is there. The thought keeps running through my mind, "I’m used to being alone". Used to it. Prefer it if the choice is time spent with someone who makes me feel more alone. But what happens when it is with someone who makes you feel very much, comfortably, not alone?

A fortnight is such a long time. The person I am each time I meet him is subtly different when we part. Not changed… softened. I’m the same, perhaps even more me, because some of the defences that I use to keep hidden away are sliding away themselves. I try to think just of the moment. I try to not think of any more than how I am feeling right then. I try not to second guess myself. Or what is happening. What is happening?

It sounds like something with a momentum of its own. Something I may not have control over. I can influence aspects of this journey, but it is happening, done, started, and none of it can be undone.

He is nervous, by nature perhaps, but still enthusiastic. We are both realistic that there are no guarantees. And I think there are many things that we need to learn about each other. About ourselves. But that’s something I now concede. No matter how much we think we know another person, we can never know them completely. People aren’t static. What makes us a successful species is our ability to change and adapt. It is also what makes us unknowable, even to ourselves, at times.

I don’t know that I even want to feel that I completely know a person anymore. It feels like an unhealthy, unbalanced situation. Free will is unpredictable and therefore uncertain. But who wants something that isn’t given and experienced in free will?

Betrayal

I didn't mean for it to come back.

But it came back, with a vengeance. My body has revolted, ignoring the agreement that it made with my mind to lock away my libido and let me get on with life calmly.

How pathetic am I that all it takes is a slight show of interest, from someone who hasn't even seen me yet, and it all unravels. I can't stop the thoughts; everywhere I look I see things that titilate me. Music, songs, voices, it all converts to caresses, so near-real that my skin craves the touch.

I don't want to be like this I tell myself, but myself calls me a liar.

The truth is I love every dirty grunty sweaty moment of it. Furtive glances at tanned bodies. Thrilled sensations of half-remembered touches. Featherlight or bruising and raw -- it all makes me feel that tell-tale deep ache that soon enough radiates into an undeniable throb.

Eyes ahead, my focus on my book is a lie. My attention is elsewhere, no matter how much willpower I use to call myself back to the words, sentence, paragraph.

An imagined sigh in my ear is all it takes. I'm pulled back into the skin-lust that has been denied for so long.

Written yesterday

Roughly 30°C and a gorgeous day, and I finally make my way out into the owrld mid-afternoon. I’ve spoilt myself with a café brunch, and sat there over a coffee while working out a shopping list that roughly stays with within the budget I’m going to have to live within this week. Next week’s budget will be even tighter, but the I think of the riches I have at hand, and I really cannot complain (or feel no need to).

Without the distractions of consumption (and how I love consumption, guilty pleasure), I have many things to concentrate on: new songs to learn for singing; new (and old) songs on the guitar, a blues harmonica to begin to learn to play; a recording studio unit to play with (and figure out before next weekend when on eof my singing teacher’s other students may be coming over to record something); a smorgasbord of CDs to listen to (and organise into the new shelves I have for them); a stack of books waiting to be read; editing workbooks to be completed; books on self-esteem to be read, exercises done; cats to be patted; long baths to be had; bike rides to be taken; T-shirt designs to b e thought up; tatoo designs to be researched; ideas for new projects to be written down; posts for the blog to b e thought up; generations of family photos to be scanned; new photographs to be taken; interesting ad hoc song lyrics and guitar tabs to be googled; and a selection of TV programs to be watched.

And in there, I shall fit working on a new assignment for a design studio that I haven’t worked for before. New people, new location, a reasonably long assignment. It is a good time for me to break old habits. I’m looking forward to this week.

*Wallowing Alert*

I’ve never claimed this to be anything other than a place for me to purge personal thoughts, to sift through them, slow them down, hoping I might find a nugget of sense amongst the slops… when really all there is, is dirty muddy water.

I had a strange weekend, one where I spent the most part of 60 hours straight asleep in an attempt to escape the migraine that overtook me on Thursday night. It wasn’t the worst, or anywhere near it. I didn’t wish to die. But it was exhausting.

Sunday afternoon saw me finally creep out of my bed feeling shaky and foggy and dizzy, but the pain had retreated, as had the nausea. It was about this time I got a phone call from Malcolm, the ex. He wanted to know what to do with some very old tax papers of mine he had found amongst his things while he was packing. Not long after that, I heard someone at my gate, and there he was, an unannounced visitor, with the papers under his arm (even though we’d agreed on him mailing them). It was so strange, and there was no time to talk, so we said a quick, awkward goodbye, and then he shook my hand. It was rather comical.

And then he was off, climbing into the cab that was taking him and his girlfriend off to the airport, to their new life in Melbourne, and I sat there, feeling sad. Even the friendship we’d managed to salvage has now come to an end.

It is all well timed. Our divorce was finalised today.

Last night I lay in bed, unable to sleep (not surprising, considering) as the time flicked over in its red squared numbers. 1.00 2.00 2.30 3.30 4.30

I lay there and the betraying tears squeezed out of my eyes, even though I tried to deny to even myself that they were there.

There’s noone left. Noone who knew me when I was married. Noone who knew me before then. Noone who knows any of my history. Noone who knew me as an angry and shy teenager, as a flirtatious twenty-something, as a person who was literally bowled over by a love she didn't know she was capable of. A person with a strength to walk away from a life that was damaging her. Noone who lived these things with me. Noone who might be able to look at me today and maybe still see a little of the potential that was there with youth.

The last friend from that time moved to Melbourne, herself, two months ago, with a promise to phone and email once she had settled in. I’ve not heard a word from her since. Which makes me ponder that friendship, too, really.

I lay there alone and thought "I am alone." With my cats for company, tolerated (just) by my immediate family.

How can someone end up 38 years old without a single friend?

Happy New Year

And, without wanting to sound too Hallmarkish, I hope 2007 brings peace to us all, personally, and on the international stage. (Call me naive, but I can still hope for it.)

I'm looking forward to reading some inspirational words in the next year (and who knows, maybe even writing... well, something!), as well as finally getting some things in my life into order that have been chaotic for far too long. No, I won't bore you with New Year's resolutions. Let's just say that these changes are no longer optional.

So, I hope you all enjoy the change of the year in good fashion, just as you would wish it to be.

cheers,

Hooch.

Work has been very quiet, and I've been trying to enjoy the free time, catching up on some much needed housework and just relaxing.

My mind wanders, sometimes, to thoughts that make me feel anxious. Mainly thoughts of money, and the lack of it, or my inability to not spend it, and the people that would very much like me to hand it over to them, if I actually had it [waves to the taxman]. But I try not to get too panicky about it (although even now I can feel the knot of anxiety swelling in my stomach). I take to my tapping exercise that my hypnotherapist gave me... accupuncture points I tap as I repeat self-affirming statements. "Even though I'm in a financial shit-hole, I am a valid person and worthy of love." You get the idea.

Christmas is also the time when I receive a card from my father and his wife. Since marrying wife #3 (who is a very nice woman, and my whole family wonders how long until she will see through his charm to the manipulative person behind it) the cards now come with either a present or cash. I feel uncomfortable. The gifts are very obviously instigated by W3, who comes from a close family where things like celebrating Christmas are very important. And I would be a liar if I didn't confess that the money helps over a time when work is very scarce. But it doesn't change the fact that he and I have reached an impasse in our relationship, and these gifts feel shallow and dishonest.

I've mentioned before that my father was someone I spent most of my life trying to appease, to make things easy so that he might spend time with me and my sister, and that there was always the underlying sense that if I didn't do this, things would fall in a heap. And that, when he had a breakdown and his second marriage came to a nasty end, I was the one he leaned on, talked to, saying very hurtful things about how much he regretted the mistakes he'd made before his second marriage, how everything before W2 was a mistake (ah, that would be me and my mother and my sister??). And I in turn would cry on my then-husband's shoulder, a hurt child wanting the love of her father still, and instead getting even more rejection from him.

During this time, something in me shifted. Hardened. Healed. I'm not sure, exactly, but whatever it was, it made me really step back from my relationship from my father and examine it. I realised that I let him treat me in a way that I would not have accepted from any other man in my life, and I decided that I wasn't going to tolerate it any more. So, once he married W3 (coincidentally at the same time that then-husband and I were going through our marriage breakdown) and then decided to move 1500km away, I felt it was time for me to let him go, to resign myself to the fact that I would never be able to rely on him or show any form of vulnerability. At about this time I asked him not to ring me any more.

It sounds harsh, maybe even cruel, but I was trying very hard to pull myself back together after my life had fallen into a heap [marriage break up, broken leg, redundancy, all within 12 months] and I simply didn't have the emotional energy to cope with these hours-long phone conversations in which he didn't even stop to ask how I was doing... simply used me as a sounding board for the things in his life he was still unhappy about [W2 being a bitch, in his words, and his kids from his second family not reacting favourably to his moving so far away while they're still in school, for example].

So, I asked him not to call anymore. He could email, I said, because that gave me time to reply, much easier for me to work with considering my erratic work hours, etc. But phoning simply was difficult because I was never sure when I would be home and I couldn't talk while I was at work anymore.

I've never received a single email. I get a card for my birthday and a card for Christmas, and I always write, thanking him and W3, and leave it open ended so he could reply, but he never does. It seems we are alike. He won't talk to me unless it is under his terms. And I cannot afford to talk to him unless I can feel it is going to be something more than him using the nearest convenient emotional crutch. I just don't have the resources to do that. I think I'm worth more consideration.

So, I look at the card, the flowery sentiments printed, the short message hand written, the postal order, and wonder whether, this year, I should simply tell him not to bother anymore. But I can't do that. That would feel too cruel. Maybe deep down I still hope that he might just get it one day, and I don't want to cut that last tenuous thread of connection. Plus, if I did, then I know he'd cut off my sister as well, and I can't do that to her. She still has hope, where I just have weary resignation.

On days like today, I don't know how I can be a good person and still maintain my integrity. I really don't know the best thing to do.