Little White Liar

Jac and our box

Last night my flatmate turned to me during the commercial break of Grey's Anatomy and asked, "Do you think I'm glowing?" Between her frizzy brown bun and vague double chin there was a hopeful smile.

I had a horrible feeling that this was the opening to an uncomfortable discussion about her sex life (which would take place under our shared roof). Even more uncomfortably, I couldn't be positive that this conversation would be finished before the show came back on.

"Err...you look kind of skinny today?" was my response.

"Because one of my friends told me a couple of days ago that I was glowing. I wanted to see if anyone else thought so."

Since I think that "glow" was something invented by families of pregnant women to compliment the sweaty bloated process of manufacturing humans, I wasn't able to comment much further. I turned up the volume on the TV and thought, there is no way this is going to work out.

In the three weeks we've shared a house, the stories have developed nonstop. Jac has a new computer that she doesn't know how to use; when I tried to help her put together a slideshow of project photos for work, she seemed more interested in making me look closely at each picture of her. She expected comments on each one - does she look tan, young, thin? Jac keeps the only phone in the house in the shared area, and she does not leave the room when I speak to my boyfriend. When I hang up, she shares her views on the half of the conversation she has overheard. Sometimes she doesn't wait until I put the phone down - she speaks into my other ear, desperate to participate.

Over a pile of her three-day-old dishes, Jac warns me that the five crumbs left by my cracker lunch are going to attract the roaches. She requests that I clean the bathroom full of her fallen hairs, that I take out the recycling overflowing with her discarded cans, that I drop off the DVDs she has rented while I'm "on the way" to the opposite direction.

Once Jac told me her debit card had been eaten by the ATM; she had forgotten her pin. Since she wouldn't be able to retrieve it for awhile, she wanted the next week's rent in cash, immediately. Her forgetfulness seeps over into my life frequently. She called me two weekends ago while I was at a sporting event to ask if I was at home.

"No, I'm at the Swans game, why?" I screamed over the crowd yelling.

"Oh, nothing. I think I might have left the stove on and wanted you to check it." I did not enjoy the game much after that.

Last week Jac told me that she was having a friend over to stay. He would be on our couch for two nights, she said, and I thanked her for the heads-up. When I got home that night a tall American named Jimmy was unpacking a big red backpack in the corner of our living room.

He talked to me with the same sense of camaraderie that all Americans abroad except me seem to want to share. Jimmy asked, "Do you guys do this often?"

"What, have guests over? I guess. I've only been living here two weeks."

"I meant have couch surfers. I saw a review from basically every month for the past two years on the website," Jimmy clarified. A whole secret life of the house opens up. Jac takes strays from the internet, backpackers who can't afford hostels, and puts them up on our couch. She provides them with house keys and maps of the area. I wonder if she gives them a diagram pointing to all the valuables in the house to make it as easy as possible to rob us with the $3 copies they make of the keys. I suddenly felt that my laptop and camera were very vulnerable behind the plywood door of my $260/week bedroom.

I have allowed an Australian man named Patrick to take me out on three dates. This isn't very ethical, I know, but free food and the company of a male whose first language is English is kind of refreshing after months living with the "Oh your people do that, my people do this" kind of conversations that define my relationship with Kevin. Jac disapproves of this arrangement, but she invited herself and Jimmy on one of my dates, and then changed the restaurant and movie selection Patrick and I had made. She ordered for the whole group once we were seated. When I rebelled and chose my own dish, she scoffed at my choice. When Patrick stood up to get me a drink, she requested one for herself. Exasperation made me suspicious - did she want him for herself? Then I wondered - would it be worth it to sacrifice him to get her out of my way? Hm.

Song of Sydney

"Oh, welcome home!" they say, pretending that my home isn't 12,000 miles away as the phone flies.

"You must be so relieved," and "What are you up to this week?" and "We missed you!" my few friends chorus in a dozen different voices in my ears or numbers on my caller ID.

What I want to ask them but never could is: "I'm wondering if this was right" and "Can you go back?" or "Do you believe in signs?"

What I'm up to this week is filing my American taxes, paying the fine for being double-taxed. I'm waiting for my monthly paycheck and then hopefully getting a bed installed in my new place so that I can stop sleeping like a squatter on a futon on the floor. I'm gathering my transcripts from three American universities, having them authorized, and then applying to the Masters program at the University of Sydney; crossing my fingers at the translation of GPA to English honors systems. I'm waiting in an hour-long line to have my visa sticker placed in my beaten passport so that I'm legal. I'm sitting on the phone for forty-five minutes a day trying to negotiate prices of private health insurance packages, I'm calling Apple to see how my laptop is doing without me, I'm hounding my superannuation funds to pay me the $900 they owe.

I'm ignoring my obsessive long-distance boyfriend; I'm prematurely beginning another relationship with an Australian man that both exhilarates and crushes me. This makes me a first-time cheater. In my newfound selfishness, I'm refusing to cook - choosing instead to frequent the $5 dinner specials at the local Indian and Thai take-away places. Instead of saying "take-out" I'm now saying "take-away." I'm turning down free desserts but batting eyelashes at the Bengali man across the counter. I'm dreaming of Asia in first reel Technicolor - somehow both bright and washed out.

I'm trying to get a driver's license in this country, and trying to re-learn how to drive. I'm trying to erase and reverse two and a half decades of looking both ways so that I don't get slapped with the front fender of a car coming from an international direction across the pedestrian walkway. I'm designing and publishing my own magazine without enough time, guidance, experience, confidence, and soon the printer will be asking for the final copy whether or not there are typos or bleeds out of place. I'm obsessing over one flatmate and avoiding another. I'm falling back into the habit of checking plane tickets to wherever, whenever.

Yes mom, I'm fine.

Composition Challenge: My One (Thousandth) Word

Composition Challenge: I am adrift.

 

Talking to my family for the first time in a month

I tell them I don't want to talk about the stress of work, the outrageous price of my new house, the gap a friend's family death leaves in my social schedule, the strain on my romantic relationship, the dire straits of my bank account, the extreme Australian summer humidity, visas, immigration offices, or any of the other factors that make my chest hurt. I want to talk about home.

My mom says, "So in the dream I heard a huge knock on the upstairs door and I sat up in bed, gasping. I shook Tom and asked if he had heard that noise, and to go check the lock. No one ever comes up those stairs, you know? But it was me who went to the door, and when I opened it two strangers from the street burst in and they were carrying [my mother] between them. She looked like she had been hit by a car or something, and she was totally limp. The guys said, 'Get [your brother]!" and for some reason he was sleeping in the room next to mine, so I got him. And she died in front of us. I mean, I know she's old and she only has, what? 10 years left? But man, what a trip that dream was. So I called her the next day and it turns out at that exact time she was having an anxiety attack about her health." Somehow the story of my mother's nightmare about her mother comforts me. Like if I have an accident overseas, a dream will warn her before the phone card chain of extreme long-distance calling can.

My brother gets on. He says he received the gifts I sent. He knew, unbelievably, what the Tiki was without asking. I get the same surrogate mother shock as always over how smart he becomes in my absence - where does he learn these things? He tells me he's moving into a new apartment, alone. I suspect it's bigger and he confirms it's cheaper than the place I'm living in, back in Sydney. My stomach curls around the suspicion I may not be home in time to see his first little nest or go on a stealth mission to stock his fridge. Because of this I force him describe it in too much detail, trying to see with my ears.

Changing the subject he touches a forbidden topic by saying, "What's going on with you and that guy?"

"We're still together, but I don't know."

"Don't know about what? Whether you can handle being apart?"

"Long distance relationships just..." I pretend there's a phone delay so I can gather my thoughts.

"Never work," he finishes.

"I want out but." I love or loved him. I need or needed him. I want or wanted him.

"You care about him and don't want to hurt him." My brother sighs over the Pacific and saves me from it.

Composition Challenge: One (Thousandth) Word

1) Finish this sentence with precisely one word:

"I am __________."

The word cannot be a name.

2) Illustrate that single word with a photo you took before you ever read this entry.

If the word accurately describes your life, you shouldn't have a problem finding a photo of it laying around.

Happy heartbreak

Deciding to move in together was easy - we had been living with one another unofficially since the night that we met. It was after the decision that things began to get tough. There were the arguments about which places to consider; how many roommates we would like (me: lots, him: none); which utilities must be included (him: must be able to bring own internet); whether pets or smokers could be accepted. In trying to become stationary, we began bickering about transportation. Being a rider of public transportation in a city that offers very little of it, I wanted to stay close to the central business district. As a car owner in need of cheap and easy parking, Kevin was keen to get as far away from the city traffic as possible. Infuriatingly, he measured travel distances by time in a car I will never own in this country.

We viewed places and there was new reasons to fight - I grow overly bubbly in an attempt to impress housemates with my friendliness. Kevin grows overly introverted in his attempt to take everything in. Together, we come off as the lion and the mouse of social living. Our relationship grinds against itself as it scrapes forward. But we love each other.

Finally we find a place that suits us both and we put down a bond. We sign a contract one rainy Friday night at Kevin's kitchen table, sitting across from a flamboyant young Aucklander in his clubbing best. A week later, six days before the move date, the same fragile young homosexual calls me at work to pull out of the agreement so that his mother can move in instead and help nurse his heartbreak. It starts over.

There's another week of the old stress. The grating on all the wrong parts of each other. The stress that has me thinking against all my better sense that it might be a good idea to break things off with the best thing that happened to me in this godforsaken country. There's six days of frantically looking at increasingly run-down flats. There's nights of bad, distracted, and frequently apologetic sex. There's crying on my part, there's worries of homelessness on his part. And then there's wishing to be somehow delivered from the limbo land of all of this: the hating of a job, the discomfort in an entire city, the inability to find a home, the disconnection of a loved one, the missing of family.

On Friday, without notice, my email inbox informs me that my Australian visa has been processed and approved. I am demanded back in Sydney by my employers within two weeks. Kevin and I move temporarily in with the gay guy, and each box placed into the moving truck by my aching arms feels like the delivery of a baby you know to be stillborn. These next two weeks I will sleep in the bed that Kevin bought for our new apartment, and then I will leave his side prematurely, wondering how things could have changed so drastically in two weeks. Wondering how long I will be left to wonder which way things would have turned out if we had moved in together permanently last week, instead of breaking up next week.

Cohabitation

Amanda went away for the weekend and all she brought me were these stupid photos

 

A story I told over dinner last week

It's such a warm night that we insist on a table outside after 8pm, even though I'm wearing short sleeves. I know that this sort of dining is called "alfresco" only because Lily Allen has dominated my iPod for the past work week, making hours bounce-bounce-bounce. If there are mosquitos in New Zealand, we have not yet discovered each other. If there is better hand-pressed tortellini than that back-alley pizza place in Parnell, I haven't fallen into it yet. I look up at the sky after finishing my meal and I watch the dots to see if they move. In the black-blue of the sky falling, the lights aren't helicopters.

"Hey, look. Five stars," I tell Kevin and when he lifts his head the sky (with its tilted moon and ghost clouds) slides across his glasses and reminds me.

So I say, "You almost never see stars in the city, even one as small as Auckland. In Sydney I almost never saw them, and I was always looking because I really wanted to see the Southern Cross. One weekend I went away to Anna Bay, Nelson Bay, those Bay places, and spent my first night at a teenage goth party. There were mattresses in the back yard. There was a band in all black screaming at their mics. There was a tire swing hanging from a tree but the tire had come off so it just looked like an unrolling noose. I ate a pot cookie to feel a little more comfortable. It didn't work immediately so I ate two more.

"When I finally convinced the guy driving to get us out of there, he took the long way back to the house we were staying in. I sulked in the back seat with my friend and tried to ignore the couple groping in the front seat. The driver parked the car on one of those beach parking lots that looks like one good gust could make everything all Day After Tomorrow.

"He said there was something we had to see before going home. Past midnight, not stoned, not drunk, and very cranky, I stomped through the sand paths until the top of the hill collapsed and the view opened up. Two dunes were in front of us, massive and black against the sky, and in the middle there was beach and ocean and this massive moon so close. The tide was funny - the wet part of the sand stretched for fifty yards and since nobody had walked on it for hours it was perfectly flat and reflective. The sky was full of stars and the beach was full of their mirror sisters. Everything was lit up. We walked down to the water and looked at the moon, totally silent, and I realized that I was probably pretty stoned when I rubbed my eyes to keep from crying.

"The next day, after I woke up and figured the whole thing had been a dream but then the girl part of the couple got a text from the boy part of the couple. He had been up all night painting, and the picture on the phone screen was an exact miniature of the picture I had in my mind. I'm so glad I didn't have a camera. I'm always going to remember that.

"It's like the stars were fallen."

**********

Two things:

1) Big ups to the person from NBC Universal who read like, my entire archives. I hope you're not my mom!

2) On a somewhat related note, I haven't updated those "Best of LWL" links over there on the left in forever, and I'm not sure how to go about doing it. Which is a bummer, because that's the first place it seems all new people go. But my favorite posts get ignored and the ones I slap together get comments from strangers. Do you guys have any particular favorites? Help me.

What is love?

Is love waking up beside a person, and going to sleep beside the same person, with each whispering dream or twitching roll a lullabye for the other? Is it knowing what the other will have for breakfast, and making dinner in turns, and meeting up for lunch halfway through the work day just to sit in the sunshine and make faces over menus? Or is it thinking of moving to a place you never intended; is it considering staying in a place you never accepted? Is the thing that makes you mindful of the times and places and ways you move your body called a certain word?

Is love holding the very word inside your mouth for a week solid because letting it out so soon has been labeled premature birth? Working up the courage one day in Waiheke and writing "I" in the sand, only to have him wipe it away immediately? Is it not being mad or sad at the swallowed confession because what comes up in the blank tablet of beach is your own name in the swirling other-world script of Persian? Or letting the other person say that phrase not once or twice or three times before you muffle him, request a ban on all words that strong to surround something so necessarily fleeting?

Is love carrying one bag between two people, a single shoulder burdened by the weight of double accessories of personality? Is it, then, tucking carefully someone else's belongings into one such pocket while, unknown to you, a bus skates around the corner behind you and aims its front fender directly at your spine? Or, facing the other direction, refusing to be one of the many people whose faces open up in surprise, instead being the one person who reaches in between the girl and the bus and yanks them apart? If so, if you sit trembling in a bus seat while a girl who should be maimed sits giggling beside you, unaccepting of the danger she was in - if you can kiss her and not shout at the driver or strangle the laughter from her throat, are you in love?

What about an ongoing suspicion that you're one-half of the cutest pair in any room? The alienation of friends new enough to still have stories you've never heard, and a lack of care that you might never hear them? If you'd rather watch old episodes of a TV show on a small laptop screen with one person than the latest movie releases in the cinema with any other human, what does that mean? Out of 37 nights, when you spend only 2 in your own (queen) bedroom, and 35 crushed in his (twin) bed breathing the same air back and forth, would you use that word?

 

Is it love if one person hates tomatoes and the other wants extra? Or if a tremble of his cologne passes you on the street and your stomach knots until the air clears? Does the knowledge that someone else will clear your discomfort (a bad seat, an annoying friend, an airless room) with a sentence come with the knowledge of another word? If you do things that you don't want to do, and like them, what led you there?