Are Memories Made Of This?

I fell in love once, with a broken boy who fell off the wall and hard as I tried, much as I wanted to, I couldn't put the pieces together again. Nothing quite describes the particular agony of loving someone to the point of desperation in the vain hope that some of that energy will break through the fortress around their heart, mind and soul. Some of you will know what I mean. Some of you will have lost someone to the realm of darkness that is intense melancholia. I believe the experience of living with this darkness is as mystical, mythical, magical, painful, surreal and beautiful as it is pathological. I willingly got lost in that darkness, looking for the boy who needed love, craved love, desired to be loved but the forest was dense, the river too deep to cross, and I was not the one who could pull the sword out of the rock and save the day.

I don't fit in.

I never did.

Maybe you don't either. Or maybe you have loved someone who lives in that parallel world where one is constantly in a state of intense melanchoy or intense euphoria. A heightened sense of reality. Or: a chemical imbalance in the brain. Listen to what the Good Doctor has to say. Take your pills now, one by one, yum, yum.

Mad, Bad, Beautiful, Luminous.

He was.

Dying all the time. Crying all the time. Lying all the time.

And me asking Why all the time?

I wanted to believe I was his saviour. The arrogance of youth, the romance of self-destruction. I was the one who poured the wine and drank to the Good Times and picked up the mess in the Bad Times.

Okay, I admit it. Sometimes I was the Bad Time. Like everyone who loved him, I too wanted to shake him so hard that he would just snap out of it.

He had a secret weapon, to keep Love at bay like all good fairytales. The Girl who makes love to the Prince will inevitably die because of a curse put on him by the Wicked Witch who shared needles.

Welcome to the Basement, where Love goes to Die.

I embraced him, held him tight and rode the waves of his despair until finally it lead me to the Emergency Room. When you have a 72-hour window to save your own life, things get very real, very fucking quickly. There is no escaping the fact that Hospitals are pathological spaces. Dreams fall apart, and illusions are shattered under those harsh lights. This is where the broken come to be repaired, the moment at which one is utterly bound to one's body. Emergency. Urgency.

The Prince spontaneously combusts, leaving the Girl Who Loved Him standing amidst a cacophony of pain, suffering and of course, sirens. The ominous wailing which cuts through the night, a constant reminder that the Grim Reaper is coming for you and I one day.

Of course, I ran from the hospital. Precious hours thrown away because my heart couldn't withstand the truth. For the next 48 hours, I was in Denial. I did not want to give in to the pathological reality because I wanted to believe in the power of the mythical. Infected with Love, infected with Death. I ate the poisoned apple and I paid the price. You can love, and love, and love a person but it won't always save them. You know how it is with young lovers and their tragedies. Another hour passed, and another.

It was a close friend who came crashing in to my apartment, and drove me back to the Emergency Room. His brother had died recently. Death, everywhere. Mine, preventable. My friend so angry, so very angry with me, pulled me down to the car, my fairytale was shattered, landed back in the Emergency Room.

There is something intensely intimate about having someone who cares about you hold your hand as your world falls apart. His friendship was the anchor that kept me hanging on when I was so close to letting go.

I don't know which hurt more, the series of intramuscular injections that saved my life, or the knowledge that sometimes you have to walk away from the mythical fairytale of Love and into Reality with a capital R. I now have lifetime immunity to the curse of death the Prince carries. I cultivated that in a very pathological way, over the six months it took me to disentangle my emotions, and reconstruct my body chemistry.

If ever I had broken wings, it was then. It was a slow crawl from the darkness back into the light, but eventually I made it.

Now and then you might fall in love with someone whose wings are broken beyond repair, a flightless bird that just doesn't know how to be in this world, at this time.

Love them while you can.

Let it hurt.

Forgive them.

Set them free.

Then start crawling towards the light, and keep going until you find you are flying on your own again.

As for you Lost Prince:

Never forgotten. Completely forgiven.

FIONA

Dating Failures Part One: Scene from an Italian Restaurant

As far as first dates go, it wasn’t bad really. I mean we had our disagreements, but if one were to tick off a checklist, which of course I did, there was a more than average chance of things working out between us. Adjustments would have to be made of course. No two people are perfect together. He was certainly not. Perfect that is. But it is fair to say his knuckles weren’t dragging along the floor, which is a vast improvement on my taste in men to date. Not sure how I developed a thing for Neanderthal but I am content to blame my public school experiences; you know we learn no manners or etiquette in the wasteland of poverty-stricken suburbia, it’s enough to just survive.

So we ate pasta, drank some red wine, I mean these are ordinary pleasures for extraordinary times – have you noticed the world is falling apart? Lately. Seems like Love is all we have left and that is difficult to find. So he tells me that I look nice by the candlelight, and I say something like ‘thanks, you picked a good drop’. He doesn’t look as nice by the candlelight. What am I supposed to do, lie? There’s a little bit of pasta sauce stuck to his collar, and it’s distracting me, he is losing ground because the longer I stare at the stain, the larger it gets, until all I can see is a clumsy idiot who can’t put food into his mouth, an infant I am going to have to spoon feed. Still these are trying times and I am not yet ready to rule out casual sex, although god knows if he can steer his dick with any more grace and integrity than his fork.

We are sizing each other up. There is no getting around this. Nobody has time to make mistakes in the dating game anymore, as Time pushes on and women cry foul as their reproductive abilities whither. I’m getting a little grey. I think my time is done, which is fine, I’m in my prime, and my focus is on the big O, orgasm.

I’m studying his hands, thinking about that schoolyard equation about hand span equalling the length of the male penis when erect. Of course this doesn’t give any clue to girth, and girth of the penis is almost as important to my mind, as length. He is talking about hopes and dreams he has, something about setting up his own business, which makes me wonder if he can’t take direction from other people. Like from me, later in the bedroom. I already run my own business. My commitment phobia is right out there, on the table. In the past I’ve found this turns a lot of men on. Kind of like how the reverse is true for women—some women go wild for a man wearing a wedding ring because it symbolises an ability to make a commitment. Ironic. The women rarely see that though, I notice.

Over sticky date pudding I am tempted to ask for his views on feminism, but really what I want to know is if he gives oral. Still, the way the sticky date pudding is sticking to his chin turns me off. Why doesn’t he notice? Perhaps he isn’t a details man. Details matter to me. I’ve experienced too many misunderstandings based on missing details. Those little pieces of information like, ‘actually I am married and should have mentioned it sooner’, or my personal favourite, ‘yes, I was arrested but nobody died, it wasn’t murder.’ Sticky date on the chin, mishandled, becomes sticky date on my genitals. Well in a perfect world it does. I don’t think he’s an oral kind of guy though; he seems to be looking for Love instead of Sex because he’s talking about the fate of humanity. We’re all doomed. We only have each other to cling to. Need to re-set our priorities. This litany is beginning to sound like a list of excuses for being a bad fuck. This date needs to end.

We share a cab home. We both know there is nothing more to be said this evening. No Love, no Lust, and just another failed attempt at trying to connect with a stranger you met in a lift at the Office. Seemed like a nice idea at the time, to go and have dinner together and now it’s just an awkward conversation about the weather. Nobody needs to call anybody; we’ll see each other the next day, and the day after. I think it’s time for me to apply for a new job. Take off. The Grey in my life is suffocating me.

FIONA

The Bridge Over Troubled Waters Saved Me From Drowning

Every woman I've spoken to in the Days After What Was tells me that four years without oral sex is ... "reason enough". A peculiar fear spreads across their face, reflected in their eyes as the truth sinks in. Four years. No oral sex. Could this happen to them too? As each white picket of the white picket fence is hammered deeper into the ground, as accumulated debts pile higher and higher, as shiny bright things replace the pleasures of the flesh that were indulged once upon a time when passion mattered. Oh yes, when passion mattered, or indeed, when passion existed.

I knew a man once who loved to pleasure me in that way. He couldn't actually articulate the specifics of the action, it became "That", as in "I like doing That to you." I still had my reservations about oral sex - as in oral sex being performed on me. The clitoris is a delicate thing, tricky to navigate despite it's small size. I mean so much can go wrong can't it? Mine, for example requires a light touch, so I always look at a man's hands, just a quick glance mind you, to assess the potential compatibility of his fingers with my clitoris. Perhaps men look at a woman's mouth with a similar objective: how would it feel to have those lips on my penis? I don't have "fellatio" lips, so it's all in the sucking and licking. These are learned skills; one has to compensate. Anyhow, this man who liked to do That. He was so good at it I changed the way I pleasured myself. This was the Turning Point in oral sex for me. I'd been so indifferent, and even a little embarrassed and uncomfortable with having a man go There to do That up to that point. Made me want to crawl the fucking walls, the things he did to my clitoris. Had to stuff a sheet in my mouth to stop myself screaming and waking up his housemate. It's a bit like discovering you have the capacity to burn DVDs on your laptop after owning it for four months. As in, suddenly a wealth of possibility opens up.

There's nothing quite like coming in a man's mouth.

Mary. Mother. Of God.

When the orgasm is that intense it makes you want to weep, when the pleasure is unbearable, when in the moment of climax you are entirely, utterly shattered, exposed and vulnerable. Oh yes, completely changed my views on both oral sex, and masturbation techniques.

So, four years passed.

Without.

Until recently, when I was reminded of the wealth of possibilities.

Boom bada bada Boom.

FIONA

Disappearer

There we are then. In the walls, under the floorboards, everywhere in this house and there, upstairs, a little of your breathing, a shadow of you left over from some other time before. You are the disappearer. You have some kind of finality about you. Like coming to an end of a book you can’t put down, your reading slows a little, not wanting to reach the full stop of the last sentence. But then again, were you really that compelling? You certainly put me down more than once and it certainly wasn’t a gentle placement on the side board next to the bed we never really shared. I never knew how to read you anyhow. We had one of those thick kind of plots, all messy and going nowhere. And I lost your character along the way somewhere. I guessed you were a pivotal figure in a landscape who, at some unexpected point, was never to return. There you go, off into the deep dark distance, fading out. But this was less classic fiction and more soap opera. Will they bring you back from the dead? Will you return re-born or as the villain in the piece with a unresolved case of brain damage or amnesia. How will this story progress with you and I? How would you like it to end – or even better, to begin again? Will there be flashbacks to our shady past such as the time when you were here and then you were not. It was an intrigue. You were nowhere to be found. I caught a plane to the other side of the world hoping to find you but you were not at the arrivals gate. You were always more inclined towards waiting at the departure lounge. Bags ready and packed. But I don’t give up. I drive out over the flatlands hunting you down, calling various telephone numbers, hoping to find an exit off the freeway that would lead me to your new town, but there was no exit and there was certainly no answer. I took wrong turns off unmarked tracks. These were the kinds of roads you would lead me down. These were the kinds of roads you’d end up dead on. There was an agreement between us that you were not keeping. There was a year of discussion to lead us toward some kind of future. There was a house involved, a dog, perhaps a child, there were walks in the park, trips away, the meeting of families, dinners cooked and eaten, long nights and mornings spent doing nothing. There was remote sex and web cameras when we were apart. Telephone conversations on international call cards between Australia and somwhere far away. Conversations about being the strange one in the family, about living in small towns with redneck values, about violence and running away, about illness and self-harm, about feeling lost, about desire for another world and each other in it and desparately wanting to touch. Conversations about not being able to trust other people anymore. They only make you sad, they only disappoint, you would say. And I would agree. I recollect a time you once told me about, a time when you were convulsing and foaming at the mouth from an epileptic fit, pretty much helpless – and your boyfriend at the time did nothing to help you, he got embarrassed, with you left shaking and choking and wheezing on the sidewalk while strangers stepped over you and some of them stopping to look and only one who would help and call an ambulance, who had to fumble around in your bag looking for some kind of medication – and this guy, your so-called boyfriend was probably throwing back a beer in the club you always hated. Or maybe he was laughing with your other so-called friends and continuing to not care about your dying frothing body on the street. You told me about how your depression is triggered by forgetting to take your pills and your various subsequent suicide attempts. How easy it would be to disappear, you would say. How simple it would be to vanish, to never be seen again, to slowly melt away. And so you did. For two whole years you appeared quite real to me, quite fleshy and tangible. Something I could hold. For two years we had become ‘almost there’. For two years, these small steps to solidity. How easy it is to watch things break apart. And I suppose these steps we took, marks left in the sand, disappear too, out to sea, washed away, off they go. With your shadowy self… a ghost. Your body was unreal.
JASON