I was eight and in year four and it wasn’t a very sunny day at all. My mother told me how she and my dad saw the second tower get hit and collapse live the night before. She said she was terrified, but I didn’t even remember what the twin towers looked like — the only twin towers I knew were my own. I went to school and discussed childish conspiracy theories with my friends and forgot about it for the rest of the day.

Somebody’s tragedy was only a month of newspaper headlines to me. It’s such a silly, scary thought, but it was and is and always will be such a landmark of an event. It brought along with it a lot of hope and also a lot of hate. I like to contemplate how much less negativity and fear there would be about certain things in our society if 9/11 never happened, but it’s exhausting and tiresome and I have no time left to be sad anymore.

Ten years on, though, and I still cry like a baby.

(Source: gypsyspeak)

“What I like about you,” he says, “is that you seem quite smart, kind of clever, unlike your friends. No offense to your friends.”

He counts to three and together we swallow it. I can feel it burn my throat, all the way down to my stomach. I wince and he sees this. “It’s good, isn’t it?” and hands me a cup of something clear. “This will make it even better.” I think it’s vodka, but it’s not. It’s just water.

He is solid, there is no other way to say it. Skinny and slight but solid; every move he makes is one he’s rehearsed, over and over until he knows he can sail them. His father lives somewhere exotic — Switzerland, maybe, or perhaps it was Norway — and his mother has married a man who pretends he doesn’t exist. Impossible, I think. Who could ignore you.

Smoke escapes his lips as he speaks. It dances to the roof of the car and lingers there until I forget to look. He hasn’t opened any windows — it’s way too cold, he says, and I didn’t bring my gloves.

“I think my favourite words are all body parts. I like lungs, limbs, bones.”

“They’re nice words. They’re soft.”

“Also jaw, cheek. Face. They’re not very soft but they’re nice too, aren’t they?” he looks at me, expectant. I pretend not to see him from the corner of my eye. Instead I stare ahead, through the windshield, even though I can’t see anything — the window is foggy from the breath of his laughing.

“I like words that end in -escent,” I tell him.

“Like crescent?”

“Like effervescent, but crescent also.”

Outside the world is sleeping. Everything is quiet, everything is still. Everything feels nonexistent but inside I am ablaze with life, or danger, or maybe it’s the weed. There is a constant humming in the air — someone in their car, inside rooms with their lover. Eventually the humming makes me crazy and I ask for some music, for some noise.  ”I only have one cassette, and it’s my mom’s,” he apologises. “That’s another nice word, cassette. It sounds like a girl’s name.” “You’re thinking of Caselle,” I tell him. 

He is lonely but he will never admit it. Instead he likes to talk with a smugness in his voice, like he’s going to live forever, even though he smokes and he drinks and he drives too fast on highways. His fingers are long and warm and he wraps them around mine, pretending we are in love, but we’re not. For a second I think I can feel his heartbeat in his palms but I realise it’s my own, and I wonder why I’m afraid. Maybe it’s too soon, I think. I feel like my heartbeat shakes the car and I suggest we go home, but before he starts the engine he tells me he thinks I’m beautiful. I stare at my thighs. “That’s nice of you to say.”

In the morning I wake up in my own bed and he is next to me, sprawled on his side. He is handsome and has the kindest eyes, but he smells like dust and cigarettes and looks so terribly afraid. I ask him if he is alright. “Your hair is really long,” he replies. The next time we see each other he pretends to have forgotten my name.

(Source: gypsyspeak)

You sound so terrible and reckless to my ears. I want to shake the child inside you so it spills from your eyes but you’ll have none of it. You say it will be alright, everything’s okay, it won’t matter after tomorrow. There is blood on my knuckles; I’ve never hit someone before and it stings. I was a child when I put bruises on my thighs, but I’m fifteen now. I’m old, old enough, and your sister is yelling at you, asking what I’m doing there, why you brought me. You tell her to calm down and she slams the door and drives away in her little green car. I’m crying but you don’t notice because you’re pacing the hallway with shaky fingers. The books on your bookshelf are nicer than mine are — they are more worn out and they smell like dust and they are by authors whose names I have yet to learn. Two years later I realise they are wonderful; Wallace and Fry and Tullis and Stoddard and Eldridge.

I am sixteen and you call me Jemima, after a girl you used to know with an accent like mine. You are smoother now, less painful, less hurtful. You tell me you’ll miss me when I move to Australia, you say the city will die a little. I laugh and tell you the city will be brighter because I won’t be there to steal the light. This is a joke, of course; I am dull, you told me that. We share a cigarette, but I hate smoking. I tell you I’ll miss you too. We sleep in your car until the sun rises at seven, and then you buy me breakfast from McDonald’s and bring me home. We feel like best friends but I hate you. I don’t eat your food. You call me anorexic. I close the car door and tell you I’ll call you that night, but I don’t. 

My phone rings and it’s you, we haven’t spoken in months. I’ve been away from home for a year now. You whisper my name like a question, I reply with a sniff so you know I’m there. You tell me about your day, about how you were in the hospital, about how it made you think of me. I don’t answer. Well, you say, thanks anyway, and I hope you like your life now. The phone beeps with an ended call and I try to bite my fingernails but I have none left. I cry because I hate me and I have too much work to do for my stage two math class. Also, I miss home.

I am three months to nineteen now, I feel like a lady but not like a woman. My Saturdays sound like you if I let them. I have new friends, they drive me places and buy me drinks and roll me cigarettes and tell me secrets about their lives. I know everyone’s stories. I stay up late because I feel less homesick after four in the morning. Sometimes I cry but I don’t know why; things are wonderful for me. I study journalism and public relations at university, I like it and I’m doing well. I’m looking for a job but I can’t find one. I still take pictures but no longer play the piano. There are photographs of you under my bed in a plastic bag, I think I will throw them out this week. I miss only one thing about you and it is all your pillows, because they were cold and musty and that is the smell of home to me. I wonder if you’re still alive, it doesn’t feel like it anymore. I don’t care if you’re happy I just hope you’re not dead.

(Source: gypsyspeak)

I didn’t worry so much and I wish I had a nicer name and I wish I watched less TV and I wish I was more talented and I wish I wasn’t so selfish and I wish I loved more and I wish I loved less and I wish I knew more and I wish I weighed less and I wish I worked harder and I wish I was kinder and I wish I didn’t wish for so many things. 

(Source: gypsyspeak)

It is quiet here, but it’s a humming sort of silence falls like dust on the wooden floorboards. This is what hotel rooms sound like when no one is there — foreign and cold and unreal, but in good ways, only the best ways. When he’s not here I start to miss him, but he is all over the place in pieces, in loose strands of hair and handwritten notes and forgotten keys by the bedside table. Right now it is raining but sunny, a contradiction to the senses. It sounds harsh and cold but the room is glowing with a summer’s shade of yellow and I feel like a lonely character in a children’s book from the nineties I used to read when I was little. Certain rooms in this house still smell new, even though I know he’s lived here for a while. It’s the wood, I think, but it makes me miss home. He’s finished work and is buying food to last us the rest of the week and I’m sitting here waiting with his sleeping puppy breathing silently next to me. Tonight I’ll meet his friends and tomorrow we’ll do this all over again.

(Source: gypsyspeak)

“Remembering is good but sometimes forgetting is better. It’s okay to forget. You can’t hold onto everything. Things will get better, so stop being such a starky bitch and let it go.”

It is saddening, and nothing more, that someone as insignificant as you can make me feel as terrible as I do now. You wouldn’t think it possible but I suppose that’s the greatest part of it all.

Only being human could break hearts the way hearts break. Only being human could guarantee that feeling of pain, that sort of ache that never leaves. But it doesn’t have to be love, and often it isn’t. Hearts are broken everyday, by people and bad habits, and a lot of the time by things you were never even in love with. Hearts break because we pour everything we have into everything we have, and when something — anything — fails us, that is when we start to feel the ache. That is when our hearts shatter into pieces too sharp to pick up with bare hands, so we leave them there, in the pits of our stomachs, and hope they one day disappear. Breaking hearts requires not love, but the silly mistake of being human, and that is all.

(Source: gypsyspeak)

And here I thought I was leaving all my bad habits in high school.

Things are difficult but only ever frivolously. University has been stressful. My art tutor lost my visual diary. I miss all my trains and buses by seconds. I have nightmares every night, a far stand from never having had nightmares in years. But they are frivolous things too — I kissed a boy who wasn’t mine. I locked a stranger in a wheelie bin. I set a house on fire, by accident, and killed everybody in it. I danced on a cold beach. I drowned on a cold beach. I lost my memory and spoke a language that didn’t exist. I cried, a lot, and I hid. I hid from authority and I hid things from people.

But everything else, everything that matters, I suppose, is at its very best. Things have been wonderful and it’s a nice thing to feel. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to say that I am happy, but even sleepless at four in the morning, close to tears over this death of an essay, things are wonderful.

I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to figure out things children shouldn’t need to figure out. I’ve always felt this incessant need to know things, but never things that mattered, never algebraic equations or all the lines from Finding Nemo or the best ways to clean one’s room. They were always silly things, like how many passing trees it took to have a good day at school, or which version of my mother was nicer; the one who wore glasses or the one who didn’t. I based so much of my childhood on this idea that the universe functioned on a tangent that nobody but me could understand, and I think I still have that mindset now, only these days I have the incessant need to know how many times you can be fucked over before you know something isn’t going to work, or which version of yourself is better; the one who tries too hard or the one that doesn’t exist.

(Source: gypsyspeak)

I used to wonder what it was about you that got you all the friends you had. You were pretty, sort of, and your hair smelt like honey and lemon, and sometimes your jokes were pretty funny, but you were the cruelest person I knew, and surely I wasn’t the only one who saw this.

Did I ever tell you about him? The way he shook when he cried? He didn’t cry very often, but when he did your lungs collapsed for him. In the middle of the night he’d kiss the back of my head and whisper things I couldn’t hear, but I’d nod and tell him to sleep, and he would. That was him. He was tall, tall-ish. He had scars on his knuckles from being angry too often. He liked the colour green and his socks had holes in them and sometimes, if he was happy, he would smile for pictures. I was just an atom but he — he was the whole entire universe, cupped into my sweaty palms, and that was okay for the both of us.

I think the single most beautiful and saddening thing about the world that we live in is the very extent of who we are as people. We hold the ability to warp human emotion and create magnificent things and bring out the best and worst in everything and sometimes, despite all the beautiful things that come out of just being, I think it’d be far better if we just weren’t.

“You learn a lot, and of course you would; all this is, really, is 365 life lessons that start with fireworks and end with fireworks. Suppose starting with a bang was never a bad thing — they say expectations result in realities that stem from thought, and so maybe starting with all the music and the laughter and the pretty colours and slurred speech is, in fact, setting your next set of lessons in motion, all to be happy and fantastic and lovely. School for the disenchanted, or perhaps just the young at heart.”

A year is such a terribly long time and the saddest, most wonderful part is that it feels nothing like it. 2010 has been a lovely year for me, but the reasons are slipping through my fingers like water in the bathtub. My last 365 days have blended into a whirlwind of smiles and sadness and stress and slips and slurs and strangely this is both disheartening and therapeutic, like numbing as a reflex or cigarette buds under your pillow in the morning. I haven’t yet learnt to stay afloat the lines of normalcy but happiness, you once told me, is for people who don’t understand. I don’t understand but I am satisfied, and satisfaction tastes okay.

I’ve learnt a lot this year but the best thing I can teach you is that you will never drown if you choose to stay afloat. I hope 2011 is a lovely year for all of you.

You told me you didn’t want to leave. “It’s a funny, scary thing,” you slurred. “What I’m feeling now. It makes me laugh but it also makes me cry.” We stood there for a long time, watching walls, watching things. Eventually the sun came up and we fell asleep counting sheep and cars and kisses, and when I woke up I was alone and there were bruises on my legs. I could still smell you — a musky cloud of my childhood, smeared on your pillow. You left yourself in pieces everywhere.