Good night, and good luck

 

I can tell the way you hang your head

You’re alone and afraid

Through your tears you look around

There is no peace of mind to be found

Darlin’ reach out

Reach out

“Reach Out I’ll Be There”

-Four Tops (Holland / Dozier / Holland)

Today, I wish my friend farewell. Greg & I have known each other for 20 years, since we met in a mixed dorm at Charles Sturt University, Bathurst.

With a stealthy mix of early adulthood pheremones, drunkeness, freedom and lockable bedrooms, university dormhouses are purpose-built for sex. At first it creeps up on you, as you bumble past each other politely, eyes averted, to get to the shower, or moan about the cafeteria food. Then someone has their own TV, & you’re piling on to a single bed, and the sibling-style wrestling ends in heavier breathing and a deeper look instead of someone ‘having their eye put out’. Then the pranks become more ingenious, or so you think. Yes, let’s take Greg’s entire bedroom and recreate it in the bathroom. By then, wired with your own brilliance, you feign sympathy for Greg by sitting up all night playing 500. You nickname him ‘Scooter’ because he looks like the Muppet with his glasses on. You plaster Greg with make up while he’s passed out and weep with laughter as he tries to unlock his bedroom door via a brick wall. And then first year ends. You stay put, Greg moves to another dorm. Uni bar nights can end on or off-campus. One night, it’s up to Greg’s new, more spacious room, as he’s become a residential tutor, a supposed ‘guiding hand’ to the first years. And the looks and the want and the who cares anymore, we don’t share a bathroom end with greedy kisses saved up for a year and set free in the freezing cold as you ‘go outside for a ciggie’. Except it’s not Greg. It never was.

This is a true story of platonic love. My relationship with Greg is the longest I’ve had with a man. In the entire time we’ve known each other – 20 years – we’ve never so much as kissed. A lot of people who know both of us don’t believe it. At 39 (ok, he’s not 39 until January), we have grown closer. We love; we lose; we laugh; we share tall tales of tigers tamed, women wooed and men maimed for life; we answer the phone swearing at each other; we gamble; we talk. While our personalities mirror each other’s in many respects, Greg has been a constant, steadying presence in my life since we were 18. I have been a constant source of amusement and raw emotion in his. He MC’d my 21st and my parents love him. When I came back to Australia after five years in Europe, we picked up where we left off. Our lives took very different paths to the ones we imagined for ourselves at 18. I wore black turtlenecks and 40s trenchcoats and was set on becoming a foreign correspondent, a photojournalist who would somehow right wrongs and shed light on forgotten wars and suffering. Greg studied PR and wore a rather bizarre collection of collared shirts. When I realised I was not meant for journalism (about eight minutes after we graduated), I drifted through jobs. Greg stayed at uni, playing perpetual big brother to a stream of first years, before moving to Sydney and working at the Bondi Hotel. That’s where I last saw him, in 1996, before I hopped a plane for Amsterdam. When I returned, he was managing a bar and had led a fairly peripatetic lifestyle, working in hospitality in the Whitsundays and having a series of serious relationships. We’d both found, and lost, the great romantic loves of our lives; mine, ‘the Brazilian’; Greg with Chelsea.

We’ve had a decade together since then, during which time the prosaic Greg has studied philosophy and taught first year uni students (quelle surprise) and has STILL not finished his PhD; while I became a political adviser (truly, showbusiness for ugly people) and fed my passions for travel and photography. We both had relationships, something slightly out of synch in all of them. When single, we are perfect ‘wingmen’ for each other. I left politics in 2007, and ‘went corporate’ after a long time travelling in India; and then I got sick. I was very ill, but incredibly lucky. The meningitis left me weak and unable to work for months but it left. Greg didn’t. After I escaped my isolation room for a ward, I remember waking up from a ‘dosed up to the eyeballs’ sleep to find him sitting there, reading a book. He didn’t tell me how long he’d been there, but he was there, unasked but greatly needed. I got well again, and went back to politics part-time, to go back to uni and study, inspired by him. I loved it. He went to Europe, ostensibly for a ‘conference’, but I like to think he stayed on inspired partly by my constant yapping … and to reconnect with Chelsea.

Cutting this off now, as I have to put my game face on and say ‘later, biatch’, to Greg in person. He alone knows how difficult this will be; and if there is a god, pray that I don’t cry. I don’t actually feel that way, I’m happy that he and Chelsea are going to be together again, moving to New York, my new favourite city. Of course I’ll miss him. Who the hell will I go to the cricket with? Who would laugh at my dopiness in thinking I could pick the result, let alone the score, in Australia’s first game in the 2006 World Cup (FTR, Australia defeated Japan 3-1); who would start cheering for me to win and then laugh at himself when his glasses went flying along with tables when we won? I have a lot of male friends, mostly gay and sometimes over zealous in their mission to protect me from all hurts, perceived and real. Greg waits and listens, lays out options and offers thoughts, but never makes me feel stupid for the choices I make. He relieves the pressure I put on myself. He has made me feel worthwhile when I have felt unworthy of anyone’s care or love; grounded during the disassociative episodes where I, the almighty great communicator, can’t feel. At 4am this morning, I realised that I have been searching for the love of my life for 20 years; and I have had it all this time, in this true, constant, platonic love. So it will be ‘later, biatch’, not goodbye.

Nearly lost you

Don’t call me daughter, not fit to be

The picture kept will remind me

“Daughter” – Pearl Jam (Vedder / Gossard)

I’ve been throwing up in the middle of the night again. Since Saturday. Since the nightmare started again. That you went to work & you didn’t come back. I wake up screaming & I sob & I can’t stop until I vomit. Just like I did when I was a little girl. And it was always you who came to stop it; not Mum. You would run to me when the screaming started. I don’t know what it was like for you to see me in the grip of this terror … it must have been unbelievable. Unbearable, even; to not understand – but how could you when I couldn’t tell you what was going on in my head, Dad? That I was scared when you weren’t there? That it played in my mind like a movie. That it wasn’t someone else’s father, but you; gone to work in the dark, dying in the dark. So I scream again in the night for a loss I am yet to experience. For the call which didn’t come. Not to our house. The only difference is you’re not here to shake me until I stop and prove to me that you’re alive. And so I scream & sob until I vomit, & I call home every day since Saturday.

Mum says I’m having flashbacks, but I can’t say, ‘I love you, Dad, please don’t leave me’.

I’m the hard one. ‘I think they’re dead, Dad’. I tell my brother as well. His answer is the same as yours.

“Probably. But they chose to do the job and knew the risks associated, as I do.”

My brother is the one in the rescue chopper. He is the man ready to walk up the barrel of a gun, just as the man from the mine said today. He’s right. There are 29 men missing; I don’t know them, I don’t have any connection to them & I am screaming in the middle of the night for them to come home.

Please let them be safe, please let them go home, please give strength & some small comfort to their families & community. Please grant the people at the pit top the wisdom to make the right choices, however desperate that choice may be. I’m agnostic; I’m not going to feign religion, it’s an insult to the faithful. Let them come home; but don’t let others go in to face the bullet in the chamber of that gun. One of those men in the dark could have been my Dad. And the man at the surface, planning the rescue, doing the risk assessment, could be my brother. 

From the archives: Poetry Boy

Friday, September 01, 2006

Friends someone asked who i text poetry to late on friday nights. it’s just one person. we don’t know each other well, but he once said to me that he was concerned for my happiness … which meant a lot to me.

he sent me this beautiful poem by margaret atwood a couple of weeks ago …

Variation On The Word Sleep

I would like to watch you sleeping,

which may not happen.

I would like to watch you,

sleeping. I would like to sleep

with you, to enter

your sleep as its smooth dark wave

slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent

wavering forest of bluegreen leaves

with its watery sun & three moons

towards the cave where you must descend,

towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver

branch, the small white flower, the one

word that will protect you

from the grief at the center

of your dream, from the grief

at the center I would like to follow

you up the long stairway

again & become

the boat that would row you back

carefully, a flame

in two cupped hands

to where your body lies

beside me, and as you enter

it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air

that inhabits you for a moment

only. I would like to be that unnoticed

& that necessary.

From the archives: Getting off the rollercoaster

Sunday, September 24, 2006

Yep, it’s back to single in the city. I’ve done some big things. No more references to my ‘boyfriend’. Flirted with someone else at a Placebo concert, let him walk me home & kissed him for 15 minutes outside the front of my building – before wishing him good night & opening the door without looking back, giving him my number or taking his. I’ve cut my hair (always a sure sign!).

I find the small things about the end of a relationship are the most difficult to act upon. Should I throw out his toothbrush? Keep the shirt he insisted I keep because it looked better on me, the one I wore to bed when he wasn’t here? Delete the sweet text messages? I haven’t done any of this … yet.

I think it’s wistful – rather than wishful thinking. These are the things that make the big stuff come flooding back. The seemingly endless kisses; the tender & gentle intimacy that allowed us to drift off into a deep, unshakeable sleep, wrapped around each other. The look in his eyes when I did something he found amazing (mostly the things other people take for granted). Not being afraid to touch, or be touched, in public. The indescribable secret pleasure of his hand resting on my thigh as we ate dinner with friends. Answering the phone late at night, knowing it would be him. The way my smile shone, without hesitation, when I was with him. The insistent, unexpected knight who drove to my flat at 1am when I called, lost and panicked.

What do I feel? Furious injustice at not being able to tell him how I feel about the way he shut the door & walked away without a word. The searing hurt, bewilderment and self-loathing that accompanies abandonment is subsiding. My fear is that those feelings have nowhere to go, locked behind the door he closed; the eternal, damning, ‘why?’ roars at me in the early hours of the morning. Cool logic tells me to accept – however reluctantly – that the highs of this inconsistent relationship are stamped out by the crashing, crushing lows. I know it. Time to get off the monster rollercoaster & head for the merry-go-round. Only one problem: I’m a rollercoaster kind of girl.

From the archives: Will he or won’t he?

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Haven’t written anything in such a long time; I hardly know where to start. I ended up writing to my ex to tell him how frustrated he made me & how sad I was at the way things had turned out. I told him about kissing a couple of guys when we were ‘off’, & confessed to reading a text message off his phone when we were ‘on’. I agonised over the ‘send message’ button until 3am & then thought, ‘fuck it’.

He called me that night; we talked for about two hours & met up with some friends a couple of days later. It was awkward for a bit, but then I let my guard drop. We sat next to each other & my knee touched his. I couldn’t move away. Our heads turned instinctively, a delicious intimate spark between us & a couple of fleeting kisses. We spent the night together & have seen each other since.

It’s been amazing; maybe better than before. He seems more open and willing to share his space & time with me. Still, there is a huge doubt in my mind. I want to ask him, ‘What’s changed?’, because something has changed within me. I’m afraid to love. I’ve been hurt in relationships before and kept giving, but now I’m not sure. Does he want me just because I said goodbye? Will he shut down again, just as easily as he came back? Has he noticed that I won’t say, ‘I love you’? How would he feel if I said goodbye again?

Some of my friends think I’m stupid; one of them was an old fuck buddy who put the hard word on when we went out last week. He was trying to kiss me outside my building & when I told him to stop because of my boy he told me he didn’t care, that it wouldn’t have stopped him taking me inside & shagging me if another friend hadn’t been there. The question is would I have stopped him, & I honestly can’t answer that question. I don’t think I will ever be sure with my ex, boy, lover, boyfriend whatever … sure of leaving him or sure of staying.