around and over and under again

circular, elizabeth, circular, that's how you live your life, yes? yes? well, accept it and don't hate yourself, hell, you know it's narcissistic, you're the first to argue it.

my phone rings, and i ignore it, often. i like the silence. i'm nestled in the the nest and it is comfortably warm even if i have an unseasonable number of blankets piled over me. it's time to listen to 'casiotone for the painfully alone' because it makes me warmer, not that it's cold, no, i've said that.
my neck hurts a bit. i'm ignoring people. i'm overtired from sleeping too much. i'm finding things to do. i find conversation that excites me so rare and sweet and delicious and ripe and damp and sucks me right in so deeply and hard and solid and when i've had it, i'm left breathing heavily somewhere deeper, satisfied and yet now more hungry, that sort of paradox of something worthwhile you get every now and then.

the trees here have shifted. one of the few truly entrancing things about canberra is the seasons. the trees go from dead, to flickered with green, to full ripe green blooms so fast that it's hard to remember when it was dead and dry. there are these sudden, heavy storms that come in the morning, evening, night; surprising and gleefully heavy. the air smells sublime right now.

i had two lighters in brisbane, and i would light one with the other, only pressing down the gas and not the spark, moving the flames into each other, separating them, merging them... disasociated fond memories of my grandmother with cigarette burns in everything she owns. i dislike smoking simply because i want to, but feel obliged to resist out of knowing how vile mouth cancer is.

facebook updates from the last hour tell me there is a large storm in brisbane. ten or so friends have stated as much, and this makes me feel strangely delighted, that i see their weather through dinky little status updates. i get this strange communicative fragment through updates, and i have a little bit of sharing, and we have a little bit of touch through the internet, and touching often scares me until i'm breathing comfortably around someone and god, i want to go home.

settling in canberra of sorts

not settled, no, but i am here. i take a lot of photos of the streets. i want to find this cemetary that someone i knew in another life sent me, with a beautiful angel looking over the ground.

the churches here are small and beautiful and there are trees on every corner, starting to turn auburn already. it's almost autumn and i am far from home, and trying to make a new home here, in streets that are oddly familiar, and completely alien, looking at books in stores i've heard of but never seen, living out what was a dream of 7 years ago, only vastly completely different. a totally incomprehensible distortion of where i thought i would be, i ended up in canberra anyway, wandering the streets alone, and feeling almost happy to be here, and very happy to be alone, but tired of the lonely. i look in electric shadows, this beautiful indie bookstore which is two streets over from my apartment, and i try to learn to cook, stutteringly, with vegetables and peanut sauce from a jar. i have a bunny, named by my ex boyfriend, and best friend in the world, my soulmate in a friendship sense, while walking home, after midnight, dreamily through new farm. i miss him, i miss my streets, my new farm, my valley, my city, and i am in this alien place that smells strange, and is filled with memories that aren't mine.


i am starting to find a way around this city, in this new skin, in my new job, the Dream Job. i am knitting more again, thinking about drawing, perching around markets, learning to blow glass soon, writing emails to my friends and missing them with every night i don't want to go out because it feels forced and i listen to friend's music, i listen to steel guitar and i think of my henry, and the magical few months we had when the world iced over with our love that melted horribly fast... and i think of jule in ever footstep around, missing him, missing his world and seeing the perfection and beauty that he glosses the universe with. i miss lachlan like air, gasping him in with daily phone calls, poking on facebook, he sends me receipes. i miss my beautiful eliza and her smile that glows, glows glows out of her heart across the state, sometimes i almost feel it here this far away, and my katy, i want to do jigsaws, and snuggle her and write little poems to each other. my joe and my tani, my beautiful friends who most people would never be comfortable with what we all shared together, but they, they wouldn't understand how beautiful it really was, and how sacred, and trusting, and sharing, and understood it was. how natural. and that, that is a fragment of who i miss and how i miss them. i miss anita, my special, special sister and housemate, my jordie and his wide green consumptive eyes and that hair that slings into them, the way he'd drag a strand across his cheek and chew on it absently...

i find pieces of the past i never lived in my workplace, in pancakes, in a large reflective lake but it's all so distant that i feel wry, slow, behind, about the shadows. i grasp for poetry, and i remember things, and i fall back into other words with my henry, and our own shadow that swallowed us. remembering to take it out of words and look at people before i lose my heart in language ever again, knowing it's hard to learn, it's hard hard hard to learn. it makes me feel young, and old, at the same time, smelling this air that tastes like trees and green and the verge of raining, and the dryness, the lack of sweat, the promise of coats and velvet, and of those parks that lead me dreaming, of holding hands through them, interlaced, with someone i love. i can place so many people i miss there, but i feel.. slowly excited that there are new people, new people whose hands can lace with mine as we wander the parks. i miss my friends no less because of this. and the shadows don't haunt me at all, they just deepen the view.

wake up in the morning, feeling shy and lonely...

i've spent the last two days watching non-stop degrassi episodes. i started on series one of degrassi high, and then backtracked to series three of junior high after disc two started skipping on me.
i am officially addicted.

i am, however, going to have the themesong in my head for the next month.

this is curtesy of lachlan's holidaying housemate. i need to buy them for myself. actually, for us, because lachlan, surprisingly, enjoys it as much as i do. and, it's not in an ironic sense. i genuinely think it's excellent television. up there with 'the x files' for favourites. and 'seinfeld'. 90's tv, and 80's music. though, strictly speaking, degrassi is more lath=e

this is helping me heal after watching 'ghost world' which made me feel ill. it was an excellent movie. just ... extremely close to home. i mean, thora birches character walked practically the same line as i did, in that same time period. only, rather than her older, idolised man losing his job and living with his mother... well... we all know what happened. still. that look of confusion, that desperation and loneliness at being a jobless, loser outsider teen, with virtually no friends.... yeah. i needed industrial strength degrassi. and that i have had. oh, and a pulp dvd. lachlan has been under the sad assumption that pulp is typified by 'common people'. he will be undertaking re-education. actually, i will leave that to emily, as she is the music journalist.

lachlan and i celebrated our 3 year anniversary. happyface. we ate crossants for dinner, and watched more degrassi, while he poured over his vegetarian cookbook-bible, and i continued knitting his jumper. the jumper, by the way, is going to be finished any day now. yay! it was pretty much a perfect evening, finished off with an early nap. what more could anyone want? apart from a kitten! (ignoring l's allergy here...) tomorrow is back to work. however, this month is tempered with the fun of working... yes, Three days a week..... erg.

well, i will get all my winter knitting out of the way, and get a good firm start on some shawls from victorian lace today, whenever amazon.com feels like delivering it. *sigh*. and amazing cat knitting japan book!. well, and reading. my byron biography and i will be spending some quality time together.


as will my new art books and toy bat. yay!