Disco.

Disco.

The rain caresses my ears cruelly. I feel fear. The thunder clashes and screeches and roars. It is unrelenting and it shall never tire. The thunder is enraged at something greater than me, and I cannot control the fury. The sky is pulsing like an aggravated vein on a swollen neck: it is a disco for the raindrops. I have not felt so in awe of the world before. I watched Jurassic Park too recently and I know that tonight may be an apocalypse too. Dinosaurs may emerge from the vortex beyond and into the holiday house. The windows are weak and token against the force of a reptilian claw. The lightning ebbs and flows and hesitantly reveals a scaly surface nestled amongst the trees. It is present and then absent. The dinosaurs are stirring. 

The Burning Bush.

The flame tree was in full bloom when Glynis dropped her home that day. It was deadly.

(God was watching).

Moses and his staff were futile today. The burning bush was irrepressible and it shook red seeds and embers of despair onto the pavement.

The syringa tree hovered in an umbrella arch. The boughs draped down onto the rusted jungle-gym. The tree was an alien here. When the wind blew, it shook its heavy branches and the syringa berries fell. Her sister once ate a cocktail of dirt and grass and millipedes and syringa berry. Her innocence saved her from the poison.

She was an anxious child. She was too fearful. Her imagination would craft death and destruction with a wry touch. She would peer like an elderly damaged soul through the lace and through the curtains. The flame tree leered.

Where was the Corolla the familiar hum of the engine the ascent of the roof-racks the squeak-squeak of the opening gate the footsteps?

Her stomach curdled and chopped.

I don’t believe in dragons.

My grandmother had blue eyes. Her hair was an eternal brown, stained dark with dye and care. She had kind crinkles in the right places. Wrinkles were beginning to form, but were shooed by rigorous application of a collection of creams. She lived next door to Joan, who once gave me a Mickey Mouse bowl and spoon collection. Little was remembered about Joan, but she was smaller and more wrinkled than my grandmother, and had hair the colour of soft moonlight.

My grandmother was a collector but not a hoarder. She had a white picket fence and God was her neighbour.

Her snapdragons snarled in their rectangular cages. Their mouths snapped and sneezed without intent. They were trapped by the dark soil: forced but futile sentries. They laughed silently at danger but cowered when it came too close. The snapdragons were beautiful and flawed and were stained red and crimson.

Nourish

The journey was long but the ice-cream and flavoured water kept her going. At times, her head hurt and she thought she might collapse in a heap onto the carpeted floor, but she didn’t. She maintained focus and sipped the berry-scented liquid and wondered if arrival was eminent.

She cried when they arrived, she cried tears of happy and sad and aching feeling. When she saw the bearded visage of her uncle she cried and he was crying too. It made her heart hurt, this happiness/sadness feeling. The children were so much bigger and taller and blonder and even more beautiful. They were almost strangers, but they were also so familiar.

They drove down familiar highways and past townships that reminded her of the past. She felt shocked and horrified by this reality: she had forgotten or perhaps blocked out, the devestation hidden in this city. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to be reminded.

And then the streets, she knew their names and she knew the directions and there was where her old friend Hillary had lived and there was her favourite chip shop. And all of a sudden they were at that familiar house and she braced herself for the wave of feelings that she knew would wash over her like a wild wave: feelings of regret and happiness and intense sadness and raw emotions. When she saw her grandparents looking so much older and smaller, what could she do what could she say? And when she saw her favourite aunt and her other cousins, who had grown handsome in her absence. Her gentle beautiful family surrounded her like warmth and she felt her heart burst of too much happiness and too much sadness, all at once.

And then too quickly far too quickly she had to leave because it was time. It was so much worse, the farewell, because it seemed final and she was an adult now and had adult emotions and understood how things work and understood that life is not as infinite as you might always imagine. The very shortness of life scared her and that fear came in bursts that knocked the air out of her lungs and made tears spring to her eyes. This same fear made her anxious about achievement and existence and existential matters. This same fear made her sick to the stomach about going home and leaving these wonderous people behind. She wished that she could stay but she knew that she could not and would not either, it was an impossible desire and an impossible thing.

She never used to understand why people owned paper shredders and why they were even invented, but now she did. She understood now that people had no time to shred paper into teeny-tiny pieces, life and time was too important. She wondered who had created the idea or the concept of time, and if they had come to hate themselves for it. Time passing made her anxious, maybe if the concept of time did not exist she would exist more freely, without any grasp of it passing or of her limited duration.

where she came from

She sat at her desk, bathed in faded yellow light from the burgundy lamp she'd picked up on the side of the road by the gelati shop. It was a very good sidewalk find, that lamp. It was Summer when she found it, and her dad had taken her to get ice-cream as a special treat. She had gotten hazelnut and passionfruit and was walking back to the car and licking the ice-cream luxuriously when she spotted the lamp. Her dad was sometimes loathe to pick up things that they didn't really need, but she protested that her current desk lamp was old and white and too fluorescent. And besides, they could always re-abandon on the roadside if it was faulty.

Where she came from, it was unheard of for White People to take things from the side of the road. This was not done. It was not necessary for them and, also, there were people who needed things more. These were the homeless people who would come around in abandoned supermarket trolleys. They would ring on doorbells and ask for old snackwich machines and broken fans and exhausted hairdryers. They would ask if you needed your grass cut or your roof painted or maybe your dog walked. Or did you have any spare old clothing? Sometimes, she would give them things. Sometimes she wouldn't have anything to give them and she felt bad, but she knew that it would be hard for her to help every person in the world (or even her city).

One time somebody stole a pair of gardening scissors from her front garden, and she wasn't sure if she was meant to feel afraid or not. One time the neighbours went on holiday for a coastal getaway and when they came back their front window was splintered and there was burgundy blood on their lacy white curtains.

One time when she was younger she heard (or maybe she imagined) that somebody stole her uncle's entire cd collection. She thought that this would make her very sad, and it seemed like a very personal and unnecessary thing to take. cd's are like some small part of your soul, and they are full of memories and past romance and deep sadness and uplifting happiness. What right (or reason) did someone have to take these? She didn't think that this was fair

Her uncle was a good man. He was a lawyer and lived in a very nice house with a very steep driveway. He had beautiful children.

No one rang her doorbell asking for old telephones anymore. Instead, she gave them to recycling bins that contributed to saving orangutangs in Borneo. She quite liked the idea of this: that her cell phone from 2000 that didn't work might help a gentle orangutang. She didn't really know what the homeless people used to do with her broken kitchen appliances. They didn't work so it seemed unlikely that they would be able to use them in their own homes. Perhaps they dismantled them slowly and carefully and removed the useful parts and sold the rest as scrap metal.

Sometimes, in the place where she used to live, the homeless people would rifle through the big rubbish bins that her father would put outside their house on Sunday nights. She didn't know what they were looking for exactly, and never got the chance to ask. They would search through the rubbish as if on a hunt for buried treasure. The neighbours didn't like this: they used to wait patiently behind the gated fence for the rubbish truck to arrive with the sunrise and they would bring out the rubbish bins and accept them back once the truck had consumed the waste.

Today

Today:

I would like a kitten
My package wasn't ready at the postoffice yet
I gave a man directions and he was very happy and called me 'doll'
I had Marmite for breakfast
I had two coffees and the second had excellent chocolate topping
Two hours for a lecture exceeds expectations
I still want job
I have angry
I had dead battery
I had tuna + health slice lunch
Job advert for Bingo attendant
Rush
Hot man on tram
Family friends from South Africa days. She made me all my Barbie clothes and they used to have corgis and one time Lauren fell into her pool at my 7th birthday party
We had salmon for dinner and conversation of Cape Town and the past and dementia and it made me sad and nostalgia.
They lived in Rosebank and I had lots of my birthday parties at their house because they had a big backyard and swimming pool. And she has a son called Aaron and I used to think it was very funny that we had the same name although different spelling and I was a girl and he was a boy.
Now he is THIRTY.
And I also had three packages awaiting my imminent homecoming on my bed including cat-bag. And I also won something. And also praise-ing email. (Also stress-inducing email)
Rooibos tea and looming bed and TV and friendly heatpack

Tears and fears and getting old

I remember at primary school, when the grade seven kids used to help us cross the road, and I remember thinking that,
wow, I'll never be that old and that tall and possessing of such flowing locks.
And then, all-of-a-very-sudden,
time just creeps and flies and stomps and then
and then
I am nineteen.
Hey, I have friends who are older. But if you stop and think, it seems that time is coming. That 'real life' is approaching. School-life is almost removed from reality: you follow this same formula for 13 years and it is everything. Nothing else exists. But then you break from this repetition of teachers and classes and lockers, and everything is there for you. The world is waiting.
My sisters are getting older and my parents are getting older, and my grandparents are getting older.
At a tea with all my great uncles and aunts recently, you can notice the ageing. You can see that they are more stooped and more deaf and maybe they have Parkinsons and maybe they have dementia. I'd never been to an old age home before, and I think it might have been the scariest thing. There are so many people, even closer to dead than alive, and their skin looks thinner than paper, and they seem to be melting and drooping. I wish I could know how all of them were when they were young and glowing and lithe and possessing of verve and passion. It was a scary scary place, I felt tears pricking breaking, at the atmosphere at the smell, at the shrunken people.
Ageing makes me want to do more with life. It makes me want to see everything and be everything and find some hunk to sweep me off my feet and onto a white and majestic horse (kidding, I hate horses). But you know.
University is getting crunch-y, things are getting srs. I am not allowed to get mascara in hair and on face anymore and also no food in hair. Food on jumper/assorted clothing is also not considered adult, but is only considered cute when aged 5 or under.

me achieving my dreams (metaphor)
(from nytimes)

story of some girl

Once upon a time, in a land quite far away, a baby was born. In this land – a particular continent called Africa, many babies were constantly being born, and perhaps this pink infant was not starkly different to any of the other thousands of babies that were born at the same instant as she. However, to a particular pairing of people, one Barry and Debs, this baby was rather spectacular and special and quite extraordinary. This bawling youngster was the first grandchild of Diane and Sonny, and Freda and Barney, so all concerned parties were rather thrilled.
The young tyke was a good-natured child, with blond locks and a tendency for falling asleep in her food. Erin and her parents lived in a nice 1-storey house in St Lukes Rd in Claremont. They had a grey mazda that was at least 100 years old but still ran OK and a red little Toyota that was the car that took Erin to the hospital to exit her mother’s stomach.

They got the most delightful of dogs: Jasmine the golden retriever. She was the runt of the litter, but not actually very small, and was a very good-natured and agreeable hound. Jasmine liked to snap at bubbles in some vain hope of achieving something great. She also occasionally killed pigeons for her owners’ delight.

In 1997, Mother Rosenberg got pregnant again and had baby Lauren. She was premature and very tiny. Erin got a new Ken doll in compensation for not being an only child anymore. New baby Lauren was also a fun new toy.
A few years later, Erin started primary school. How big and old she was getting! A prominent memory from the first day of school is Klara Scholtz being able to spell cat and Erin being suitably impressed. Oh how far she has come since such days. Another sister was also born in this year, although she was not accompanied by any Ken dolls. And then in the Rosenberg household girls outnumbered boys 4 to 1. Jasmine the dog was a girl too. Poor Barry.

In 1999 Erin performed in a school play lamenting the incoming invasion of the Y2K bug. She wasn’t too sure what it meant, but the costumes sure looked like ladybugs. She played an orphan. She managed to survive the y2k bug and made it into the new millennium!

Debs and Baz took the family on a trip to Australia. The flight was very long, but fortunately there was a Pokemon game on the aeroplane screens. Whilst Down Under, Erin and sisters saw fun things like Australian animals, the Sydney Opera House and similarly exciting landmarks.
The parents were so enamoured with the land that they thought they would try to emigrate there. South Africa, for all its breathtaking beauty, was a dangerous and scarred place: perhaps Australia would yield a better future for their children.
At the end of 2004 Erin had her batmitzvah. In Orthodox Judaism when a girl is 12 she becomes a woman, and is rewarded with lots of presents and endless gefilte fish. This occasion was particularly auspicious because it was a batmitzvah-cum-farewell party, so, although everyone had fun dancing the horah, a few tears were shed.

On the 19 January 2005 the Rosenberg family left the beauty of Cape Town and moved to Melbourne, in far-flung Australia. Erin started high school, Lauren and Hannah integrated into primary school where they weren’t allowed to say ‘mom’ anymore, but rather were forced to say ‘mum’. They got a new doggy, a most rambunctious Labrador/spaniel/mutt called Daisy. She was joyous.
Time passed and the childrens’ Australian twangs increased, although their affinity for Vegemite did not.  Everyone grew a little bit older, a little bit taller. Erin finished high school, which seemed like a strange thing. School was forever, or so it had seemed. She even got to wear a graduating gown, which was all a little High School Musical. (Zac Efron was not present).  Real life seemed to be starting. She got into a university course that seemed relevant to something she may wish to pursue in some far-off adult future, and travelled to far-off places in the world. She saw things she had never seen before, and experienced wild adventure. She was overcome by this revelation: that the world is a huge and wonderous place, merely waiting to be discovered.

And then she went back to university and real life again, and her baby sister started high school. Her parents asked her scary questions like, “What are you going to do after university?” and she thought, “I am getting a little old now.” She wished for a blue genie to appear and guide her, but this seemed an unlikely scenario.

her evening, the movie.

No time for food, she is enraptured in the sometimes beauty and sometimes grossness of the internet. She would drive but time has flown, as it too often does. What did she do today? She is not so sure.
A rush of train noise, the stark and cold cold silence afterwards. She can see her breath, the condensation floating for a single second in the air. She loves it when her timing is perfect: when the train gods conspire to make her train come just when it is supposed to, and there is a seat next to the window, ripe for gazing. She listens to english hip-hop, because she is not a gangster but perhaps in her mind she is, and dreams of falling in love with a man who happens to sit next to her.
She walks through the chilled air, huddling and wishing she hadn't worn a cardigan. Although it is a very fetching colour. Martha Wainwright and Snow Patrol croon in her ears, reminding her of the past.
She scampers, like some startled rabbit, to catch the flashing red man light. This always happens. Perhaps she should just learn to wait, for the next green man. But it doesn't seem necessary.
She watches a film with an old friend; a lovely film, of love and glimmering sunlight and a man with gorgeous eyes. She loves these sorts of movies; with some sort of seeping nostalgia and great music and beautiful love. There is a scene that is particularly poignant and she likes a lot: everyone is in the changing room at the swimming pool and everyone is naked. She hasn't been to a public swimming pool in a very long time, but the last time she did, and all the times prior to that, she hadn't been too keen on changing in front of other people. But her mother always did. She thinks it must be something old people do, or something that one comes to not care so much about as they pass through life.
She ate too much popcorn and felt sick but quite full. And then, when the film had finished and they exited the cinema complex, she bought a banana choc top, because she felt like it. (Even though the air outside was colder than the ice-cream itself). And she walked with her friend and ate her ice-cream and laughed and was joyous.
The choc-top didn't have chocolate at the bottom of the cone, but she wasn't overly fussed because the rest had been quite delicious, a most satisfactory dinner replacement. After her friend got off the train she imagined the boy in the blue beanie had been listening to their conversation, and had wanted to join in but hadn't, because that may have been considered rude.
When she got home, the heater in her room was already on and her room was toasty and delicious. Her dad played piano and she was content with things.

Listen to the radio

Winter was beautiful today. 

The air sparkled with joyous clarity:

Everything was so bright and fresh.

Colours seem saturated: people brighter and the sky bolder

I wanted to breathe most

So much air, bursting like a flower into my being

Such weather breeds happiness and frivolity and $6.80 japanese hot lunch 

Great life day

Who

Her gaze shifted and then, with the very flick of her eyeball, everything was starkly different. The dog hadn't been there before. And neither the giraffe.
And the man. The man made her brain tingle with faint recognition. With a recognition so faint and fleeting that it may have been a miniature brain freeze, but was not. She knew him: with his surly grimace and ginger growth and big dinner-plate hands.
He was approaching, idly. He was wandering in her general vicinity.
She said: "Hello"
She said: "Do I know you?"
He seemed startled by the sound of her voice. It was thin and reedy and sounded like a child. (A prepubescent child.)
The giraffe, which had been grazing inconspicuously in the background, make the noise that giraffes tend to make, and trotted over for a pat.
But the girl only had eyes for the man.
Her brain was buzzing with greater buzz than before.
He said:
"If you had been born a man, and in 1980: I am you."
She blinked with slow comprehension.

straight to the deep end

this is my first post.

quite excited about this blog thing; others that ive read are so frank and honest and true and inspiring and beautiful.

lets hope mine can be at least some of those.

i went to a memorial for my friends grampa today.

it was sad, and it was scary

death is such a sudden thing; like a violent whirlwind that just whips in and changes everything. forever.

life is never the same, however hard you try to return to the old ways. the faint reminder of what was is omnipresent, lingering in the corner of your head. sometimes its brought back by a smell, an object. or even a song

i dont think im scared of my own death. its rather the idea of not fulfilling my life that frightens me. theres so many things to do, to experience, to wonder at, to laugh about. im so excited to grow up - but its so daunting. i cant even imagine not living at home, or not going to school, or being old. it hasnt hit me yet that after this year, ill never go to school ever again. ill be an adult: a little kid, like i once was, will see me and think, shes big. adults talk to me now like im one of them. its weird; like, i feel like i should be with the children on the other side of the room, playing monopoly. not talking about intellectual things.

one day ill be old. with wrinkles. and ill know how to knit, and ill make apple pies.