Experimenting With Relationships & Playing With Myself - Friendship and other leaky boats

Sunday morning, seven o’clock, and I’m waiting for a tram with a bag of poo in my hand.

Twenty-four hours earlier I was on a train, heading to the metropolis for one last weekend with my eco-warrior mate before his visa ran out and our friendship became hemispherically challenged. The plan was to do very little but hang out together, talk, read; all mundane but vitally needed.

I arrive, and call. He’s having brunch with some friends from the sports club where he sometimes trains. He sounds awkward, hesitant. He’s not quite ready, but no matter. There’s an easy solution. I will shop while he finishes his coffee and then he’ll meet me and we’ll go back to his meticulously laid-out, laid back enviro-palace and fall into our easy conversation, our plans to save the world and our sanity.

I get to the shopping strip, all department stores and buskers and tourists in cheap cotton t-shirts with day-glo cries of “G’day Mate” and “Koalas do it better”; panhandlers without pans, clouds of pigeons and intense, earnest consumers. I’m not one of them.
I feel extremely unsure of myself and overly aware of my otherness, but being in Melbourne and because this is just a head-rant, no one else is. Apparently you can take the city out of the girl.
I read in a toilet for forty minutes.

We meet. We’re going back to the others to have more coffee and then all go together to an eco fair and have lunch and later dinner and did I bring my bathers because they were all pretty keen to go for a swim in the afternoon and I’d really like them and he’d been seeing one of them for about two weeks and the other two were her mate and her friend’s boyfriend and…

I was suddenly so tired. Mid-30 degree temperatures sank into the concrete and my dark blue jeans and the four bottles of wine in my backpack and all bounced back, everything around me one throbbing mercury-riser.

See, this friend and I have a history. Not that kind of history. And though, when you continue to read and see twinges of words that make you disbelieve the nature of our friendship, hold fast. I won’t steer you wrong. I only do that to myself. They are only words. This is not about the nature of friendship, this is about its nurturing.

We have a history – one where I get bumped every time he starts a new relationship.

Man, I get it; one tends to develop that tunnel vision fuzz at the beginning of a new love: tingly heartjumbles, adrenaline so palpable that you feel their heartbeat in the briefest fingertip brush; sinking, drowning into every detail, and shagging like you intend never to come up for air. Writers through the ages have waxed proverbial - all spring in their steps and lead in their pencils.

I get it; I’ve have it; and, at some point I expect to again revisit that tantalizing freakshow, but all I could think of was how difficult it was to get time off work – my god, and an actual Saturday/Sunday weekend too – and I saw stretching ahead the pavement of my weekend and how the reality of it closely shadowed my newfound expectations of disappointment.

Plans gone, rearranged now: I am the third or fifth wheel.

We end up with thirty minutes of solo conversation and talk, like we used to. We open up: me about how I’m uncomfortable around people now; how despite a lifetime of jobs where I talk and listen, everything feels contrived, and he talks about visa woes and leaving Australia and relationships. We’re just getting started really and he says you have to watch this Al Gore film and it's good but I could have watched it any other time and because it’s the DVD there are the out takes and updates and I’m sitting watching this, by now, very long film while he reads about water consumption in agriculture and has a nanna nap.

There’s no time for talking after that. A quick shower in the balcony bath, a gin and tonic and then to dinner with the same few.
And they’re lovely people, truly. And at another time, I may have enjoyed it, been able to relax into it. But I’m there with two couples and they do their couple stuff and their double date stuff and we ask each other the usual perfunctory questions, all punctuated by frothy social lubricant.

The dinner becomes dinner and a bar with the promise of a café for midnight tiramisu - and my eighteen-hour day says no. So I beg off: I’m tired I say, and I am. What I don’t say is I’m feeling ignored, undervalued, irrelevant. What I don’t say is I know, despite your assertions that you will meet me back there in an hour, you won’t. That you’re giddy on imported beer and love juice. That I know tomorrow will be another today.
So I get the key, organize where to leave it for him, and leave.

Had I created this? Possibly. Probably. I could have simply smiled, not cared or chosen to have different feelings and just rejoiced in the fact that my good friend, who tended to need to be needed and always shone in those first dazzling love-lights, was again fulfilling the general criteria. Be happy that he was happy.

Nah. F*ck it. I was pissed.

I can feel uncomfortable and awkward anywhere – I really didn’t need to make a special trip to the city for it.

***

The 6 a.m. not quite dawn arrives, heralded by plastic on my wrist and the hopeful heart monitor attached. The key is still there, lying snug against the brick. Who am I kidding? I’d made my choice as I lay it there. This just made it easier, made me feel justified, made me feel like a bitch for contemplating screwing his day, made me realize I was giving him what he wanted after all. At that moment I didn’t care about saving the world, I just wanted to save my weekend.

Leaving again.

Going through the motions: remake the bed; folding clothes; cleaning dishes, myself. All your morning basics. Teeth, toilet, and then…

The toilet doesn’t flush.
At all.
Even a little bit.

I look down at the nuggets of potential shame.
More crap to deal with.
And in a household such as this, do you think I can find a plastic bag?

Eventually I do.

I leave other things to show I was here instead: a note, the key, the mess of half-eaten stone fruit left by marauding possums, some fresh peppercorns I had liberated from a tree next to the Yarra River.

I want to go, but the weight of unsaid volumes hunches me, rounds my shoulders, and my feet drag my still reluctant head down the stairs, past the decades of family murals, an old bike, a new bike, a clutch of coats, until I reach the front gate. It’s too late to stay.

I open the gate, let it clang behind me, take a deep breath and …

It’s Sunday morning. Most of the city is sleeping; the early cool a welcome lullaby after the heat of the night. A few stragglers are bounding homeward: the walk of shame or fame, depending on the night’s transpirations. Is that even a word?

The neighbor to my left is sneakily watering his garden and, at a service station two minutes down the road to my right, there’s a man who has completed all but one hour of his night shift. He’s really tired, but he still manages to smile and sell me some really excellent juice.

There’s a thirty-minute wait for the first tram, a sixty-minute one for the train and I’m happy, really happy. I feel courageous, even though I’m really sneaking away.

I look around, hoping he won’t come into view, hoping I can escape without him finding me. I will deal with it, I just don’t want to yet.
I want my familiar turf, my high ground, my hermit crab cave. Hell, I want my own toilet, with its reassuring flush; I want physical and emotional distance – miles and days of it.

But.

In a couple of hours he will find my tardy train and twice try to get me to stay; in a couple of days he will tell me that he had not communicated to me properly what the weekend would entail. Communicate. A dozen times he will use it in a five-minute conversation. You would think that with such effort actual communication will have taken place. And maybe it will in another part of the future. But not now. For now I’m done.

Exeunt, gentle reader. The heroine aways. With dignity? Pride? Sanity?

I’m standing there, grinning like the idiot I am, and waiting for a tram with a bag of poo in my hand.

But it’s ok, or it will be. Or maybe not.

Sunday morning, seven o’clock.

It is now and now is beautiful and it’s mine.

Sometimes, not putting up with someone else’s shit means taking your own shit home.