This is a love story.
Two young girls run across a beach, shrieking. They’re laughing, the bottom of their skirts soaked by the sea, but they don’t care. My eyes begin to tear up as I watch the scene play on my laptop screen.
I can’t remember the last time I ran, other than from an ibis trying to steal my lunch. I didn’t realise I’d grown up already. I’m aware it says “Birth year: 2003” on my license, but not grown up, grown up. I used to be so preoccupied with seeming grown-up that I frowned upon childish interests, but now it’s too late. I’m officially an adult, whose opportunities to run carefree along stretches of sand are few and far between. I roll over in bed, re-fluffing my pillow. It’s stained with mascara marks because I was too lazy to take my makeup off after getting home last night – well… really this morning – which my Uber receipts love to remind me. They all just seem to be mocking me when I open my email to read:
“Your Sunday morning trip with Uber:
We hope you enjoyed your ride this morning. (Fuck you Uber you know I spent the entire ride trying to not throw up while the driver tried to set me up with his son).
Total: A$25.67
3:07 am (Insert here some guy’s address who’s not your boyfriend to your house)”
The younger me would be impressed with how the older me is now. Drinking, parties, boys... Younger me was incredibly naive, sheltered, and a late bloomer. She couldn’t have imagined the novelty would ever wear off. The current me knows that sometimes you wake up in your bed, or someone else’s, with dry mouth and hangover shakes, smudged mascara, two missed calls from your Mum, and $103 less in your bank account.
Sometimes it’s pretty regrettable, actually.
“But we’re in our twenties!” My friends and I tell each other when we’re out together debating a certain decision, like ordering another margarita jug when we have work the next day, or booking flights to Europe that we can’t afford. 20s. That word alone justifies you doing a lot of dumb shit. We’ll never be this young again, in this same place, with the same people, so… why not?
In your 20s, your number one responsibility is to collect as many good stories as you can so that you can tell them to your kids when you’re older. Except, I don't want kids, so maybe I’ll tell them to my sister’s kids? Maybe just my dogs.
Your 20s as a young woman in the 21st century is supposed to be an age of liberation, enlightenment, and empowerment. This sounds quite similar to the French Revolution’s motto. Except, my friends and I don't know if we feel all that empowered sometimes. We often sarcastically insert phrases like “I love being a woman” at the end of our stories about cynical things, like how everyone only seems to be into casual dating these days. Maybe it’s unfair to say we’re not empowered. We never had to live without having access to the pill, we weren't forcibly shut out of the workforce (for the most part), or only taught cooking and sewing in school. We’re not some perky ‘girl bosses’ on a motivational poster. We’re just boring, normal people going about our boring, normal lives who never stop to ask, “Hang on, do I feel empowered right now?” because that just sounds lame. I don’t think that’s something men ever have to think about in their daily lives. If they shave their legs they don’t think, “Am I doing this for me or for the patriarchy?” When they care too much about receiving male validation, they don’t have to feel like they’ve set back an entire movement. To lament upon this, I keep these records…
Memory Box
In every one of my romantic relationships, I've kept a sort of imaginary memory box that I fill with all the things that remind me of them.
Marcus –
Campus coffees, art museums, hidden bars, The Godfather, the scent of clean laundry, his blonde hair, study dates
Joseph –
Jazz music, his red Jeep, weed smoke, vinyl records, his painting studio, Danny’s bar and its whiskey cocktails, navy sheets
Evan –
Rugby, Delwood Beach, Mac Miller songs, Italy, my green dress, New Year’s Eve, summer, late-night kebabs, his Nikon D7500 camera
I’ve left some of these memory boxes out. One…that is too painful to remember still.
We all have one.
I think it’s funny that none of these relationships were all that significant, yet I hold onto their artefacts and act as their museum curator, making sure they’re safe, occasionally dusting them off.
To be honest it’s a pretty shitty museum that no one else would want to visit. The audience would probably look at the glass case with some beer coasters inside and think, “Huh... weird choice.”
The relationships in my life that are actually significant don’t have this same sort of treatment. Maybe because there’s too much history. So many shared memories and inside jokes that I can’t fit into just one neat box. Perhaps it’s because I take them for granted. I don't expect them to end at any time, so I don't catalogue every single object and moment for fear it’ll be the last thing we share together.
There’s an empty red wine bottle that still sits on my bookshelf as a token from a past relationship, but it's not as special as the crescent moon tattoo on my ankle I got with my best friend to match the starburst on hers. The sprig of baby’s breath he tucked behind my hair isn't as beautiful as the scar on my leg I got from falling over whilst playing in the rain with my sister. The red cherry wood guitar pick I gifted him isn't as valuable as the gold earrings my friend bought me for my 19th birthday – which I wear on every special occasion.
A kind, older woman once told me I was pretty when I served her in my store, and that meant a lot more to me than any boy who’s ever called me beautiful before because I knew that she was being sincere. It’s different to be loved than to just be lusted after – as all women know. I think that’s the root of a lot of pain in my life, that pursuit of love. When it works, it can leave you smiling like an idiot. When it doesn’t, it can leave you gasping for breaths against your sinking chest.
I Died: An Interlude
I died. Or I am currently in the process of dying and withering away. I feel like a piece of uneaten fruit left out on a dinner party table with a weird film forming over me. And the people walk past the table at this dinner party, and no one wants to eat the weird lone piece of fruit left out on a lone plate on the dining table. But I’m a pretty, young thing! Why is no one devouring me? Someone! Devour me now, please!
I’m in my prime, aren’t I? This is the most magical time of all the times that have been thus far. I’m floating away in the wind. Won’t someone catch me quickly? Pluck me from the air and undress me and kiss me all over and never let me go.
I force intimacy. I do.
I will never watch my clothes spin around in the washing machine with your clothes, watching as they entwine themselves. I’ll never take them out when they’re done and fold our clothes together and put them away in the set of drawers we share.
I will wither away on the table. I will never achieve the purpose that I blossomed for; that I was peeled, rinsed and presented for.
I want to grab my own hand and push myself in front of a stranger on a sunny day and say, “Here! She’s yours now!”
I want to lie down on a sticky floor, littered with confetti, in a dark room under bright lights and thumping music in some act of weird performance art. I want to just be done with it all if no one will have me. People can step around me and I won’t budge because I am doing something down here!
Fine, I’ll hoist up my skirt and trudge off into the wilderness and become a wild thing on my own instead. I’ll drink and dance and sing and act like I don’t ache inside.
I want to stand up at the table at that dinner party and scream! I want to frighten the guests and stop their chatter. Perhaps their plates will jump up off the table and their food will rearrange itself. I want to force them to confront themselves and their pathetic dinner party, so I don’t have to confront mine. But they’ll just scoop me up under a glass jar and carefully carry me out to the garden, releasing me into the night air, and softly shutting the door behind them.
Layla
2007/2022:
I’m hanging up my backpack, which is nearly the same size as me, on the hook outside our kindergarten classroom. A girl with tan skin and frizzy brown hair is putting hers up next to mine. I’m slightly younger for my year, a nervous little thing… or maybe I’m not. Was I anxious then? Or did that come later? I seemed to have no issue turning to this girl, who introduced herself as Layla, asking if she wanted to be my friend. I wish making friends was that easy in your twenties.
The next two years we ate together every recess and lunch, swapping sandwiches and playing made-up games in the garden, going to each other’s houses after school and having sleepovers. In Year Two I left Layla and that school behind, becoming the new kid and starting all over again at a new school after my parents moved us. Layla and I somehow managed to stay best friends, even though kids don't really understand the importance of communication or consistency or growing together. These are things we would learn later on.
Layla moved states when we were fourteen, but we never let the distance impact our friendship. I’ve visited her apartment a dozen times in Brisbane. It’s an old, white, two-storey building with a terrace on the river. There are three bedrooms:
Her flat mate Emma’s room (who throws out Layla’s food when it is perfectly fine and sends her passive-aggressive messages about paying rent)
The spare room where Emma’s friend occasionally stays (I’ve never seen her and am not sure she actually exists)
Layla’s bedroom, whose bed I share whenever I stay over.
I’d booked the flights a month before to be there for Layla’s 21st birthday party, unaware of the fact I’d be broken up with four days prior to flying over. Her birthday weekend would, unfortunately, partly become about distracting me from my recent devastation.
This involved:
Margaritas, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, homemade pizzas, 2000s teen romcoms, tequila shots, flirting with random men, kissing random men, nearly going home with random men but deciding better – thank god! I was avoiding Instagram, posting to Instagram but avoiding who viewed it, crying in the bathroom, smoking blueberry-flavoured cigarettes with a drug dealer named Bossie (not his legal name), crashing a friend of a friend’s 21st, meeting a man with the same name as my ex and immediately ending the conversation there, having Layla wipe the tears off my face and give me a pep talk in the middle of a bar and flying home with a screaming baby sat behind me.
With anyone else, I probably would have just cancelled the trip altogether. But it wasn't just anyone — It was Layla.
I heard someone say once that friends will help fix a heart they didn’t break. I think about that a lot.
Remember, this is still a love story.
Sky
June, 2023:
I’m tired of dedicating months of my life to other people — and when I say people, I mean men. I’ve made it a habit of dedicating long stretches of time to thinking about someone else, then having that end, and treating the period where I focus on myself as an interim period before the next person comes along.
Right after my most recent heartbreak, after he left my house and I had a good cry in the shower, I messaged my friend Sky so we could get dinner together because I didn't want to be alone. I sat on a bus, trying not to look at the couple sat across from me hugging each other, and met her outside the Lebanese place where I continued to cry as families ate around us. They carried on with their meals, pretending like they didn’t see me. I pointed out spots around the city to her that he took me to on dates. Throughout the night, she listened to my tearful lamentations about my lost romantic future. She reassured me that my mascara wasn’t smudged, and it did not make me look like a raccoon, as we sat on a bench eating ice cream together. We had known each other for a solid amount of time, but she was still a relatively new friend, and had never seen me cry before.
I still can’t look at the Sydney Opera House the same way, or the streets in Newtown, old pubs in The Rocks, or LimeBikes, because of the memories I associate with them. At least now I also think of hazelnut ice cream and sitting cross-legged with Sky as we talked for hours, looking out on the harbour.
16,632 Kilometres Away
Present:
There are daffodils growing outside my apartment window. I’m halfway across the world.
I’m standing in my shower, listening to Abba’s ‘Slipping Through My Fingers.’ I realise I feel a lot taller now. I bought a new perfume to wear whilst I was away, switching it out for the old one to force myself to associate new memories with this new, powdery floral scent.
I took a pink, bitter-tasting pill the other night in Amsterdam and made my friends hold my hands so tight the entire time and promise that they wouldn’t let go. My best friend entwined her fingers with mine and held our hands in her pocket so we would both stay warm. As we stood there, cheek to cheek, she told me I’ll be okay. I think that’s love.
