Sometimes I have out-of-body experiences where I scream what the fuck is wrong with you. It could also be my conscience. I’m not sure. That particular voice in my head does not feature as much as the others that say “Fuck it. Seems fun”. Shh! The demons are talking.

Hello SJ, you fucked up.

The thing about accountability is the thing that feels bad at the time, is the thing that is good for you. In true petite Heroine style, I burned it all to the ground. I can’t tell if this was spurred by my father’s hand or if I’m a bad person. Two things can be true at the same time. Yes, we’re talking about love. 

The flowers on the dining table sit orderly in one of my mother’s crystal vases that I thought was ugly until I became a grown-up. The chrysanthemums are fresh, of neutral colours, soft creams and whites. A few flower heads sport bruised petals and I think it is a shame that when I bought them at Sunday’s market, I thought they would revive if I gave them water. Perpetually naive.

I’m sitting in limbo with larger thoughts looming than love- Thank God. The apartment I live in is being sold. A reminder that it’s not mine. What this means is, come the end of the month, I’m either granted the grace to stay or picking up my library of books and calling where you land home. 

Advice is free that is why people give it without thought or care. If advice were worth money, would you be telling the checkout girl the best model of microwave? You’d probably hoard your time better. What I’ll tell you for free advice is… Fucking stop. Or can I just not be told anything because I am always right (statement not question). Sounds correct. 

I finish a long, pre-winter beach walk with an acquaintance. I’m not sure where the line blurs into friend. I do like her though. Or find her interesting. I’m not sure if that is the same. Lying back into my couch in the same manner one reclines in the psychiatrist’s chair, staring into my pretty art deco plastered ceiling that I do not own but rent, she talks of the existential crisis in her marriage. Seeking advice from a girl at least ten years younger than you, who is unmarried, with a string of patched up relationships seems unwise. Alas, I listen. 

There was two weeks in India with a friend on a charitable mission, where confronted with poverty she admired women who fetched water from wells and were content with their “lot”. The experience captured on her Iphone. 

“I’m just not happy”, the confession drops like I am supposed to be surprised. Like we are entitled to happiness. The white privledge makes me recoil or I am graciously defensive. I don’t know if you can hold other people’s material poverty against your own barren interior emotional landscape to give you fortitude. Because it looks alot like Saudi oil barons and Russian princesses saying Inshallah, they don’t live in the hovel that is your inner suburban, double storey, four bedroom house. My point, life is hard relative to your experience of it. And we do not reduce someone’s lived experience because it is true to them, baby Heroine. Look at me, I’m tolerant. Tell me your pronoun babe.  

I’m feeling well rested which supports objectivity. And, because I am as emotionally priviledged as she is financially privledged to the slum dog millionaires, I show the subject kindness in my deliberate gloss over of such an assumed fact that people living in abject poverty are grateful or happy and not merely surviving. Fuck me. 

If my life is not as bad as yours, it connects the thought that it is not as good as others. Comparison is Satan’s work, doll. Read the blog. 

If the couples therapy my married Millenial mates flock to is a measure of difficulty, then long term relationships are hard. “What I hear is you are a help seeking generation”, My Gen X acquaintance-friend tells me. Sunny. When I ask, have you ever told your husband what you need instead of telling him why you are dissatisfied I have said something so obvious and true that I struggle to interpret the silence as either awe or embarrassment. I’m not sure if it is a cultural or generational chasm I am bearing witness to. It is uncomfortable. 

Long term relationships are hard because they are full of free advice from someone who isn’t listening to someone else, who is doing dumb shit, because they are an idiot. Love carnage. Til death do us part.

SJ xx