Pitch

I first became subjected to this pressure to be breathlessly articulate ten years ago. When my counsellor urged me to only see her once I had specific questions to discuss, it broke my heart. It became apparent that I had to frequently launch into an elevator pitch, particularly when I was compelled to speak with an important type with an impatient manner. Their inattention would rattle me, my chest would constrict when I'd see their wandering eyes search for something else, anybody else they'd rather be talking to. It happens in these momentary interactions, in chance meetings with musical heroes, prospective employers and BBC journalists. I speak quickly. I make it brief.

When I heard a recent recording of his voice, competing for space and attention, I was reminded of how this dynamic plagued him in the days when I knew him. We never discussed it, but I always thought his fast-paced delivery reflected a feeling of creative powerlessness. He was eternally pitching to the eternally distracted. We hadn't spoken in five years but I still felt a level of gratitude towards him. In spite of his cruelty, he checked back frequently to read my Plague essays. Knowing of his silent readership prompted me to lovingly craft my words. I felt relieved at the thought that I still existed in his mind, yet I struggled to obscure the fact that I no longer held onto his memory as I once did. I still don't know if he ever knew that I had loved and lost another.

In a moment of madness, I crafted an email to him in reference to his forthcoming visit to London. It drew heavily on my ancient fear of being in London and being denied the possibility of seeing someone important. I wrote to offer the chance to meet as friends but I never honestly expected a response, because I know that even the caring don't tend to write. Yet, in this instance, he did reply. It was palpably abrupt, condescending and needlessly harsh. What I had intended as a kind gesture managed to shake all the kindness that I had once cultivated in my heart and my head. In that moment, I knew that he would never visit this site again. I had lost my muse... and there's no one around who could possibly understand what that means to me.

It's a loving thing to be generous with your time and space, but I need to reconcile with those suffocating moments where there's no interest, there's no love or warmth. It's best to return to those friends who choose to love and listen and be kind. I need to return to them.

Nuances

"This very familiar recital of the musical experience suddenly takes on, as I can tell it, the aspect of a very hazardous undertaking. It is hazardous because at no point can you seize the musical experience and hold it. Unlike that moment in a film when a still shot suddenly immobilises a complete scene, a single musical moment immobilised makes audible only one chord, which in itself is comparatively meaningless. This never ending flow of music forces us to use our imagination, for music is a continual state of becoming."

Aaron Copland, Music and Imagination

I thought a lot about that quote during a train ride between Salzburg and Hallstatt. The untouchable, ephemeral nature of what he had described moved me, that it was never possible to capture or evoke music in an instant. I reflected upon the nature of the musical imagination, writing quickly in cursive hand, free of any fear that I would ever read what I wrote again: "I hear a recording of Freddie and the detail of it, the nuances of his tone make him seem so incredibly alive still. There is life in its recorded expression and it is addictive, that ability to access that voice, that detail of expression..."

Yesterday, I recovered some demos that I thought had been lost and gone forever. They were covers of Ricky Nelson's Garden Party and Tom Petty's I Won't Back Down that we had recorded before he returned home for Christmas that year. It made my heart leap to discover that they had lived on in my Sent Mail all this time, existing as MP3 attachments to my estranged co-collaborator. The guitar was lowly amplified, the hushed vocals wavered in occasionally perfect unison, with each phrase adopting some imagining of a Southern twang. The recording features innumerable stuff ups, giggles and apologies, with dialogue in warm, low tones: impossible to ever decipher, impossible to ever recover.

Speech, like music, can never be properly immobilised. You can't capture it in an instance, time is necessary to replay those recordings where the inaccessible speak freely, laughing and utilising the expressions they use too much. There's a real joy in becoming reacquainted with a lost voice and I've been finding it more and more, as I've been making a radio documentary for Olli's departure from the hostel. I've sought out contributions from countless guests and they've come back with these voice recordings. Edited together, the finish is rough and the quality variable, almost every detail of their delivery remains intact, close and alive.

As Olli prepares to leave, I feel grateful that I've managed to share this passion for reflection, sentimentality and documentation. In addition to verbally sparring almost constantly, we've both kept our respective notes, continuously writing down quotes and ideas. He looks at my Twitter from time to time, loudly bemoaning the absurd misattributed quotes. It's been a joy to exist alongside him and I know there'll be more to uncover when he leaves. It's odd to think but perhaps it's that method of recovery which will add to that sense of the past being recaptured. Maybe it needs to be distant, it needs to be thought as if it's lost and maybe only then, you can have it back.

Guidance

It's only when you open up to the wrong person that you realise how multifaceted grief can be. You mourn for lost moments, lossy memories and an even lesser regard. You've lost out on the most valuable cultural exchange but they never seems to understand it. They think sadness comes from the memory of physical love, but it's often about a more simple desire to be present with another person: it's a longing for the warmth and the education to carry on, as promised.

It's an ineffectual desire in light of where I find myself now. I've been attempting to think of the future and address those plans I once had. It's uncomfortable to dream, now that I find that I have to develop some other life. I wake up each afternoon in a kind of panic. I feel less and less welcome in the hostel, having read horrible things that were intended for me and horrible things that weren't. I have uncovered a plot to replace me and someone else must work for free until I decide that it's time.

I labour on ancient memories after a year of silence, his suggestions that I leave the hostel (and London) as soon as possible. We frequently described this place as a kind of purgatory, as the events of each night managed to bleed into one another and everybody appeared to be wearing the same clothes constantly. I refer to those poetic reflections, those agreements that touched upon how we have all lived together knowing that it was the best and the worst way to live. We lived knowing that this was a stolen season and none of this was ever real.

I don't know where I could possibly go, but I hope I'll have my desk, my books, some air, some light and my guitar. There'll always be those persistent dreams of demos with fuzzy hooks and loaded lyrics, but I know that I will naturally gravitate towards essays about music, grief, love and hope. The wrong people may characterise it as a destructive habit to remember, reframe and honour how I've been mistreated, but for me, it's the only way I can learn and grow and find out what I want. I don't want to talk anymore, I just have to write...

Lacrimosa

The proposition read as a perverse challenge to me: Sad music might actually evoke positive emotions, reveals a new study by Japanese researchers... The summary suggested that there is an odd ambivalence that comes from listening to sad music, suggesting that pleasant feelings derive from sad music because that it does not pose a real threat to personal safety. It was a vague proposition with little scientific certainty in its brief citation. In any case, I decided that I wanted to conduct my own uncontrolled study using myself, an old unfinished C60 cassette and the tape deck in my Volvo.

I tested the theory during a familiar late night drive, when time was indistinct and the streets were empty. I pushed in the tape and pressed rewind. The tape whirred, eventually clicking to start. The plane trees bowed ruefully over Orrong Road, the heavy branches clouded the flossy glow of the passing street lights. I was convinced that I could handle whatever associations it threw at me and I did. I remained stoic throughout the aggressive jangly semiquavers of Fonz. I felt fine through the scarcely discernible French ramblorings of Still Fond. Each lyrical proclamation left me unperturbed: One day, we're gonna live in Paris, I promise...

It was sad, but not in the Lacrimosa sense of the word. It was sad in that everything from its sequence to its sentiments felt so familiar to me, in spite of the fact that it had been so long since I'd listened to it. It felt like living: speeding through the darkness, being bombarded with scarcely-forgotten reminders, always battling to shut up.

Now homeward bound, the last song came on near where I spotted a Toorak fox, some nights before. I was bemused, having momentarily forgotten the song's inclusion on the tape. It was a lo-fi home-made demo with acoustic guitar and loud female backing vocals. I recalled its lyrics and sang along in a plaintive masochistic style, Why don't you call me? As the song went on to describe the devastating possibility of his crush running out of phone credit, I had to smile and acknowledge how dated and painful it all was. As much as I tried to guard the ongoing legacy of this thing, there was always the risk I'd trip over something like that. I'd come across a horrible reminder of how this is life, as it worked out.

I'll admit, I had some doubts about this scientific proposition. For one thing, I don't necessarily believe that music can be divided into the happy and the sad. There are associations, meanings and intentions, always contained and largely untapped. For me, both music and living is all about legacy management. I try to organise memories in the knowledge that time will never make the painful, painless. I appreciate that one point that study did make though: that music, like memory, poses no immediate threat to us in the present moment. Despite my initial reluctance to reacquaint myself with his songs, I will always be protected due to the nature of the past and its complete irrelevance. I am comforted in the idea that I'm strong enough to return as an unmoved silent tourist. I am safe, I will always be safe, so long as I am alone at some indistinct hour.

Hauntings

It was still daylight when we emerged from dinner and we stood at the corner of Little Bourke and Russell Street. I said, "I'll be happy to think that I'll associate all these places with you, when you're gone..." He didn't really respond, in fact he said comparatively very little on that walk back. I suppose we both knew it would be the last few minutes we would ever see each other, but I remained largely unsentimental. I filled the silence, recounting various hauntings of those narrow streets. We walked past Ding Dong and I told him of the friend who carelessly volunteered her heart to someone she shouldn't have. I told him of her heartbreak and how a mutual friend ruthlessly dismissed her grief. He sarcastically summed up the story I just told, highlighting the similarities to us and I playfully smacked his chest. "That was completely different."

We returned to talking about music in those remaining moments, about Parlophone and Steve Osborne and that other movement we thought we had played a part in. We kept walking until we came upon a street sign, a lane bearing his name. We stopped and looked up: "That's so strange..."

I once hated Melbourne for its hauntings. I would emerge from the house knowing that almost every street and intersection would bring up some unwelcomed association, some memory of a loss or mistake. I've never been able to shake that habit and I'm beginning to think that it's not even possible. I'm always attaching a memory to a locality and it was only recently that I learned that this mental process is called Method of Loci. It's a device which relies upon memorised spatial relationships to recall "memorial content". Even as I sit here now, I'm randomly generating geographical associations, namely the east side of Little Lonsdale and Russell Street, for no other reason than I want to remember what it is to be writing this.

Each morning, I take the train and between Flinders Street Station and Southern Cross I survey many places I associate with him. His hauntings don't bother me so much, in fact, I'm happy to think that he's somehow attached to the physicality of this place. I think about Little Collins Street and his thoughts on quantum physics. Through some ridiculous theory, he suggested that it somehow meant that we could have already lived out every path, every choice and possibility together. I said it was completely absurd and without even thinking, I pointed out the half-demolished building on the diametrically opposite corner with its crumbling Art Deco façade. "I don't understand why it needs to be destroyed." As the green man flashed at us and I instinctively stretched out my hand towards his, a thoughtless gesture to ensure we crossed safely.

Inventions

It was a cold brisk night and Noreen and I had just walked past the cemetery. She said: "Just because they don't write essays about it doesn't mean they don't care. It doesn't mean that they don't remember everything..." I could only laugh a little, what with my wheezing and shortness of breath. I responded quite flippantly in that trade mark sardonic tone. "What are you talking about, no one remembers anything! I'd be an idiot to convince myself otherwise."

I don't know when I started believing this, but at some point, I thought that comfort comes from invention. It comes from that ability to convince yourself that they do care or they do remember or they do regret. There's always that scope to do that, if you spend enough time alone with your thoughts. In the silence, you can construct an alternative reality, one that need not be true necessarily, but one that is not quite so painful to live with on a day-by-day basis.

Lately, I've been sceptical of this practice. That's not to say I don't think it's worthwhile, I believe it encourages the imagination to provide solace at a time when it is so inclined to do quite the opposite. Saying that, I've started to resent the idea of measuring requitedness. Trying to figure out what they think, what they feel. You can stand in front of a person and they can insist that they love you and you can insist that you love them, but ultimately, it means nothing if they go on to remorselessly squash your heart.

Are those moments meaningless? Are they void of sincerity if you can't reconcile words with actions? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps I've had too many conversations to know how easy it is for other people to shelve such incidents in the mind. They don't need to invent imaginary regret or regard, they just distract themselves and move on. There's no desire to glorify passing moments or conversations, they don't even need to wonder if I care because I advertise that I do, in the most vulgar way imaginable. I advertise that I care on here.

I've been experimenting with damnatio memoriae, the Roman practice of completely wiping out a person's image and memory. It's just like carrying on as if that person never existed. It's strange and it's powerful and it's completely at odds with who I am. Yet, I've taken to it, not because it is easy to do, but because it is much easier than having to understand why. No comfort can be derived from that old practice of invention, there's no way to imagine their care or regret because it is impossible. It just doesn't make any sense.

The irony of all this is that I've started to see value in the meanings I create. I've started to see beauty in my own inventions. What they think is almost irrelevant at this point, I create consequence. I will always create consequence. I love how empowering that notion is, how it is not at all reliant upon detecting any semblance of truth or sincerity. It's all about establishing a kind of ownership: it's not meaningful because they care, it's meaningful because I care... and I express it all in a way that other people might care too.

Viktor Tsoi in Igla: get stabbed, light cigarette, walk away...

White Belt

It recently occurred to me that the day might come when I'll have to retire my white belt. After nine years, the canvas is beginning to fray a little and those various grey lines which correlate with the varying girth of my hips have faded. The white has gone a kind of polluted grey now, I can only assume from wearing it with skinny black jeans for so long. It's funny because the truth is I never even really wanted a white belt when Madam marched me off to NEXT in Hull to get one. The design was not exactly what I wanted, the buckle being two silver metal rings instead of a solid alligator-like claw contraption. After buying it, we stood in a busy arcade in the middle of Hull city centre, looking at my lower belly, attempting to work out how to thread up my belt. I'm sure it must've been a curious scene for anyone who was there to witness it.

I'm sure to anyone else, that greyed, frayed thing around my hips is hardly becoming but I suppose it's a relic of something that I once thought was quite sexy. Much like handling a black canvas rucksack, it wasn't a style that other girls appropriated and I appreciated that act of solidarity. It was a masculine token, in keeping with the stylish men I once associated with. Gav remarked upon the belt too, how it attracted him as he spied me dancing from across the room. I never had the tenacity to say: "You like it because it's you, it's your style." But saying that, I occasionally have daydreams of going back in time and mocking his breathtaking vanity, while at the same time congratulating myself for successfully appealing to the one thing he would find attractive: himself.

I look for new white belts from time to time, but nothing replicates the one I have. Not in style or in feeling. I suppose I will replace it when the time is right and this belt will become emblematic of another era in my life, as silly as that may sound. I was thinking the other day that in spite of all that has passed in the last nine years, I will always attribute its existence to Madam. The fact that we haven't seen each other in that time makes that loop around my hips so much more consequential. It's as if he's always here, clinging to me. I can hardly shake it and I don't really want to, either. Because although he doesn't remember venturing out to buy these things that I've kept for far too long now, I don't care to forget much. I don't care to forget his legacy and how, in spite of his absence, he's helped me to shape the person I am now.

Ophelia

It was some years ago when he decided he would call me Ophelia. He was delighted at the re-christening, shouting its significance over the loud music to our mutual friends: It's cockney-rhyming slang, you see: Eleanor, Elisnore, Hamlet, Ophelia. Little did he know I had chosen my own nickname for him, not that he ever knew it. For the purposes of my head and my phone he was John Lennon Guy and it was a name so committed that even now, I need to momentarily concentrate before I say his real name out loud.

There are little fragments of that friendship that sometimes return to me. How he would purposefully (yet secretly) request the Kinks so we could dance together or send me a text from across the room: Sorry Ophelia, I didn't recognise you with your new haircut. Wow, you look beautiful... There's a lot to be said for those youthful escapades when the most mild-mannered flirtation would be enough. Nights when you would spend the whole car ride home thinking of what it felt like when he kissed you goodbye on your eyelashes.

The modern-day encounter would be rare, but no less enjoyable. I'd order a mocha and listen, captivated as he'd teach me how psychiatrists establish credibility with their patients or else, how to land a Tigermoth aircraft. It would be rare that I would be able to teach him anything, however there was one occasion when I taught him about lenticular lenses and the meaning of the word, threnody. I also told him the story of Pennies, at which point he handed over a threepence from 1921, a coin I've now pinned to my wall in the traditional Plague style.

I most recently came across an email where I described our first meeting to a friend. I was thrilled that I had somehow managed to forget the drama that transpired. You had a brother?! I texted to him, alarmed. He remembered how it all went down and again, I marvelled in how incredibly unusual it was, to forget that what someone else had remembered. There is always a possibility that more moments have been lost, but I don't believe there is much more to recall that I can't recall already.

I suppose that I just like the innocence of those times. I like the idea of that Ophelia girl, especially now I don't think I'll ever be her again.

Accuracy

I'll admit, I harbour this unattractive tendency to remember everything. If that wasn't unattractive enough, I strive to remember everything more accurately than you do. I prefer to have that sort of information on hand, for if I'm ever challenged about the nature of a glance, gesture or suggestion, I can trump you and I will win. Because I can remember and you can't.

There would have been a time when I would have been upset by this notion. I would have been harpooned by the thought that it wasn't important enough for you to remember, whatever it was exactly. While I had endlessly rhapsodised about various plagues, you'd struggle to recall the scarcest detail of my existence. Once I would have been offended, now I don't particularly care.

It would have been fine except I recently realised that I'd convinced myself of personal truths that were fraught with factual defects. I don't know how but lust and intent became whitewashed with years of coffee-drinking, journal-writing and story-telling. I only realised when you admitted to remembering something: "Come on Elle, you know it was never like that!"

I've never had to account for the veracity of those personal truths, my stories on the Plague or otherwise. Even as I attempt to craft and create and honour those moments of consequence, even as I faithfully recall any number of phantom glances and gestures, the moral of any given memory is diluted by the fact that I refuse to face the truth. I refuse to admit what it was and why it hurt so much when I lost it.

Amber

I don't abandon much, but when I was young, I abandoned your songs. It was an unusual situation, in that there was a time when I'd loved those songs more than anything else. I only ever had access to early demo versions and live rips, much to the exclusion of those later, official incarnations. I just stopped. I stopped listening. I stopped reinforcing ideas of a fondly-held consequence. It was easier to convince myself that you'd produced nothing else and there was, quite simply, nothing to go back to.

I was relieved that I never had to describe the circumstances surrounding that musical abandonment. I never thought I would have to, until I actually had to explain it to you. "But there's that prospect of finding a new connection, I think you might even like some of the new b-sides," you'd implore to my better judgement. I'd stutter, unable to offer a coherent explanation as to why I just can't. "People will wonder why, they'll wonder what has changed." He'd retort derisively, "But it's not about them."

I could listen now. I could listen and become casually acquainted with how it all went down. There's even that strange viability that I could embrace the life I was once compelled to reject. It's much easier not to listen, though. It's much easier to live unaware and unmoved, preserving that unacknowledged consequence, now held fast in amber. Yet, I can't help but neg you when you challenge me to give it a chance, "Maybe if you write something that exactly replicates your first demo, I might consider it. I might consider going back and doing it all over again."


Nagakin

Rippers

I don't understand how, but I felt my feet bleed tonight. It was a sensation I am familiar with, the sting of a raw heel, the mesh of school tights stuck fast. But I haven't touched my feet in days, I promised myself I wouldn't. I convinced myself I could.

The truth is I really don't care to stop, I really don't want to. I'm comforted when I pick, rip and cut my feet. It isn't particularly painful, not like it was when I was much younger. I'd whince and hobble as I'd walk, but I would never say why. They knew why I'd walk like that and I knew I deserved no sympathy.

I'm unclear when the habit even started Maybe I was 12 or 13 or maybe even 11? I started ripping my toenails and over the course of many years, I lost my nails in their entirety. They don't even grow now, but I could hardly care less. I paint nail polish over the barren, uneven skin and no one seems to care.

It's neat to think up some super compelling, wildly cohesive explanation as to why I do this to myself. I could be destroying my feet in an attempt to attain a kind of smoothness, an unattainable raw perfection that could be confused with normality. Yeah. Whatever. Why should it matter? Why should I stop? Why should you care, anyway?

I will try for the week though, as I've promised myself that I'd refrain from this and other bad habits: excessive sleep, painful photographs, Mint Slices and Google Analytics. I'm not convinced that any of it will help with very much, but I'm willing to see what it might feel like to heal a little bit... if only it is for a few days.

Handlers

I had hoped not to attract any attention. I skirted the trestle table and I watched him concentrate on examining records and patting turntables. He was my first boyfriend and he had broken my heart six months prior, when he sat on my bed and said he didn't miss me when I wasn't around. I grieved and recovered. With glazed eyes, I looked on blankly, recalling his insistence that one couldn't just learn how to mix beats.

He suddenly swept up beside me, leaving his decks unattended. "Can I talk to you?" I shrugged and he pulled my hand towards the dilapidated back stairs. We sat close together and he smelt of cloves, still. Dizzy, I paid little attention to his apology, ignoring the questionable levels of sincerity. I flipped my hand dismissively and reassured him that it was fine and I was fine and it was really all nothing.

I'm unsure whether it was the dismissive reassurances or my staring at his glowing straight teeth which made him ask: "Do you want to take me home?" I smiled, shook my head and took his hand, leading him to the side of the crumbling weatherboard house. "I only want you for a moment." They were soft and ineffectual kisses, yet nothing had ever made me feel more empowered. I commanded it, all of it. It would be the last time I would ever see him.

Missy Laur and I have always discussed the notion of confrontation or rather, how we can ever expect to cope with seeing those we've lost. I've have dealt with it to varying degrees: I've approached, I've ignored, I've been visibly upset, I've been visibly indifferent. I have dreams where I am composed and untouchable and I can handle everything, even the most meaningless of passing contact. I have dreams where I am woken up to the buzz of my phone and a lost name on screen.

"You'll always want more, you'll always want them to love you again." She warns me. I sip my mocha and dismissively flip my hand. "I think I can handle it."

Scissors

My hair was short when we were last friends. It was so short that the hairdresser had to shave the back of my head to mend the botchjob I had done to myself, one night when I had been left alone with the scissors.

It was a chic style, a 1920s bob, not unlike Louise Brooks or Edita Vilkevičiūtė as Chanel for Lagerfield. It was the closest I could ever get to shaving my head, the true cultural signifier of being hopelessly depressed.


As I was complimented for the boldness of the cut by strangers at parties, I could only think: "You don't know..." When I left his Jolimont apartment at 4 o'clock in the morning, I could only think: "You don't want to know..."

My dark hair now reaches far, far down my back, in thick cascades of incidental waves. I describe its length as cinematic and I revel in how it somehow illustrates that time has passed and things have changed.

But when he glances at me vacantly, with his new frames and unfamiliar beard, I know nothing of what he thinks. To ease the threat of self-reproach, I imagine he is looking at my hair.

I imagine he is looking, not only to survey its excessive length, but to recall its similarity to a style I once had. The style I had when we would hang out together and laugh endlessly... and I would actually be happy.

The Hip Tilt

I wasn't allowed to start a fashion folio, not until I had finished my Year 12 exams. My desire to pursue something fashionable, something artistic failed to impress my parents, but at this stage of the game, I could hardly care less. As my school friends got wasted, I bought a spiral-bound book with a translucent purple cover and I started to sketch girls, inspired by the pasted scraps of glossy paper ripped from fashion magazines. I started my first fashion folio, I started to imagine who I could be.

The girls I sketched were gruff, yet willowy, with side fringes and fashionably asymmetric garments. I drew awkward, couture dresses and near pointless white-singlet-indigo-jean combinations. All the while, I would pay careful attention to the female form. I ensured that each girl posed differently, with a head tilt or a fist clenched. There was always a cohesiveness about it, the eyes were always flat black lines, hooded to disguise any realistic demeanour. Their bodies were always stretched out and slimmed down to avoid any hint of a hip.


When I was meant to be studying for Criminal Law, I sketched furiously. I presented my initial efforts to my supportive best friend. After examining the drawings closely, she cried out: "It's great! You've got the hip tilt and everything!" I had never heard the expression before, but as she went on to explain the physiological significance of the tilt, it was the first time I ever considered that the hips might play some sort of a role in the balance and proportion of the female form.

It would take some time before I would accept the hips. I felt a great deal of reluctance to accept that curve: the exaggerated breasts, the small waist and big hips. I can only imagine this had much to do with those glossy images I poured over. In 2002, no such images were represented in the fashion magazines I collected. Yet I still admit, I wanted to be one of them, I wanted to be straight up and down, like a stick. I thought this was the absolute embodiment of sexiness.

Again and I'm not quite sure how, something changed, something in the public consciousness. I felt there was a greater acknowledgement of different shapes, of pears and apples and an almost universal adulation for the hourglass figure. Lovers raved on and on, insisting of how they unequivocally loved curvy girls, how they perceived hips as handle bars. Not only that, I spied Tyra's team of wannabe Top Models, discussing how they could effectively shape their body, to contort it in a manner that would exaggerate the curve I once so vehemently detested.

I never ended up drawing a girl with big hips. I gave up in 2005, three quarters of the way through my fourth fashion folio. I had presented my sketches, along with my stencil graffiti artwork to a panel of teachers, during an interview for a creative arts certificate. After I was rejected from the course, I could never bring myself to sketch again. It seemed pointless to imagine how I'd ever fare in trousers made of belts or a hoodie made of chainmail, inspired by the Smiths' Bigmouth Strikes Again.

I only recently started sketching again, I started teaching myself vintage fashion illustration from Walter T Foster's instructional book, Fashion Illustration 1920-1950. I love it, even though the girls are even more slender, stretched out and slimmed down. There are no hips, no breasts and only the tiniest waft of a waist. I do it, not to vanquish my own curve, but to embrace that simplicity of line and how it so easily suggests an arcane ideal of the female form.

Damnatio Memoriae

"Alas, that the friend of my youth is gone! Alas, that I ever knew her! I might say to myself, "You are a dreamer to seek what is not to be found here below." But she has been mine. I have possessed that heart, that noble soul, in whose presence I seemed to be more than I really was, because I was all that I could be."

The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe

I once wrote that my writings were never about one person in particular. They were ripped up photographs of those I once loved. Perhaps that is selfish or vague, but I wrote and published work in the hope that they would read it and understand that I still held them in high regard. I could never communicate with them, not in the way I would have wanted. In any case, it isn't healthy or socially acceptable to be on such intimate terms with the past. Perhaps with such persistent feelings of yearning, I only ever wanted access to the past. I wanted access to a temporal impossibility.

I did love them, in the most authentic sense of the word. I loved their conversation more than anything else. Sharing witticisms over mochas in Brunswick St. Sharing music over MSN, mixtapes and long car trips. Sharing lengthy musical diatribes to one another. I was addicted to their words, not their lips. It was the truest form of intimacy for me, it glorified the past and challenged the mind. Now we cannot talk, I can only pass the things they would have loved, the things we could have talked about. Who knows what could have been said, maybe they had lost interest altogether.

There is no way of knowing their thoughts. There may be an oblique reference to us in a lyric or a tweet, but I would only be entertaining my vanity to wonder such things. Do they ever feel the desire to talk? To discuss the things only we cared about? It is like a young teen, angsting over a non-responsive crushling. In such circumstances I can safely say that in the case of personal regard, if one has to wonder how much they cared, they didn't care enough. Clearly, the Dolly Magazine education has worked a treat.


However, therein lies the paradox. I found their regard to be the most empowering, intoxicating thing. Friends, lovers, whoever they were, I saw these people as incredibly clever and enlightened individuals. But then, they swore that they did see something in me too. They spent hours convincing me of my skill and potential but I was too proud to acknowledge or accept their kind encouragement. It was a feeling of mutual awe that I could never adequately deconstruct. It was the clarity and the requited nature of it all never really made sense to me.

I didn't understand it, but I became addicted to that breed of attention. Although I would come to meet more and more people with similar interests, I was always in a perpetual state of mourning. I became addicted to missing my past. I grieved for one in the presence of another. I grieved in the knowledge that, in time, they would come to hate me too. Brothers and friends warned that this would be my undoing, but I have only realised its net effect in recent times.

It is when I revisited Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, that I understood what it is to be in love with the past. I always knew, on some level, that access to the past was analogous to access to my creative self. It makes sense when I think about it now. I would only feel spurred to create if I had their input, their influence and encouragement. In their presence, I was more than I was, because I was all that I could be.

So now I sit with my notes on how to build the empire. I wince and procrastinate and complain and I sniffle endlessly - I long to talk to you. You would understand all this. But somehow, I've realised that you, or rather the idea of you is all but a mirage. For all the laughter and compassion that we shared, there is a completely logical explanation as to why we must never speak. My desire for long winded d&ms is fuelled by the impossible situation we find ourselves in. We simply cannot speak. If my creative output is dependent on your speaking to me, I shall never get anything done.

That is not to say that I don't still love you. Our friendship was not a contract, where all our feelings rescinded upon expiration of the term. I will be forever inspired by your wit and your kindness and good taste, but I do not need to talk to you to be inspired by all that you gave me.

I do not need to know whether you remember me or not. I remember you.