Wax

I brought in the new year alone. I didn't intend it to be that way, but it felt appropriate somehow. As I stood by the upstairs window and watched the fireworks over Northcote, I don't think I could have had anyone else there.

With any other year, I'd take myself aside moments after midnight to read a letter I'd written a year before. There'd be lengthy summaries, paired with annoyingly simple and familiar moral overtures.

As I sat alone, I recalled those instances where I was forced to reveal the contents of my yearly letter, to Gav in a gutter in China Town and to Min in a kitchen in South Yarra. In both instances, I warned of its intensity but they insisted I proceed.

They were both disgusted, but for very different reasons. Gav came up with the infamously ironic (and the fucking stupid) statement: "you have ephemeral attitude towards love". Min, predictably, dismissed my candour and depressive tendencies.

I realised it quickly, after I managed to pull the pages apart that were stuck fast together with silver sealing wax. A year ago, I wrote with the same idiotic naïveté that I displayed in revealing my words to those I had loved so much.

I don't think I'd have ever realised, in my ten years of doing this, that perhaps these letters weren't about resolutions for the new year. They were about an ideal: someone interested enough to excuse themselves from a party, to follow me out to calmly listen to private thoughts.

Everything is different now, everything is more different than I could've ever imagined. I no longer hope for connection, I no longer hold that desire to glorify passing moments. I hope for nothing, except for the ability to quash that pathetic propensity to talk and to trust.

Disappointments Diary 2013

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.