Letters written, never meaning to send

I felt a small sense of accomplishment when I realised I hadn't written to you in a year. They never substantial communications, they were innocuous emails, at best. Reminders of in-jokes and maybe songs you might like, things you might have seen or missed. I didn't write frequently but I came to realise my writing fell into some sort of an abyss. No reply. There was something tragic about that silence and I slowly came to accept that when my name flashed upon your screen it triggered some sort of shame stimulus. I was a living shame stimulus. So I stopped writing.

I still find things I want to talk about but I let that inclination evaporate. I think about it and carry on much like a recovered junkie. I haven't reconciled that existential mystery: am I remembered with scorn or am I remembered with longing? I once believed in false dreams and images of warmth, but now I don't know. I tend to believe in something more complicated now. It's a bit like a hologram, you can hold it to the light and play with its perspective, and the colours will change, from moment to moment. There was a full spectrum of love and toxicity, I've had to face that alone.

I miss you in this reckless, life-wasting way. I can't write anymore, I can only hope you can listen to the songs we once listened to and remember some of the cackling, some of the harmonies we once sang together. It's not much but it will have to do for now.

Heady States

"You have to remember the power of your words too. For you, it's a heady moment to forget but for me, it's waves of electricity coursing through my fingers. You touch me."

It's a quote that's lived in me for years and years and for some reason it came back to me today. It was from this English rock star penpal who I talked to online when I was 20. He hated that "rock star" label so much, but I can say he was a musician from some emerging indie band that managed to infiltrate the mainstream. We met during a phone interview: he called from London and I spoke into a microphone from my little radio studio at RMIT. There was a minor confusion in the set up, did he mean the interview was this Thursday or the Thursday after? The conversation itself was long, relaxed and languid. We would go on to send super lengthy emails to one another. Soon it became frantic texts in the middle of the night and eventually, some real or imagined romantic dimension materialised.

In spite of its brevity, the communication was electrifying. In retrospect, I see that everything was closely tied to his narcissism. I had granted him this unlimited space to speak about himself and his band and girlfriend and music and neighbours and festivals... that he never really bothered to find out anything about me. It was just how I wanted it. Each email sent provided this incredible opportunity to blend my favourite things: therapy, music and analysis, all the while obscuring the pathetic truth of my existence as a failing law student. Despite all that, he managed to infuse so much romance into the dynamic, that we may as well have been dispatching ink-stained letters in the early 1800s. I died to see his name on a screen. It meant he was thinking of me.

The fall out was devastating. He returned home from a tour in Holland and texted me: "My world's seismic. I've fallen in love. I need to talk to you..." I momentarily thought that he was referring to us but he would swiftly disclose that he was agonising over some other girl. She was with someone else too but they had been talking intensely for some months now. Since it happened, all those years ago, I kept on screaming into the ether, "HOW ON EARTH DID YOU HAVE SPACE FOR THIS??" It's hilarious to say it now but at the time I was completely heartbroken. For years I pined for his poetic turn-of-phrase, his dramatic sensibility and his over-the-top insistence that I understood what it all meant.

The story is more nuanced and detailed than that, but that's why I've written so many essays about it over the years. All coded, disguising the identities of the victims. He was intensely quotable: when I asked him whether he wanted to see me in London, he said: "I'd only see you if it meant more to me than it would to you." It was romantic while at the same time there was an ambiguity that would confuse you. He doled out phrases that would hold you tight and squeeze you like a boa constrictor. My hostel lover was a bit like that, coming up with expressions like, "Just because I don't want to remember, doesn't mean I can forget..." and "Every time you've looked at me and felt I've wanted to kiss you, I've wanted to kiss you..." I mean, what does that even mean?

I don't believe either of them were really in love with me when they said these things, but there was something in their capacity to say such things so beautifully and spontaneously that led them into this very intense kind of euphoria, like a creative flow state. They fell in love with themselves and their own poetics. I'm not sad about it, they were powerful lines, any one of them could be shoehorned into a jagged post-punk anthem that we'd sing down at the indie clubs. I miss their poetic desperation. I would give anything now for their name to flash on my screen, despite the pain, despite the fallout.

Precision

I knew it was the end when I saw that photograph of your smashed up steel-blue Fender Precision Bass. The headstock was roughly decapitated from its thick neck, the strings were severed and hung loose across the bruised body. Fans cooed dramatically, commenting on how rock'n'roll it all was. You never addressed them, but I know you would have loathed that suggestion. You only ever said: "Goodbye old friend."

I imagined your relief that came from that violence. How it must have felt for you to destroy the object that had kept you away for so long. It reminded me of our first conversation, when you told me about how you saw Richey Edwards' last show with the Manic Street Preachers. Years after his disappearance, you still seemed so shaken by the determination of his violence, diving head first into the drum-kit at the end of the show.

I hope you've managed to return to the life you wanted, free of old friends and draining obligations. I'd be lying to say that I didn't miss your hysterics, they were always so poetic. I still think of the world in terms of us and them. There are those who will swoon over the rock'n'roll gesture and then us, those who will try to derive some meaning out of it. I think we live differently to everyone else.

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