Running With The Wolves

I unpacked all of my books and set up my bookcase and all this magic poured out.

I set up my favourite Skyway Restaurant desk and wrote the first chapter of my memoir. It's probably shit and will never see the light of day in the final edit. But that's ok.

There's so many different ways to write it. I could write twenty memoirs using different words but the essence would all be the same. I've never been so ready. See that Joy Division postcard? I bought it when I was nineteen - Love Will Tear Us Apart. I had no idea what that meant but I sure do now. The glass broke and the frame is long gone but it's still stuck there, still true. I've always been intuitive, always felt things years before I understood them.

Here's a photo of me writing my memoir:

I bought that card a few years ago from the local Catholic shop that I hate. It makes me cranky. Don't even know who this guy is but I like him. I took Max into that shop once to buy him some rosary beads which weren't cheap and by the time we got home the cross had fallen off. So I took them back the next day but the lady wouldn't let me replace them, said it was my fault. Oh, Catholicism! Always with the guilt! I told her I'd never be back and I haven't. One of the richest corporations in the world couldn't replace a cross for a small boy. I hate what being brought up Catholic has done to me. Weeks later I found that cross wedged in the back seat of the car but I threw it away. I'd already given Max an Angel card from a different place by then and Lord Himself knows we all got too many crosses to bear anyway.

I found a rare photo of my brother Cam and my baby Max together one christmas. Straight after I took that photo Cam made Max laugh and Max threw his head back and it hit the table. He cried so hard! Cam felt SO bad, I said "Mate, it's fine, don't worry! He's ok!" Cam used to come and visit me when I was pregnant with Max and he was still in high school. We talked so much, about everything. I keep looking back like a forensic scientist, understanding things and putting his suicide pieces together. It's been the most extraordinarily hardest thing I've ever had to live through in my life and I've spent all of this weekend crying a river so high that I was able to sail away in a little boat and keep moving, keep going. Tears make you stronger.

It's difficult to believe in a world my brother didn't believe in anymore. It's conflicting when I get moments of hope. And now, suddenly, everything has come together in a huge crescendo and I'm reaping the rewards of all the hard work I've been doing these past few years, looking inside myself, dismantling everything.

I used to be many things. And yet here I sit on a back deck of a new house looking at trees and sobbing from gratitude, from understanding, from the realisation that I'm more powerful than I could have ever imagined. Against all the odds.

I thanked whoever the fuck it is who has been watching over me for my entire life. When you don't receive the love you need early on, you can get it from other places, mystical places. Keep walking through that fire - don't stop. And you'll arrive at a place you've never been to before.

I said to whoever the fuck it is who has been watching over me for my entire life,

"You gave me a boy to love. And then you took him away."

I know that's not true but it felt good to say it anyway. My brother was a grown man who made his own choices and doesn't life deal us some crappy cards? Sometimes I get angry at Cam. "I had two dead dads you only had ONE. You are supposed to still BE HERE." Mostly I just tell him I love him and I'm sorry and I need him. Over and over I tell him that. Life doesn't get handed to us on a bounteous platter. You gotta eat a lot of shit sandwiches to get to where you need to be. There's so many wars in the world and on the "news" but the biggest wars are silently being waged in our own hearts. You can numb it, or run from it, go the ignore, fill it up with other stuff. But if you don't wake up while you're alive then you'll die sleeping. So many of us lose our way.

This is the strongest and truest I've ever been and I'm just sitting on a chair on a Sunday, looking at the trees. Just being. Understanding so many different things all at once. I'm not done yet. I got shit to do, poems to slam, kids to raise and bills to pay. I've always had this theory that when somebody you love dies, they'll watch out for you and give you strength. I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure my brother is giving me all the strength and love and power to me now, all the stuff he couldn't feel or do when he was alive. He wanted me to keep going. He banked on it. He knew I had kids and couldn't follow him. Fucker. Everything I do from now on in my life I will do for and because of the both of us. He saved me in my childhood and I couldn't save him in his adulthood but that was not my job. It was his. One day I might believe that. I'm still very far from forgiving myself about his death and I'll carry my sadness like a cross for the rest of my days, a cross so big it could never be wedged in the back seat of a car. So I'll need to be strong.

Have you ever re-evaluated your entire self and made huge decisions based purely on instinct, intuition, a knowing that you're on the right path? Yes? No? It feels absolutely extraordinary and though it's full of pain and tears, you're suddenly on the other side looking at things with a completely different set of eyeballs as if the actual Creator of this whole stupid shebang switched them out of the sockets of your skull while you were asleep. To wake you up.



"Write.
What you know
and let your feelings show.
Be who you are and give all that you've got
It's easy and as hard as this
Though you try to resist

It's just the way of this world
Let it be your oyster, your pearl
Make you an honest girl
Let it be your oyster, your pearl."

- Sarah Blasko