Oh, So Quiet.

I was so shy as a kid that I could hardly look people in the eye when they talked to me. Sometimes my face would go the deepest shade of crimson that kids would laugh and laugh. "Your face is as red as your hair!" 

Fuck those kids. Fuck people who go out of their way to make other people feel bad. I watched a group of young women wearing hardly anything laugh at a homeless man. Who laughs at a homeless man? I guess I must have missed the punchline but I sure as hell wanted to punch some empathy into them which is a total contradiction.

Those girls skirts were so high it was embarrassing - sweetheart, you just ain't got it. In laughing at the homeless man you're actually laughing at yourselves but you're nowhere near understanding that concept. Yet.

Maybe one day when life starts sinking its teeth into them, bleeding, wrestling them around in the dirty water like a crocodile and they're gasping for air saying "I get it! I get it now!"

The hardest lessons make the strongest motherfuckers.

Yeah I been quiet. I always go quiet when there's too much to say. There's always way too much to say I usually say it anyway despite and in spite but I don't have much time for spite these days. Too busy trying to get things down before it's too late. No time for crying just trying to create.

The last time I ever saw my real father I was eleven years old and I was so nervous because I hadn't seen him for years and I always wondered what it would be like to talk to him. I look exactly like him. Before he came to visit his kids I ran upstairs and grabbed my coin collection, a huge hexagonal glass case. And when he arrived I sat on the couch being quiet so quiet and waited very patiently until I realised. He didn't have anything to say to me. I never showed him my coin collection. I never saw him again.

Years after he died I had a dream he was on a train that I was chasing and I was still holding that hexagonal box and as I ran I wasn't timid anymore I was furious and just as the train carrying him sped off without me I threw that fucking box at the glass aimed it directly at his head and yelled out THERE'S MY FUCKING COIN COLLECTION.

I never turn crimson anymore. And I've never really liked objects.

So yeah I been going through stuff. Who hasn't? I don't do surface level. Some things can't be written about. They just have to be felt. Acknowledged. Let go. I don't understand so many things but where is it written that I even have to?

My words are currently being poured into the shape of a memoir. Wordsmithing. Banging and hammering the letters and sentences and secrets and structures and lessons into the right mold with every tool I have. I start with scaffolding. Soon I'll be wrapping the meat around the skeleton. It's easy to write. It's hard to let go and trust that it will be set in the right incarnation before I let it go.

If my sons had coin collections I would sit while they described every single coin back and front. It would take hours and I'd probably be bored shitless but I wouldn't show it I'd just marvel at the curve of their lips and the memory of their feet kicking me from the inside. I constantly tell them I love them with my whole heart and pray that that's enough.

I feel all of my life. It's hard and necessary. Just do my best. Wash the dishes.

::

My Rocco loves to explore everything. So curious. I love watching him explore everything.

He picked up this magnificent stick and straight away knew it was something special.

"Mum, I'm going to keep this stick always. So when I'm an old man I can have all the memories of my life."

When he spoke those words to me, I felt like everything was going to be ok.

Perhaps everything always has been.