What am I? I am a microcosm of every person and thing I’ve ever loved and respected.

 

I was nine when I met my best friend. She had moved from the tropical heat of her Queensland home into a unique suburban Sydney house that was enclosed by bush and river. We spent time by hanging off the clothesline, spinning until we both decided to be brave enough to drop into the dirt mound below. We slept on the kitchen tiles in the summer when the wind pushed through the windows and the river salt stained our skin. I lived ten minutes up the road, past a graffiti painted pipe and the train station. I lived in a blue house with a red room, a fireplace, a backyard a brother, father and mother.

 

When we turned eleven, she moved away from the eighty-two steps and the winding trail that led to her home. When we turned eleven, we made a pact that we would stay friends until time threw us apart, or boys, or other things that didn’t really make sense to throw two parts of the whole apart. Later the whole came apart. But only temporarily.

 

Last month I dreamt I was standing on my hands, my mouth was made of glass teeth, when I looked into the mirror and smiled they turned to piano keys. Last week smelt like January fifteenth two years ago, so, for the past five days I’ve dreamt of oak trees and mangroves. Which means that I’ve been checking the mail regularly even though I know the post comes on Thursday.

 

My best friend’s father moved to another country when we turned twelve. We were fifteen when we realised he wasn’t coming home. She went to a catholic private high school. I went to the public high school a suburb away. Granuerholz mentions that ‘women who seek or gain power through their attractiveness are often those who are most dependent on men’s resources’. I think we figured that one out backwards. In order to gain power, use any attractive quality you have to gain the resources. We figured that one out later. During the younger years we learnt that our mouths were our resource. She memorised and spat information with speed and accuracy and took down the opposition with a single sentence. And when she couldn’t, when the opposition wasn’t playing fair, was attacking faults that weren’t there. I was. Spitting the new insult I had learnt from my school-yard. ‘Chat cunt’ or ‘fuckwit’ was my usual choice.  

 

When I forgot the name of his parents, and brother, and sister I dreamt about poetry. I was writing a poem in a notepad while observing myself writing it. I couldn’t read the poem. Two days post poetry dream, I dreamt the world was upside down, that I had forced the sky open and threw the world out.

 

Research has found that religion is related to the timing of first sex and sexual behaviours. She was baptised at fourteen, her mother’s side full of devout Irish Catholics. She picked a name of a saint that sounded the most humorous. She graduated last year in law. Her internship was in a well-sized family law clinic in a lower socioeconomic area. She was thrown into the deep end of kidnapping claims and child abuse. ‘Beauty and the pursuit of such holds a central place and role in women’s lives’. A study in 1997 found that women who wear makeup in the workplace are seen as healthier and more competent than those who do not. She bought new clothes, new shoes, curled her hair each morning and continued.

 

When the internship was completed she knew that it was something she had entered into that she didn’t have a good chance of winning. No matter how strong her rebuttal or how fast her mouth. Her mentor a forty-something, happily-ish, married woman made clear that sacrifice is the only unavoidable certainty in this profession. She completed her internship and went back to University to study psychology and chose this unavoidable certainty once again.

 

Her dad came home recently. Which means that she hasn’t been dreaming.

 

In Highschool I met a girl who was nothing like me, but, understood me in a way that I didn’t understand of myself. Her parents divorced when she was very young and her mother lived over an hour away on a property that housed carnival rides in the spring for extra money, a deer that died under a marquee, and men who kept secrets but stole phones. Cherlin suggests that ‘adult children from divorced families tend to enter into premarital cohabitation more often than adult children of married families’. She entered into a serious relationship at fifteen. It stayed serious until she was nineteen. I entered into a serious relationship at fourteen. I haven’t stopped entering in them since. She faced adulthood at nine. She stopped visiting her mother at sixteen. Her father adopted her brothers when she was eighteen and she got her dream job at twenty one.

 

I first fell in love with a girl when I was eleven. She moved to my primary school from England. My brother came out to me when I was twelve. I matched with the girl on a dating app last year. I never sent her a message. I lost my virginity to my first boyfriend when I was fourteen. His father was angry and focused it on him which made him angry. I found his anger knowable but wanted to learn how to turn it outwards like he could. The Journal of Marriage and Family sample study indicates that 92% of high school students who had used cigarettes in the seventh grade had also used alcohol and 95% had also used marijuana. I started smoking at fourteen. I first drunk alcohol at fifteen. Or was it fourteen?

 

Wilson says that ‘shame is inwardly directed to self consciousness whereas guilt refers to actions’. Shame wraps itself around the central core dimensions of the self; the ego, identity, and personality. Fenichel wrote that ‘to feel ashamed is to not want to be seen’, Wurmser wrote that ‘the eye is the organ of shame’, and Stoller goes as far to say that ‘shame operates on the face’.

 

 I used to cope with things by laughing at them. I still do. I guess it creates a distance between me and it. My friends and I refer to this as ‘doing it for the story time’ and /or ‘it’s good for the plot’.

 

FADE IN:

INT. THERAPY OFFICE- DAY

ALI HENRY, 22, sits and picks at thumb cuticle. THERAPIST NO. FIFTEEN (motherly quality, 37) sits opposite.

NO. FIFTEEN

If the police came to your door this afternoon and told you that you had murdered me. How would you plea?

ALI

Guilty.

 

NO. FIFTEEN

Did you murder me?

 

ALI
No-

 

NO. FIFTEEN

Why would you be guilty? What if they found blood on your towel in your house?

 

ALI
Not guilty. I have work this afternoon. That’s my alibi.

 

NO. FIFTEEN

The blood is mine?

 

ALI

She laughs - - snorts.

I’m reaching conclusions without proof.

 

 

NO. FIFTEEN

Let’s say you can have anything in the future. What would it be?

 

ALI

I’d be in Canada. Working a job that gave me enough money to travel and live. And writing.

 

NO. FIFTEEN

What would you be writing?

 

ALI
Anything.

 

NO. FIFTEEN

What do you like to write about? Why Canada?

 

ALI
Anything. I feel an urgency to go.

 

NO. FIFTEEN

What type of writing do you like?

 

ALI

Realistic.

 

 NO. FIFTEEN

Why?

 

ALI
Coming-of-age, dystopian, horror.

 

 

NO. FIFTEEN

You’re the third person I’ve asked who’s said dystopian. That’s a realistic, manageable, attainable goal. What’s stopping you?

 

ALI

Nothing… Fear. Fear. Fear.

 

Up until I was seventeen I mainly ran with a bunch of boys. Some men. And my best friend. The boys taught me things that made me feel tough, and, gross. Both felt equally as good. The collective of boys were from a handful of highschools. The collective had terms and conditions attached. Smoking weed was only to be referred to as ‘pulling a romper’. Party tricks were limited to ‘bubblering oneself’; pissing in one’s mouth, a trick I was afforded the biological luxury to not have to participate in. If we drunk and didn’t think we could continue through to the early hours of the morning we had to ‘tactile’; force the vomit up our throats with fingers. Pain tolerance was tested through the ‘smiley’; a lighter lit upside down so the flames licked the metal then thrust into skin. I fell in love with a boy from the collective who I would watch skateboard for hours on end. He showed me how to steal. We listened to a lot of Nirvana. Drunk a lot of Redbull. Ate a lot of two-dollar butter chicken naans and smoked a lot of cigarettes. He lived with his family in an overcrowded house that smelt like damp mould. His bedroom was in the attic and when I woke up in his bed I would hit my head on the roof.

 

The World Health Organisation states that statistically ‘one in three’ women are sexually assaulted. I became friends with a group of seven girls at sixteen. When we first met, the statistic was correct. Our group dispersed last year. After the six year friendship; we all left as that ‘one in six’. We all remember the roofs.

 

The Journal of Labor Economics believes that ‘the education rate is a major dependent on the age of individuals when entering into a marriage, highly educated women and men delay their entry into marriage while also being most likely to continue to stay married’. My parents married in their thirties. My father grew up in a coastal town up the South Coast of Australia. He started university when he was seventeen. He grew up surfing, hitchhiking, dabbling in psychedelics and listening to The Beatles. My mother grew up in Canada. My father moved to Canada to complete his PHD in physics and met my mother who was in her honours year of psychology. Shortly after, they moved to Australia. I visited them three months ago and they told me that when my mother was writing her thesis and was at the point of defeat my father took her on a hike up the Canadian mountainside. They arrived at their destination, a large hole in the ground, and my father instructed my mother to scream into it. My mother obliged. They went home, and she finished her thesis. They had my brother at thirty-five and me at thirty- eight. Temple says that attitudes towards alcohol consumption in women and social behaviour ‘changed when they were able to enter the work force as there was a heightening in fears regarding women’s health problems and damage to the family’. My mother started drinking before I was born. It became a problem when I was six. My parents are still married.

 

Locke believes that ‘desire is an uneasiness of the mind and it is a pain that pushes us toward an object that promises new pleasure or at least the pleasure of release from current pain’. Hobbes disagrees he thinks that ‘desire is a pleasure that pulls people toward the pleasant object’. The house I grew up in had four bookshelves in the ‘red room’. The red room was filled with antiques and on the wooden coffee table sat a bell in the shape of an apple. I had read one bookshelf by the time I was fourteen. I stopped reading for a while when I turned sixteen. Goodwin argues that there is a genetic link ‘between writing ability and alcoholism, manic depression being the common thread’. Goodwin also thinks that perhaps the reason for this is ‘an increase in exhibitionism, sociability, fantasy and self confidence’. All an increase. An addition. Do writers know that they lack? Do others see it too?  

 

The Philosophical Review claims that suggesting that ‘there are reasons for love is to imply that people in certain situations should be blamed for loving or not loving and that this blame and basis is cruel and absurd’. The Philosophical Review states that one should not be blamed for failing to love. I don’t try and speak with my mother about her addiction anymore. When I did previously, I didn’t realise that by bringing up her past, it anchored to her present. She has been sober for six months. She continues to tell us it has been a year. I don’t correct her.  

 

Studies in Berlin illustrated the effectiveness of cognitive behavioural therapy on individuals suffering from anxiety disorder and depression. The studies revealed that after therapy individuals felt a thirty percent decrease in their symptoms. From fourteen to nineteen my obsessive compulsive disorder behaviour that was the most left-field was praying. I would pray each night before sleeping. The prayer was specific and long and had to be repeated three times most nights, and six times on some nights.

I haven’t slept well for a while. Which means that I haven’t slept well since I was three. I used to have the same nightmare over and over. My parents, brother and I were flying in the roof rafters of a wooden house. I’m not sure why It was a nightmare.

 

I was diagnosed with insomnia when I was twelve. My parents would make me recount my nightmares to them. Later in life during nightmares when the climactic moment of my death would approach, I would suddenly realise that I was in fact in a nightmare. Studies suggest that doing as my parents did for me can create the ability to lucid dream.

 

 Recently my obsessive compulsive disorder is easier to manage because it is less behavioural and more cognitive. Which means that even when I want to sleep, I don’t sleep (I don’t sleep. I don’t sleep). Thirty percent decrease I guess.

 

The Philosophical Review says that ‘the absence of love is inappropriate when there is a relationship that calls for it, as is the case with a mother’s indifference to her own child’. What about a mother’s indifference to herself? Two years ago I fell in love in a way that I hadn’t before. My bestfriend tells me that I am ‘safer when in love’. Machiavelli says that ‘it is better to be feared than loved’. I think he means that it’s better to be powerful then be in love. I’ve never felt powerful in love. Everyone wants power, until they have it. Then, what do they want? To write about it? Feagin says that horror movies hold a paradoxical nature due to the emotions that occur from watching the movie. The adrenalin, fear and negative affect creates this addictive quality. Essentially, the attraction to it comes from the feeling it creates, even though that feeling isn’t positive. A negative-emotion reinforcement. This is what that love two years ago was for me. Which means that I was both feared and in fear.

 

Factors that predict addiction risk include: ‘loss of a parent, sexual abuse, unfaithfulness of a significant other and childhood maltreatment’. I think a part of my mother died when she was twenty-three and her own mother died. I think another part of her died when she lost her first child. I think another part died along with her brother when she was forty. I think she almost died when my sister almost did.

I used to think that I understood. But I didn’t. I think I understand now.

 

What am I? I am a lead box surrounded by gold, hoping I can transmute into it just through proximity.