She Was.

I’ve been thinking about what comes next. About how the story unravelled. I’ve been thinking about what details to include in the re-telling, trying to establish what is merely descriptive and what is essential to the plot. I haven’t decided yet. Perhaps the telling is harder than I thought it would be.

By the time I knew her she was a very proper woman. She always told me that it was better to lose an eye than to lose your reputation. When I was growing up and negotiating the world of lovers, she always stressed the importance of fidelity. She firmly believed that adultery was the greatest sin. My sister and I judged her harshly, thought she was uptight, conservative, and perhaps a little sexless. She was beautiful but she was cold.

It would be remiss to leave out her beauty. Both friends and strangers often told me how beautiful she was, as if somehow I was too close to see it. Glamourous, perfectly arched, thick, dark eyebrows framed wide, clear, hazel eyes, a perfect upturned nose and full pouty lips. Polished fingernails. Always. She was obsessive about clothes and would have spent her last cent on perfume or jewellery. She was fiercely independent too. She always told us how important it was to make your own money. To never rely on anyone. To pay the bills on time, even if that meant eating bread and cheese for the rest of the week. She taught me to add heels for confidence, to always remove one accessory after I had finished dressing, and to always, always wipe leather handbags after using them.

When my mother and sister moved out and left us behind, just the two of us, she began telling me stories. Stories about Alexandria, about summers spent learning to swim in the Nile, about climbing mango trees and playing in the sand. She lived in Australia for over 40 years, but these stories were always prefaced with ‘back home, in Egypt’. Her saying this never failed to annoy me. ‘But it’s been so long’ I used to say to her, ‘How can it still be home’? I hear her voice in my head every time I catch myself saying ‘back home, in Australia’. I wish that I could tell her that I understand now, that I finally get what home means.

Despite living together for years, we were never really close. We didn’t share confidences or affection, just relatively pleasant companionship. Up until the day she got sick and I began to care for her. Then everything changed.

Photo of the Nile here

Dear Nablopomo,

April Nablopomo + Happy Misfit = Fail

I’ve realised that not much has changed since high school. I cannot write (or do anything for that matter) when someone says that I have to. This is the case even when I am the one saying the oh-so-paralysing ‘you have to’s’. It’s a sad state of affairs to find oneself in really. However, adulthood dictates that one must face uncomfortable truths about oneself head on and with good grace. That being the case, I would like to offer the following admission:

I am a Bad Attitude Misfit.

I would also like to apologise for messing up your blogroll and for the time you will waste date checking my previous entries.

That is all,

The Contrite Misfit

I have to tell this story, though I don’t quite know how. It begins decades before I took my first breath. It is not really mine to tell. And yet it is. You see, I inadvertently became it’s keeper, and sometimes, I rather think that now it is keeping me. I don’t like carrying this story. I never did. I don’t want to be it’s keeper anymore. It is my hope, that perhaps in the telling I will be purged clean of it’s weight, or, that at least, I will somehow understand.

She was 19 when her father chose her husband. She had met him momentarily in her apartment building the week before their engagement. He had been visiting friends when they collided on the narrow staircase between floors. She said that he looked at her appreciatively (she never left that part out) and asked her to turn a circle. She hesitated and he asked her to hurry up because he was running late for a date. When she refused, he told her that although she didn’t know it yet, they would soon be married. She remembered laughing and responding that her father would never allow it. She didn’t like this arrogant man, twenty years older than herself.

To her surprise, her father called her to him the very next night. He explained that she had reached a marriageable age and that it was time for her to meet her fiance. She remembered telling her father that she didn’t want to get married, at least not to someone that wasn’t of her own choosing. It was then that he explained that he was about to divorce her mother, that he wanted no more familial obligations. Later, she spoke of how much this hurt her. This first betrayal.

The following Saturday, she found herself seated next to the man from the stairwell, engagement rings exchanged and promises made. She listened to him yell and laugh drunkenly with his friends and vowed to herself that she would make the best of it. She told herself over and over again that one could learn to love someone, that she would try. She knew she would soon no longer have a home. She had nowhere else to go.

They must have been married 35 years by the time I first heard this story. I wonder now, how she always managed to make it sound less horrifying and more like your average ‘how we met’ story. She smiled in the telling. It was only years later that I realised that the smile never made it to her eyes. But this was the beginning. It was her beginning. And so this is where the story starts. It is where her story starts. Mine begins later. And I will try to keep it in order.

Me: I miss you.

Him: It’s like Swayze and Gray, Travolta and Olivia, Bea Smith and Lizzie Birdsworth.

There’s an idea rising, a quiet panic swelling. It’s old and familiar. Comfortably worn. It’s too loud to be sitting here, grimace in hand. I’m tired, and a little blinded, thirsty. I don’t like standing timid. I’d rather kneel and suck. There’s a shushed goodbye in every silence, too much hesitation to swallow. I’m side stepping, shuffling through one more song and never did like dancing alone. I am calloused and all too far from home.

Photograph @ www.unprofound.com

Dear Entry 54,

You are the muse that drives all my fantasies, my sighs, my liquid heart. I have no intention of living a life of regrets, of what ifs. I will try to be less oblique.

My love is yours should you want it,

The Happy Misfit