Geographic Hearts

Dinner with Alan Rickman

It’s dark out.

The light’s glow, fake fireflies

In The Quiet Night.

We can’t see The Trees

But we know they’re there

Whisper-wish-hush-shushing

We’re at a picnic table.

Bare wood, unsteady boards.

We’re wearing wool and longs against

the bites and brrr’s

Our skeletons beat bone white

against the black Cold.

We eat, with gusto:

Cheese-laced lasagne full of dripping

tomatoes and crisped-to-crunch-basil leaves

We sip sweet-smile-soda

(it is so orange it looks more real than Real)

Then tropical fruit salad for dessert.

We eat our fill of mid-winter holidays.

The meal, now over, sits like an archaeology

of gastronomy.

Alan is extolling the virtues of The Afterlife.

How he had tea with Austen and talked

Social status and dance cards.

How they together watched the Union solders march by

Always marching, marching by.

I tell him I’d be orange if I were a colour.

It’s less overwhelming than red.

And not everyone can wear it, I say.

He smiles at that.

I feel safe within his smile.

As I do in the presence of his nasal drawl.

Its sarcastic.

But the questions are kind.

There are queries about religion and creativity

(creativity is what you want it to be!

he says vehemently)

We compare deer and dolphins as endangered species

And as spirit animals.

We discuss scarcity mindsets in the middle class.

I realise as we talk that I feel safer still

as a reflection in his eyes.

***

This poem was written at the Kahini Writer’s Retreat 2020 held at Waikanae Beach in Aotearoa New Zealand. The bare bones of it were written as a 10 minute free-writing exercise in response to interview questions attendees exchanged with another participant.

Many of the things and featured in this poem (Alan Rickman, Union Soldiers, the colour orange, dolphins and deer) were answers from my interviewee. I then added in some of the beautiful natural setting and the wonderful meal we had on arrival at the retreat.

Note that i used creative license (an artist’s best friend) to craft a poem with what i hope has a wider and more considered significance than just a random juxtaposition of elements.

I believe poetry is both about specific things and everything. Both at the same time. I hope this poem conveys a sense of this..

Stella x

So awhile back I read a book called ‘Single Girl Problems.’ You know, the problems that arise in the celebratory season when you turn up solo. Yet again. When people say, oh, but you’re so pretty, smart, funny (insert positive descriptor here) and this ‘but’ implies a lack on your part. The lack of hooking in a man, of being coupled, a lack, dare I say it, of attractiveness.

Is it because I’m too opinionated? And use words like paradigm and incandescent. The first word to (I admit) to make myself sound smart (and smartness is, I feel, a worthy weapon in the gender battle.) The second because saying it makes me feel a lightness of being and I need that feeling when I’m being cutting-eyed by someone I have only recently met or not seen for years and they are asking me, why no date?

I’ve never had a date. Well, I’ve dated. I’ve eaten raw veggie burgers and talked about places where I’ve never been and am not sure I honestly want to go to. I’ve straddled silence awkwardly over vegan tacos. I’ve board-gamed and eaten curry without splashing it on my pale blue blouse (life achievement here.) I’ve been to movies and avoided sweaty hand holds but at the same time surreptitiously made side lines glances at The Guy. I’ve said no to more dates. I’ve been the person who says ‘just friends.’ Knowing at the same time I’ll never hear from them again.

But I’ve never taken a guy home to meet my mum. Let alone my grandmother. I segregate my life into boxes like a sock drawer but I hope, better organised. There are the family dinners once a week where over vegetarian casseroles and roasted vegetables we discuss Future Directions and The Housing Crisis. There’s the fortnightly date with my dad where we share Haiku we’ve written like badly kept secrets and get jittery on cowboy coffee.

There are the friends who I never let meet each other. In case they like each other better than me and I am the forgotten thing that brought them together. Or because I’m afraid My Secrets will come out. About The Crazy. Or The Fear. Or even just that I’ve exercised for three hours that day. Not for weight loss. But because moving is the only thing that makes me feel ok. Maybe it’s the secret that I’ve been thinking of moving away for longer than I will admit to. Those kinds of secrets. The feeling huge but are actually little and the feeling small but are actually larger than life kind.

So I’ve dated but never had a boyfriend. Never been In a Relationship. At 28 that would most definitely make me a spinster in Jane Austen’s world. In 2019 I like to think it makes me an independent woman. I don’t however want to hold out until cougar status takes hold. I’ve never suited leopard prints and gold-manacled jewellery. 

I know what I don’t want to be. That’s a start. And even better I know what I already am not and that is lonely. I have great friends, even if I do segregate them in my life. That’s certainly something to work on.

I have a job I enjoy where I get to help people (libraries rock!) and I have work I love – writing. Note, the differentiation between my job and my work. I feel this matter of distinction is important for there is a similar subtle distinction between being alone and lonely.

I am often alone. I write solo at my desk or in public places with headphones on. I choose my own noise. At the moment Anoushka Shankar sitar music or this obscure Dutch indie band whose drummer FB’ed me because he liked one of my Spotify playlists.

I write at desks and cafe tables and on my lap table in bed which makes me feel like I’m on an airplane because it comes with a drink holder but it’s the most comfy flight in the world and it doesn’t matter when I haven’t done my face.

And speaking of FB, I have social media. Writers to follow on Twitter as they too face the dilemma of middle of the day courier deliveries and you’re still in your Pyjamas. Commiserations over writer’s blocks that take up weeks of your life and it’s like how I imagine a bad break-up is like but there’s less tears and more chocolate but equally stringent resolutions about exercise and healthy eating and routines, damn it.

But rarely am I lonely. I have Anoushka, of Shankar Sitar royalty. I have random musicians messaging me. (Internet Life!) And ofcourse I have my characters. The heroes I fall just a little, ok a lot, in love with. The feisty heroines who I wish I was more like so I could say screw it to the people who ask if I’m still single, (or worse, those who have stopped asking.) It’s hypocritical, I know, but the question implies that a sense of faith is still there and that they still have hope for me.

Today, however, I refuse to be categorised by my romantic relationship status. I have relationships with many people. Friends. My parents. My brother. My co-workers. The patrons I help at work. The women at craft groups where we share stories of our lives and hook yarn to make blankets and booties for people less fortunate than us.

I also see myself as having relationships with the people who I sit next to in coffee shops and smile at over my $2 pot of English Breakfast tea while we both work on our Hope-To-Be-Breakout novels. This is a comradery of a certain kind of Writerly Relationship. We don’t necessarily have to talk to each-other. But it feels like we get each other anyway.

My answer to questions of singledom is that there really isn’t a single answer. Relationships are complicated (as the Facebook status attests to.) And because of this complicated nature, I believe people will keep asking me if I’m ‘in a relationship’ until the societal paradigm (that word) changes.  In the meantime, I’ll keep emanating my incandescent (that word) self through the world.

I will live with passion. I will celebrate my freedoms. I will follow my fancies. I will love living my life. So that when the right person comes along, they’ll recognise me as someone they want to be with. And, just as importantly, I’ll see myself as the kind of person who is capable of being loved in that way.

Not only by another, but to have that love manifest in a genuine and honest way that speaks of a wider truth. One of a certain sense of identity and of a high degree of self-esteem. It’s about knowing the real me. Not just the right me. And if I’m being totally honest here, it’s taken me this long to figure that out myself; the real versus right thing.

I also come from a family of later-in-life relationships. The first forays into romance for many of us tend to be in our mid to late 20’s, a decade after many people begin dating. We’re also an intensely interested family. For me, this has meant, along with a few health issues needing to be addressed, that I’ve spent the last decade just being really busy learning shit.

I got the BA. (Art History.) I received a library diploma. I studied for a business administration certificate. These were just the formal education situations. I also taught myself using library books and the internet, a whole range of craft techniques from quilting to cable knitting. I’ve read up on zero waste living (and am now teaching an adult education class on this topic.) I’ve read self-help books to make myself feel better psychologically. I’ve also been to therapy where I was given mindfulness homework. I found this hard. It ended up taking up a lot of my spare time. I’ve been to social media development classes. Environmental film screenings. Plant swaps and compost science workshops. I’ve been to oral history trainings. Time bank inductions. Archival process lessons. I’ve spent most of the time I wasn’t dating, learning stuff.

And I’ve loved it (most of the time.) But I now feel I’m ready for a different kind of learning. Less head, more heart.

I want to feel things rather than just think them.

So, I guess if I was going to say something to my single girl self I would ask, how does it make you feel (as opposed to ‘what do you think?’) And in that, would be my attempt at some kind of answer. 

Even good girls can grow into debatable women. Perhaps all the more so for they have so much to live up to. Perfect GPA’s. Perfect skin. Perfect relationship track records. Which is why Amy Sherman Palladino’s TV character Rory Gilmore is of interest. She started out as the archetypal good girl. Good at school. Good to her grandparents. Good at being good. And she dated a nice guy too. Kudos to her.

But then she grew up. Life got complicated. She fell in love with someone else who was, I have to say it, a hell of a lot more interesting. She broke someone’s heart. Had hers broken by said more interesting guy. She went to college. Cheated with her ex. Stole a boat. Lost her confidence. Found solace in a beautiful rich boy with few morals and a lot of cash.

Fast forward to The Revival where she’s in her early 30’s. She’s dating someone so forgettable the joke is she doesn’t recall his name and leaves him behind at coffee shops. She’s still sleeping with said beautiful rich boy (now man) even though he is engaged to someone else. She is The Other Woman. Her career is on the edge of that much touted End of Journalism as we Know It. She ends up with no job. Moves back home. Fights with her mother. Tap dances at 1am. Gets pregnant. The latter two points not necessarily related.

I guess what i’m trying to say is that Rory Gilmore is both a fictional character and a trope. As a trope she is the aforementioned Good Girl we all (supposedly) are meant to aspire to be. As a character she is messy and real and human and actually, i found, kind of unlikable as a fully-grown woman.  

This felt like an enormous relief. Because living up to trope Rory Gilmore is next to impossible. It makes us feel like we’ve failed before we start. Because we’ve had acne or didn’t date during high school or didn’t get A’s in calculus. We’re already never perfect. We can try to be good. And that is an admirable goal and one I fully support but perfect is to set yourself up for failure. And that sucks. It really, really does. To be a loser before you’ve even begun.

Fictional character Rory is however richer. More meaty as it were. She seems lighter in some ways. Heavier in others. And i don’t just mean in the boob department; actress Alexis Bledel in the break between series and revival had a kid so you know…

Adult Rory wavers like a star struck teenager at a rock concert, dithering to surge forward with the crowd and meet the Rock God they have been worshipping for years. Whose music got them through a hell of a lot of crap. We don’t know all of Rory’s crap in the preceding decade but we assume there has been some, least of all the death of her beloved grandfather Richard. There’s definitely been loss. We assume several levels of heart break.

But in watching her flail as an-early-thirty-year-old it made me as a late-twenties-woman feel better because here, finally was a Rory i could imagine being friends with. The sort of friend you definitely don’t like all the time. Who you may find annoying and love to hate but a friend none the less because she screws up and gets drunk and sleeps with Wookie’s and needs to stay with you when she fights with her mum just like she did when you were both sixteen and didn’t know any better.

Now you both should know better and yet there are still fights and running away and you both make all sorts of mistakes but you’re in it for the long haul. As we were for seven seasons and a revival’s worth of Rory.

A constant for Rory, both the girl we know and the woman she grows into being, who we get to see a glimpse of in the Revival, is that she writes. This love of words, of literature, of exploring the world through writing is a quality I hope she will always cultivate. Both as trope (the Quiet Reading Chick and Smart Girl) and as a character where she starts to find herself again when she starts writing a book about her life growing up with Lorelei Gilmore as a mother.

That is one story I would love to read even though it’s a made-up book in a TV universe. But why is this imaginary book on my To Read list?

Because I am The Quiet Reading Chick.

Because I am The Smart Girl.

Because I am the Rory who is beginning to find out about herself through the words she writes. That is, telling her own story and not just those of others.

Because I was a Good Girl.

And because now I am proud to call myself a debatable woman.

 

You’re all striped hair extensions and

Bubble-gum pink lips and lids.

Glitter is your middle name.

It is calligraphed on the labels you wear and

The decals stuck to your nails,

Some hearts.

Other’s stars.

 

You laugh and talk

Lubricious

In your words of parties

Up The Valley and beer tags tossed

Like wedding confetti.

There is no bouquet of flowers.

But there are plenty of daisy tatts and

The women throw themselves at The Men

As desperate as any satin-dressed maiden.

 

You’re different though.

Even though you’ve got the same clothes and hair and makeup.

It’s in your eyes.

Something darker.

Like the shadow of a bird.

A crow with its heathen connotation.

Or a vulture, circling on the winds

Of carrion.

 

But the real truth is one neither of us forgets.

That the swaddle of tight clothes

Is to calm you as you try very, very hard

To take even a gasp of breath.

***

This poem was written in response to a certain kind of girl we recognise in pop culture as the ‘popular girl’ trope. It imagines and considers perhaps some of the darker thoughts and feelings hidden beneath the perky, pretty exterior. This exterior can be interpreted as a mask carefully made up to attract not only the opposite sex but also validating responses for a particular self-concept. In this poem I tried to take apart some aspects of that mask and to create empathy for girls, who, like all of us, are just muddling through…