Inkshiz.

So. Dedication to the blog? No, no, silly oyster. An homage to a long life loving The Princess Bride. And it's not even some sneaky little quote buried away. Morgenstern labelled it "The Princess Bride: The Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure." Now seriously, who wouldn't want to live life that way?

So that's where it is. On my back. My backy wack. I think it hurt. I don't remember. I was pretty well delirious by that point....

Friggen Owwwwwwch.

But don't my pins look lovely?

This was the beginning of Pacman. Massive kudos to Ryan from Holdfast in Beaufort Street. The kids a trooper. It was like three or five or something odd hours of non-stop tattooing, and me telling him I hated him.

"Do you want to take a break, Trish?"

"NO, JUST FRIGGEN DO IT."

Story of my life.

He's also the guitarist of the positively brilliant Perth band Elora Danan. Check it here.

Word.

Intentions

It's so hard settling for what you already have when you realise all the things you could have.

When you realise your friends aren't your friends, they're just the leftovers of your past. It sounds horrid to put like that, but it's true. People change, regardless of what they want. And we all change at different rates, so sometimes we leave people behind. Timing is funny, sometimes we click again, sometimes we don't, and that's all there is.

When you look in your closet and you find mountains of clothes, none of which really work for you anymore. Clothing is important, it's superficial, but it's how we present ourselves to the world. People form an opinion of us just by looking at us, and if we just stand there in our awkward, nondescript clothing, uncomfortable and unsure, we aren't happy, and we aren't going to be clicking.

When the person you thought you could maybe one day love doesn't turn out to be the person you thought, or maybe just hoped. We try. It's human nature, we crave love, and we try to hold on, but sometimes it's just not an option anymore. You give and you give and sometime's there's nothing left to give, and there's no more second chances.

There's a saying that my brother has said a million times, one that I just put down to his delinquent tendencies and his rage blackouts. 'Kill Your Family, Kill Your Friends, Kill Yourself." When I actually asked him what it was, he explained that it wasn't some angry emo catchcry, it was actually derived from some religious or cultural belief, I can't remember now.

Basically, it was about starting fresh. You take away your family, the beliefs and values they instilled, the good and the bad memories, any regrets, resentment, failures, anything that affected you. Then, you take away your friends, what you try and be for them, what compromises you make, what you go along with. Then, when all you have left is you, you start stripping it off.

The lies we tell ourselves to make things seem better, the way we justify our motives, our jealous feelings, our insecure thoughts, the things that keep us awake at night, angry dizzy thoughts that we count, pretending they're sheep. We strip ourselves bare, peel back the layers of clothing, of skin, of muscle and bone, until we're no longer a physical presence. What are you behind it all?

Then, when you're clean and fresh and vulnerable, you start again. You become someone you like, someone you understand, someone you can rely on. Then you go to your family, you learn to love them again, you learn to respect them again, you allow yourself to let in their morals and values and beliefs through a filter, and if you've been on the right track, they don't change so much.

You reasses your friends, you build a solid support team, people who become your world. They complement you. They make you happy beyond comprehension. You're different but you're united through common threads- ideas, thoughts, actions, it draws us in.

And maybe, if we do it right, we aren't 'settling' for anything anymore. We win. There's no compromise, because nobody should ever lower their standards- you compromise your life, you compromise your happiness. No compromising, no settling. And then we're on the road again.

Hide and Seek

People are drawn to each other through similarities. Troubles draw troubles, what you think of most eventually manifests, and though it can be easy to say that it's bad to have someone as troubled as you, sometimes it's the best thing for you.

Things don't need to be perfect to be exactly what you need.

I'm lost. It's like when you play Hide and Seek, and you find a brilliant hiding spot, and at first you're triumphant, you know no-one's going to find you. But as time ambles by, you start wondering if maybe they forgot about you, maybe they finished the game without you, maybe you hid too well.

You start feeling a little claustrophobic, scared, angry, you know you've been hiding too long but the thought of going back into the game and forfeiting worries you. So you sit, and you stay lost, and if you were anything like the child I was, you stayed lost all afternoon, until the neighbourhood went quiet and you realise maybe that you won, but you're still lost.

So you stumble out of your hiding spot, confused and nervous, the light too bright to your darkened, bleary eyes, cobwebs in your hair and dirt on your hands, and you can't quite shake the feeling of being lost. Even after you find your way to your house, and wash all the dust off you, and crawl into your bed, you feel lost and tired and cold.

Because being lost is a little intoxicating, it's quite lovely to hide away from all the horrid things that happen and uncomfortable silences and unpleasant situations, and pretend time is frozen and nothing matters.

I don't want to be found by someone who isn't lost too. So when walking around in a cold city, numb and cold and bleary eyed, I don't want to be found by The Seeker. Another lost person is quite enough, we'll hold hands and anchor each other to the ground so we don't float away, and then sometime we won't be lost anymore, because we crawled out of our own little hiding place on our own, nobody had to find us and drag us out and cut short our hibernation.

Being lost never was a bad thing.

Biko

Today I was aimless, travelling on unfamiliar trains with unfamiliar faces. Where I would end up was erroneous, I didn't know, I didn't know how to know, and for once it was nice to not be running away. I was just adventuring.

I like who I am when I don't know who to be.

At some point, My Gentleman Caller found me on my adventures and joined me. He sat next to me, his knee pressed into my thigh, our arms and hands tangled together, and in him, as always, I found solace.

Belonging is a tricky thing- it's not just how you fit, its where you long to be. I don't know where I want to be. Perth is home, Bunbury is home, the edge of my balcony is home, My Gentleman Caller's arms are home, the pylon at Cottesloe is home, nowhere is home, I am comfortable and out of my element in so many places. Where I fit one day is foreign the next. The world is new, and while I am unconditionally in love with the bliss and the harsh ugliness, I am also unfamiliar and scared, easily shaken, unsure of how solid the ground may be before me.

The world isn't kind to little things, but it is forgiving. Love is where you find it, and I choose to look for it in reflections, so that one thing can stay constant.

Hopscotch

I don't like how temporary things are. Bread only lasts a couple of days, and in my efforts to prolong its existence, I end up accidentally eating mould and gagging it all into the kitchen sink. Trying to hold onto things never ends well.

Marriage isn't even a permanent thing anymore, somehow it's become normal for people to divorce, to leave each other, to just decide that they're moving on by themselves.

Sometimes things don't even reach the top level before they fade away, it seems. Things that you try and hold onto and build on and love just fall between your fingers before it gets to a satisfying level. It's like you didn't even get the chance to learn anything, to get the real experience of it all.

I feel like there's a hole in my stomach, I'm missing something that I never even had. I knew that I could have it, it was there, but I don't know if I didn't hold on tight enough, or if I held on too tight after all, but I seem to have lost it and I don't know how to get it back.

Don't Get Any Big Ideas

Today I was a bit down. It was a carry over from last night's sombre mood, but it left me grim about the mouth and with no spring in my step. I had no desire to get out of bed, resulting in me being about an hour late for work when I actually got up. I made myself even later by stopping in to see My Gentleman Caller, and he lightened my miserable mood a little by being his lovely self, holding my hand and saying typical guy statements, and although he did walk me to work, he made us walk the long way, thus making me later.
After about twenty minutes I'd left work again, and I was sleepwalking around for the most part, thinking too much and not feeling much at all.

You know when you have something on your face, and you're self concious enough about it, but then someone else says something about it and it just shatters your frail confidence? Like, for example, you have a pimple or a bruise or a scar, and you think you've pretty well hidden it, or maybe it's not as noticeable as you think, but then your friend says, "Geez, dude, you better be hooking into that Clearasil, stat." And you're sooo bummed out.
Well, the other day I had a pretty gnarly asthma attack, and I have this habit of biting my bottom lip during an attack. Basically, I bit through my lip, and it bled and bled, and now there's this slightly rank looking sore on it. Yeah. Gross, right? But I was like, ohhh, it's not so bad, I mean it's not like I have herpes.

So in my sombre mood, I was sitting on a bench talking to my Gentlemen Caller, when he states quite bluntly "I'd kiss you, but I don't want to catch whatever you've got." Being slightly mortified, my only response was to punch him in the stomach effectively winding him, and sit grumpily on the bench while he grovelled. "I bit through my lip, jerkface." I say defensively.

Even though my crankiness was still very much in place, and I was feeling hideously ugly and unwanted, that conversation changed my mood a fair bit. Like I was looking at the world through crap-covered glasses, while some people have real problems. I had someone who wanted to fix my mood, and while I had to 'settle' for hugs, the intentions were there.

I guess in the end its easy to let yourself wallow, because sadness is surrender. What's hard though is letting people catch you in their own way- people aren't going to sugarcoat things or coddle you or fulfill your big ideas of how you should be treated, but if you're lucky, and you keep your mind open, you can find someone who'll catch you and make you stronger than before.

Eyes and Ears

I don't look like a particularly classy, together kind of person. I'm eternally late for work, even though I started catching the early train and have twenty minutes to do a seven minute walk. I rarely brush my hair and I probably should, considering how long and wild it goes, but it never seems to be overly important to me. I skip down the street to work, I high five the construction workers, I stop every morning and chat to my favourite homeless guy, who I affectionately refer to as Dumbledore.

Dumbledore and I have a lovely relationship. Most days I bring him an apple or a juice box or just some coins, and in exchange, he'll give me a trinket he found or tell me some hilarious story about things he sees around the city. He always gives me some lovely compliment about my hair or how green my eyes are in the morning light or how I smell like sunshine. For about three days last week I didn't see him, and I was worried sick that he'd died, but when he returned to his stoop, he informed me that he'd been adventuring.

Initially, I was kind to him because I was worried about being attacked in the city, and I figured that if I was nice to Dumbledore, he'd turn into a superhero and save my life one day. Then, I had a thought that maybe he was magic (hence the Dumbledore) and if I gave him things, he'd give me a unicorn. Now, I just like him because he makes me happy in the mornings, and refers to My Gentlemen Caller as 'that long haired lout with Popeye arms.'

Anyway, this afternoon as I was leaving work after a brutal asthma attack, Dumbledore was sitting at his usual spot, chatting to the construction workers. "Hey Dumbledore." I say hoarsely as I walk past, clutching my Ventolin tightly. "Good morning, Kitten." He replies, holding out his hand with a plastic helicopter toy on it. I like that he says good morning or good evening whenever he likes, he says sometimes it feels like morning in the afternoon, and he trusts his instincts more than some clock. I take the helicopter and give him a Subway cookie that I got with my lunch, and he stares at me carefully before saying "Breathe easy, little kitten." I show him my Ventolin and inform him that I would be when it kicks in, and he kind of shrugs it off and looks at me knowingly. Instead of shrugging back at him, and leaving to my train as per usual, I stop and sit next to him for a change. Things look different from Dumbledore's stoop.

Maybe it's because we're lower than everyone else, maybe it was because we had nowhere to be in the immediate future, but on the stoop, I could breathe easier. I didn't care that people were staring at the homeless guy and the tangle-haired girl on the stoop, I just liked that someone who paid no heed to impressing others, or making others prove themselves, would let me into his little world of peace.

A lot of people look at Dumbledore like a parasite, like the scum of society, like just another schitzophrenic soul wandering the streets barefoot. He may be, I can't say that something is right or wrong. But to me, he's a friend with a different view of the world, that maybe I can learn from.