Footsteps On Concrete

“I don’t know what I want!” is a lie.

I know exactly what I want.

What I don’t know is how to get it.

I’m just back from my third trip to London and I find the city wholly intoxicating. When I’m there, nothing else feels as important as being there, soaking the city in. It feels endlessly alive and so do I. And even though, on paper, I shouldn’t like it, my appetite for it is insatiable.

But then…there’s Sydney, where I’ve made some of my best friends in the world. The place I feel the most socially integrated. The (notoriously unfriendly and cliquish, according to every Melburnian I told I was moving) place I lived for 10 months and yet somehow had 60 people to invite to my going away party. What? My Sydney family is everything. They are my people, my tribe. (And Aussie coffee, produce and yogurt are heaps better than everywhere else I’ve been, at the same relative price point.)

So what do I do?
How do I square that circle?

On the bright side, it’s not like they’re on opposite sides of the world or anything.

Oh. Wait.

I have to just hope that it will work out and that I am where I need to be to end up where I want to be.

Something like that.

Life is gonna teach me patience or kill me.

Than this period of my life when I find myself constantly sick due to being surrounded by Europeans.

(Too soon?)

1. Flat white, 2 sugars is how I take my coffee.

2. How to drive on the left.

3. That it’s okay to ask for help.

4. How to pronounce “quay”–even though it is a phonetic abomination

5. What it feels like to stand at the top of Sydney Harbour Bridge while fireworks go off.

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Shout out to everyone dealing with death over the holidays.

I didn’t grow up with Christmas–or any winter holiday really–so it’s always been a time of year that I felt disconnected from, but having this on top of it is like…wake me up on NYE.

Survival Tips:
Fight the urge to listen to sad songs; they will make you irretrievable.
Take some time to be alone.
Take some time to talk to friends.
Let the waves happen.
Be compassionate with yourself.
Take a social media break.
DO NOT LOOK UP PICTURES OF DECOMPOSING BODIES; a house is not a home and a body is not a life.

It’s okay.
It’s okay.
It’s okay.
And if it’s not, then it will be.

It is the single most morbid thing I have ever done in my entire, but I wanted to know what his body might look like. Would he be an unrecognizable mess? Or a skeleton? Or would there be nothing left at this point? Just an expensive box occupying a hole in the ground.

You never see it.
The final place you live.

It turns out there is no official consensus.

It can takes decades for a body to decay, as there are many factors that affect the rate of decomposition, such as how well the person was embalmed, what type of casket and vault they were placed in, humidity, heat, cold, soil type, water level, depth of burial, the availability of oxygen, accessible by insects or scavengers, body size and weight, clothing, the surface on which a body rests – all determine how fast a fresh body will skeletonize or mummify. A basic guide for the effect of environment on decomposition is given as ‘Casper’s Law’ which determined that where there is free access of air a body decomposes twice as fast than if immersed in water and eight times faster than if buried in earth. People who have been dead for decades could still look fine whilst others of the same era are completely decomposed. There are just too many factors that affect the rate of decomposition to give a definitive answer. ”
Source

Oh.

I saw pictures. Two bodies. (Not “people”–bodies.)
I didn’t mean to, but they were there and I clicked on them. As bacteria eat you from the inside out, the gases they create push your intestines and tongue out. Your skin turns black.
They were horrible; I wish I’d never seen them.

****

I sat in a park today and I ate gelato from my favourite place in Sydney, Australia and I wondered what he would think of me being here. But it’s been 13 years and I don’t remember him all that well anymore.

I thought, “No one here knew him…and I am forgetting.”
It felt…weird.
Sometimes I wonder if I have survivor’s guilt even though I wasn’t there.

So it goes.

Everything ends.

I went to lunch today with 2 women.

Woman 1: I slept with this guy and after round 3, he offered to pay off my student loans.
Me: Wait, that’s a real thing that happens?? I DREAM about that.
Woman 1: But isn’t that a bit like prostitution?
Me: Pssh! Let someone want to come take this $34,000 off of my shoulders!
Woman 1: And I have $75!
Woman 2: What if you have $158?
Me: Chile, then you turn tricks faster than a dreidel at a Hanukkah party. Label it what you want. I’ll take financial freedom.

The marriage I could have gotten over, but a baby that ties them together forever…!

My friend Marcella and I made a list of things this is worse than:

• Season 4 of Misfits
• A Sansa/Tyrion sex tape
• Miley’s VMA performance
• That Sarah Machlachlan commercial with the animals
• That time Kobe Bryant tried to be a rapper
• Nick Carter’s solo album
• Ann Coulter running for president and winning by a landslide with Sarah Palin as her VP
• Craving Chick-Fil-A on a Sunday
• That time my friend asked me, “What man is gonna want to be with you if don’t want to have kids??” igniting every latent fear I have about my childfree future so that all I could manage to say in response was, “I guess none of them.”
• Jessica Biel

One the bright side, as I was lamenting the fact that I will die alone surrounded by passport stamps and unpaid student loans, another one of my friends said that my loans will be paid off by some rich lonely guy I have an affair with for a week in a couple years, so no need to stress and I thought it was one of the sweetest things she’s ever said to me.

I ate–and enjoyed–Indian food tonight!!!

Feeling like anything is possible right now.
Aim for the stars, even if you miss, you’ll land among the chickpeas and yellow curry.