Pic by dcJohn
At the age of about nine, three friends and I formed the Friends-4-Ever Club. Heavily influenced by The Baby-Sitters Club, we would collect “dues” of one or two dollars each every week and produce newsletters photocopied at the office of someone’s dad. The content of these newsletters was always slight, consisting mostly of drawings of balloons and flowers and cats. Our club had no definitive purpose other than the promotion of friendship and general do-gooding. During lunch time we would stand at the school fence and ask passers-by to donate money to the club, reaching our hands between the bars of the gate like little urchins. Most people laughed. A few people gave us some change. Soon we lost interest.
In an attempt to save money at high school we’d buy a buttered roll and a flavoured ice block called a Lickstick for lunch. The buttered roll was 50 cents and the Lickstick cost 30 cents. We would get into heated debates about whether the black Lickstick was black or purple. It was blackcurrant flavoured. I always considered it to be purple.
In year 10 a substitute history teacher gave me detention. She called me antagonistic. I have never been so offended. It was the exact opposite of everything I wanted to be.
When I was 16 and anorexic I brought a small plastic container of tomato soup and two rice cakes for lunch. Juvena was going to the canteen, so I asked her to heat my soup. When she came back she showed me that the rubber seal on the container had melted into the plastic, fusing the edges and trapping the soup inside. I threw it against a brick wall in frustration. I felt powerless and angry and imprisoned by my own skin.
When I got really thin I had to gather my school skirt into folds and pin it in the back. I used a safety pin that mum had saved from when she used it to fasten my nappies as a baby.
I remember always being cold. I wore long-sleeved thermals to school. And when I sat down it hurt because the bones of my spine scraped against the plastic chair.
During the school holidays in year 11 a freak hailstorm damaged all the classrooms on the top floor. For months we had to have lessons in creaking portable rooms that had been installed on the grass field near the bear pit. (Our school was built on the site of the old Sydney Zoo, which closed in 1916.) The rooms were stifling in summer and desperately cold in winter, and the carpets were always ripped and frayed.
Our all-girl school was next to an all-boy school. It used to be separated by a fence, but that was gone by the time we were there. The boys’ school had Coke and vanilla slices in their canteen, but we had to make do with flavoured sparkling mineral water and chocolate chip muffins.
There was nothing as stressful as watching the wheels of a cassette tape slowly spin as you sat facing the stereo during a Japanese speaking exam. A piece of paper with English sentences sat on the desk, and you had to speak them in Japanese, remembering all of the tricky grammatical structures and particles that would be ticked off when the teacher heard the tape. You had five minutes to read the paper before pressing the record button. I used to rock back and forth, squeezing my hands together and reciting the phrases to myself in a frenzied whisper.
All the cool girls used to wear eight-hole Doc Martens instead of the brown leather shoes we were supposed to have. Once there was a uniform check during English, and Juvena was wearing white socks with little ladybugs on them. As the teacher made her way to the back of the classroom where we were sitting, Juvena painted the bugs away with Wite-Out. She didn’t get into trouble.
Being at school after dark always felt like an adventure.
by Ella on March 25, 2010
Pic by tochis
I recently finished reading Atonement, which put me in the mood to do a bit of the ol’ creative writing. So I challenged myself to write a little vignette-type thing without thinking too much or going back to fix and tweak and obsess. (I recommend this, incidentally. You will surprise yourself with what you write.)
Here is aforementioned vignette-type thing, just for something different.
—–
He sits opposite me, right ankle resting on left knee, sketchbook on his leg. We have our own quaint little cabin for 12 whole hours. Prague to Zagreb. The middle leg of our journey.
This train is a time capsule. Our leather seats are worn and faded, the luggage racks battered. An hour ago a man with a trolley delivered us two bowls of beef goulash, unbidden, on a trolley. We mopped it all up with torn rolls of bread as Hungarian fields whipped past our window.
He keeps drawing me in his sketchbook. Trying to define me with exploratory strokes from a stubby pencil. It’s hard, he says. Especially the eyes. There are three portraits so far — in the first two my eyes are closed, and in the third my gaze is unfocused, distant, directed toward the blurred fields of sunflowers that stretch to the horizon. I tried to look at him while he sketched me but it was too much. I had to smile and give a self-effacing laugh and turn away.
As he draws I’ve been reading a book: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. There’s a character in it who loses the ability to speak, so he gets “YES” and “NO” tattooed on his palms and holds up the appropriate hand to answer questions. Sometimes I wish I could do that. I wish that when I was burdened with a terrible secret, people close to me would somehow know exactly what questions to ask, and all I would have to do is raise a hand silently.
What will happen when we arrive? Too much has gone unsaid. All this beauty and art and pastoral calmness around me and I’m still unsettled. I feel things only in short, sharp bursts. The rest is muted by worry. Maddening, intangible worry. I try to push the thoughts away but more crowd in — the same ones, really, just phrased in different ways. A growing uncertainty spurred on by a thousand self-denigrations seizes my throat and keeps me silent. Soon I will have to speak. To talk about the messiness and the fears and the failings and explain why I feel broken. In my head I sift through language, trying to pick the perfect words; to assemble them into the sentence that will do the least damage.
It’s so beautiful outside. A cloudless sky; golden light. Two hours ago we threw open the windows and a breeze streamed into the stifled cabin. It felt like purification. I rested my head on the window frame and closed my eyes as the wind blew my unbrushed hair wildly about my face. He stood behind me, chin resting on my head. I couldn’t see his face, but I could tell he was smiling.
I have a fantasy where I tell him all of my worries. I confess the ways in which I feel unworthy of his love. Piece by piece I lift away every gram of guilt and shame and fear that pushes me toward the ground. When I’m finished, I stand taller. I breathe slower. There is a pause that holds a million possibilities, and then he moves toward me and touches my face and looks into my eyes and says “Hey. I’m not going anywhere. Come here.” I sink into his arms, exhausted, grateful, and he holds me tightly as the cacophony of voices in my head lowers to a whisper.
For now, though, we play games. We draw faces on our fingers and make our hands talk to one another. We sing made-up songs and recite monologues from Hamlet and talk about what we’ll do when we reach the sea. We’re so close now. I want to feel the salt water on my skin.
