The first and last time

In my memory, it is all teal and off-white, ugly paintings and the smell of disinfectant. It was a stupidly sunny day, and I had come to visit her, because she was dying. We all knew it, so it was only decent to come and see her, before we couldn’t anymore. Seeing my grandmother had always been a chore, at least according to my mother.

At her apartment, which was about a block away from the unit she used to live in, I was always a child, eating biscuits or chewy fruit-shaped lollies, sometimes sitting down for cake that she had made. I’d brush the light green velvet coloured couches with my fingers, drawing lines as I touched the material in different directions. I’d listen to stories about things my parents didn’t want to hear, explore drawers in desks secretly while they talked. When I was younger, I remember playing in the park that we could always see out of the window, sliding down the hills on pieces of cardboard boxes, getting grass stains on my jeans.

When she looked at me, the oxygen no longer reaching her brain, and asked me, anyone, to call the police, delirious and confused, I was aware that I did not know her at all. I was older now but suddenly a child again, with my mother and her sister, my aunt, three of us standing around the hospital bed, after deciding to turn off life support. I was part of the decision, but I was a stranger to death, and I was my mother’s daughter; the daughter of her daughter. I was scared of this woman who I had never seen before, her hair no longer permed, parts stuck sweaty to her wrinkled forehead, no makeup, not offering me a cup of tea or a biscuit, dressed only in a badly fitted hospital gown.

When she died, the rest of everything was harder to commit to memory. Her funeral is a cartoon, a film re-enactment in my mind. I see myself watching my father shovel a bit of dirt on to the top of a coffin. The headstone wasn’t ready yet; we walked away from a bare grave. I don’t think I cried. It was the last time the whole family had been together and the first time I’d ever seen someone die.

The hardest thing

I’d never broken up with anyone before, never in any serious way. I had been talking to strangers about it for more than a week, finding anyone at any university table and asking them to listen. Telling them about how awful he was, how unhappy I was, how things were falling apart, while they politely sipped take-away coffees and listened for entertainment’s sake. “I’m going to break up with him,” I’d proclaim, more to myself than to them, as if saying it made it impossible to back down from.

It was my birthday and we had to go to a party around the corner from his apartment. When I went in to his bedroom full of the words I was going to say, he had already put all my books and things in a pile, like he somehow knew. It was the saddest pile of books I’d ever seen. I cried when I told him that we couldn’t keep hurting each other, that I loved him and wanted to be his friend, but that I couldn’t be his lover. We went to the party and his father told me how happy he was that I was in his son’s life, that I had made things better for them both. I was so ashamed. I talked to people I didn’t know about nothing, and outside the city lights were shining on the water of the harbour in no particular way, in the same way they had been shining when we met, across the bay.

Afterwards, he left me messages. On my phone, email. He left me a letter on my doorstep with the birthday present he couldn’t give me in person. I stood on the doorstep and waited, walked up the driveway and looked up and down the street, looking desperately for his car, his back disappearing around a corner. I held the gifts he’d bought for me a few days before, not knowing that I’d do what I did, but they were foreign objects, things I could not love. I couldn’t read the book but I read his letter and cried for hours. I don’t know what I did with it – it’s been a few years but I’m still too afraid to look for it.

You keep re-living the beautiful things: the walk we took in the golf course, through the park, when the aeroplanes were flying low and breaking the sound barrier, when I lay down on the grass. I can’t remember the other things now, I suppose they fade away. I remember thinking that no-one would ever love me as much as he did. I read all of his letters over and over again until I felt I could never write another word. His handwriting was spidery and tiny - I wanted to hide away in the curves of his alphabet and stay there until everything was okay again.

Expectations

When our cat Tripod got cancer on her nose, we all knew eventually that it was the beginning of the end. She was called Tripod because she had three legs. She had no tail, as well, but that was part of her breed. The little sore underneath her nose eventually grew to cover a fair part of her face. I don’t remember ever feeling disgusted by it, just disappointed that we were so powerless against this sore that was going to take our little friend away.

She wanted to keep sitting on our laps as her body slowly shut down over the months. We’d have to keep a tattered yellow towel under her, and towards the end, in her bed. Eventually she staggered, unable to walk. She was so quiet and tiny underneath the table, a little black creature silhouetted against a suburban patterned carpet. A little shadow. We put her down. I couldn’t watch it happen, and when I saw her limp body, tiny and black, smaller than ever before, she wasn’t my cat anymore.

Problems

In high school, we were all upset but Naomi’s problems were rougher, more dangerous. Naomi’s problems had corners and edges while ours were still amorphous shapes that we quietly stepped around, pushed in to the back of our minds and replaced with study notes.

We shared a locker. We shared a lot more than a locker, too. We’d been very close ever since we met in Year Seven, thrown together by circumstance in a new school, two awkward girls with bad clothes and legs and arms we didn’t know what to do with. She’d go in and out of my life, finding a new best friend for a few months, then coming back. We’d skip maths and sit on milk crates in an alleyway with coffee and cigarettes. So when she started to cut her arms and legs up, I wondered vaguely where she had thought that idea up. We all kind of hated her for it for a while. How dare she do such a thing, demand our attention so obviously.

Soon enough it was old news and no-one was angry anymore. Most people wrote her off, turned it in to a sick joke. I was worried then, and upset. I’d look at her arms, criss-crossed like nothing I’d ever seen before, scar upon scar upon scar, red raw and bleeding. Then it began on her ankles, half covered in navy-blue school socks.

She became more and more distant. I knew that I couldn’t force her to stop, as much as every part of me wanted to. I knew that I had to let her fix this, that as much as I loved her, her body was her body and I had no rights over it. Every time I looked at her skin I’d feel something drop inside me, this feeling that I had failed her so badly as a friend. I conceded to let her know that I cared about her and that I had put some bandages, bandaids and disinfectant in our locker for her. Every day I’d open the locker and see my little medical stash, unused, pathetic in the empty space that I could no longer even keep books in. It was like it was haunted. I’m not sure if either of us really used it after that.

Eventually she just wasn’t doing it anymore. I don’t really remember a moment where she stopped. There were other parts of her, deeper, darker parts, that I never knew about, that she still won’t talk about very much. With her it always seems to be just the tip of the iceberg. Her arms are still scarred, but the scars are like texture now, and slowly seem to be fading away, just little bumps under my fingertips.