Paramedics blare their sirens violently through the inner suburbs of the city,
No one turns back to see what or who theyve missed out on here and it’s interesting how places that once nurtured happy gatherings now just feel like distant memories
He’s on a self-discovery bender but the only person he’s running from is himself and he told he never cried like it was a badge of honour, but like my father he felt intensely and repressed his anger
Cause there’s a difference between being emotional and emotionally intelligent and I’ll be damned if I can decipher it
My main example of love was one of abuse so do I secretly want to be abused?
Cause if Im still a little girl that needs saving then he can still emotionally manipulate me.
Everytime I hear someone say “we had an amazing connection”, it just means they had an erection and sometimes I think Id like to be in a relationship cause it would be nice to have someone to split the rent with
And she told me I couldn’t have it all like complete happiness was unattainable.
In movies you just meet someone who fits you, you don’t have to work through your trust issues and if just look happy and hide my disdain then no one will notice that I’m in pain
And when the pain has passed do we tell our life stories like they don’t belong to us anymore? Routinely told and removed from us like a book we’ve read before?
My sleep pattern is out of whack and it ain’t cause I’ve been slack,
I hate pressing pause on my to do list to deal with my feelings and that ole depression’s snuck up on me and she’s excusing his behaviour, sweeps it under the rug because she doesn’t want to lose his love.
I’ve had many lovers but no great loves and I wasn’t blessed with tits but God gave me great wit.
I’ve always been one of the boys and the girls have felt threatened by my authority to go out and get what I want fearlessly.
They told me my chances of fertility were slim so I started calculating, re-evaluating and like all great perfectionists before me, my ego couldn’t accept that I might never have my own child… or that it might take a while..
Cause I want someone who will fight with me through the thick and the thin and who wont easily give in.
Everybody tells me I’ll find it when I’m not looking for it but Ive been looking for ten years, so I’m over it.
He used big words to seem intelligent but forgot to text me cause he’s negligent.
I see him in so many forms but it’s never him and if he was born half an hour later would we have worked better?
I love the smell of books and words that have found a place to lie together and even though my mind tells me I haven’t done a lot, my body knows better.
I believe everything happens for a reason but death is one I’ll never be able to explain and the younger generation want to have it easy but the struggle is where you find the happiness and the gain.
And just when you think you’ve worked through all your shit , you remember the deeply engrained abandonment but it’s part of your story and there’s no running from it – so you may as well welcome it.
Gemini woman,
With your brave heart, your stern look and your coy smile.
They can only wonder how many places you’ve seen, the people you’ve been with and become
Always got a story to tell, you’d be at a loss if she bid you farewell.
Men beg at her feet but she sends them away one by one.
And when they try to break her spirit, she gets up again. She can not be tamed.
She’ll look you in the eye, and she’s far from shy.
She’ll lend you a hand, even when you don’t understand.
She’ll break you down, make a joke and say something profound.
Gemini woman, she is two sides of a coin.
She is heaven and she is hell. She is love and she is hate.
She is fickle but she’s strong. She’s perfectly vulnerable and she is me.
There is frost on my windshield of our 1984 Mercedes. It was quite a popular car at the time.
It’s mustard and there is a divider in between the seats my brother and I used to ride and call “horsey!”
It is 1997 and I am four; adorable with bangs. My Christmas present that year was oranges so it surprised me that Australian children took all their presents for granted.
The Yugoslavian war had ended and my brother and mother fight about how to preserve paprika for the winter. We have a black Labrador called Leo which described his zodiac sign well as he was petulant and got into fights when he was older.
We moved around a lot in the war and I never really knew stability. My emotional release therapist tells me I have skinny legs in my lower half because I’m always moving due to my childhood.
Home. I was jealous of other children who had one home. A picket fence and agreeable parents. I wondered what it would be like to be them.
My mum always regrets not being able to buy me a Baby born that I so desperately wanted. “Baby born!! I want a baby born!!” I cried because having a baby that could cry and shit was what my nuturing maternal side wanted. And now that 28, that need somehow appeared again.
We rented every two years so moving was familiar to me – in and out of 90’s apartments in Brisbane. We would take the bus every weekend to go to the river before everything closed at 5 which was a surprise to my mother who was used to everything constantly being open in Europe.
Could we build a new home in a foreign land? I learnt English quickly but was bullied for being different. I wore glasses and would cry every day that I missed my family. I used to be cool and loved and now I was no one again. The only other Serbian girl, Jelena was mean to me and my closest friends were Jessica Pigeon and Africa. She was white and her mum was a hippy with beautiful long hair that I admired.
In my teenage years, we had one home for more than 5 years which is the longest we’ve had. Ironically that was the most turbulent time in my family. Stability didn’t seem to serve us. My dad was restless and kept starting fights. He never felt grounded when he wasn’t in his own country.
At 22, when he moved back to Serbia my sense of home fell apart. I moved out into a sharehouse and I felt lost and frazzled. Home was supposed to be a sanctuary, a grounding safe haven but I spent my whole life searching for it and wondering if I’ll ever find it.
In 2017, I decided to move to Melbourne to leave my family and try to figure it out. My brother had moved to America and my dad had left so it felt like we were just an International family splattered about. When my ex asked if my parents were together I said “they live in different places” and he said “so they’re separated”. That never really felt like the way their marriage worked because they would be separated by time and distance for years until they saw each other again. Except this time they didn’t.
My mum begged me not to leave her and I coldly said “you need to let me live my life.” Family was home to her. But I don’t know if family was home to me. I wanted to explore and I spent the next five years moving another five times and being a gypsy musician. I had slept in old churches, Airbnb’s, hostels, and family homes. I lived with jazz musicians, with a friend until I lived on my own.
There was a sense of freedom and fear with living on your own but when I lived alone that’s when I felt the most at home. Every night I would write in my diary and make a cup of tea. I’ve always been an old soul with ancient wisdom and grandma slippers. When I’m alone, I could sing, dance, move and express without anyone’s judgement. I didn’t have to wash the dishes when I was told. I wonder how I’ll be able to live with anyone else when I’m fiercely independent and don’t like sharing my teapot.
My dad always said I was like my Scorpio grandmother who kept to herself, was hardworking, possessive and overly giving. When she died, I collected all her photos in her apartment. I miss her smell. She would make us fried chips called Pomfrit and whatever we wanted as children. She never said no to our childish requests and that’s why I loved her. Her sister said she saw white when she died and I wrote a choir piece called “Place far from our Home” about how my grandparents would reuinite in heaven.
It is the year 2053 and I am 60. I sit inside our family home, the one my grandparents built in the 70’s. It’s the only place I called home because we would use it as our survival base whenever we needed it. My dad kept a pistol hidden away in case we were attacked. They gave me this house.
I said “why me?” and my great aunt said “you loved your grandmother – you wouldn’t have come to the funeral otherwise. You deserve the house” because sometimes our good deeds pay off in this lifetime.
I cried when my dad cut down the cherry tree but there is another one in front of the house. I used to collect mulberries near the barbed wire. I’ve renovated the inside because it was rotting on the inside and my children and their kids come to play here in the summer. I spent my whole life looking for a home until I realised maybe home wasn’t a place or a house or a family. Maybe home was a feeling inside of ourselves and whatever we decide to make of it.
Shadows and silhouettes,
Dance under the midnight sky.
Inanimate objects that bind you together
And with that object you leave him behind.
Moments of weakness in the darkest of hours,
Lovers that have turned you sour.
Unfulfilled childhood instability,
Numbing is familiar but doesn’t last long you see
You feel the music in your body; rush through your veins,
You think about how you are no longer the same.
And meaningless relationships don’t fill you up
Cause dating her is easy but keeping her is tough.
It’s a jungle out there and you’re on your own
And you seek out drama because trouble is all you’ve known.
Passive behaviour through positivity,
You cut the string, and now you’re free.
Drugged up and fluey,
I’ve been wearing the sweatpants for ten days,
My mind is in a haze, foggy, confusion
I’ve been out of action and I feel like I’m losin’.
I’m disconnected from my instrument and I’m questioning what the next thing is and how to proceed,
Cause all the fire signs in me are angry and all the water signs in me are crying
Cause when I’m sick I start Googling my symptoms and I’m much worse on the internet so is my ovarian cancer even prevalent?
I tried to download a dating app but my storage was too full and I’m too lazy to delete it just to meet someone who can’t spell in full sentences and says “alrighty” repeatedly
Cause we’re in the ghosting generation and I don’t want to be a ghost no more.
I’ve always liked philosophers even though they’ve had nothing of real substance to say
And he wanted to hear the end of my verse, but hadn’t earned that privilege today
Cause when he’s benefiting and I’m suffering, the playing field is out
And we became more creative apart and art acted as a medium of survival from the start.
And I blame the twelfth house that I get wrapped up in turbulent artistic relationships where there’s no solid basis
Cause the twelfth house is about sadness and misery, so will I be able to go deep with someone without it killing me?
The pseudoephedrine is kicking in and when does God want me to stop suffering?
The doctor told me to rest but I’m too rest-less and as a child I kept my family members up cause I hated sleeping and as an adult I keep my lovers up with anxious questions like:
“Do you love me? Why do you love me? How much do you love me?”
Cause my anxious attachment isn’t pretty but it’s part of me.
Cats have never liked me cause I’m not subtle enough and I’m beginning to smell a fake from miles away
Cause when people corner you and revive up your past shit, you can tell them to beat it.
He thought he was special because he understood that my parent’s marriage had broken down, so was that our only common ground?
He thought we were suited because we had the same mental illness but there was no stillness and people often like to talk to me, but he wanted to talk at me.
Why can’t I meet someone who wants to dance but doesn’t want to fuck off to France?
Cause I’m never gonna be party animal even though I used to be attracted to smokers and the way they inhale that drag *inhales* but I’ve had no desire to lose time off my life
And sometimes I think Aries fire would murder someone to get their revenge but the only person holding anger towards you is you
And I spent so much time wanting everyone to like me, that I lost of what really mattered to me, and the person I was meant to be
Cause my job is to say what people are too afraid to say… to be a voice for the voiceless and to feel for the powerless cause I’ve always empathised with people who were suffering and he told me I belonging in Brunswick cause that’s where all the crazy creatives were living
Do you ever see a dress you want in the window and then it’s gone?
I like to think those potential dresses, potential job opportunities, potential flings were never the right fit
Cause if they were you would have bought it or the timing would have sit right and I don’t wanna fight what the universe has in store for me
Cause I know it’s going to be magnificent cause I finally feel worthy of it.