5ai.

2017, a google doc

Hey sis, thought you might want a chance to talk about… anything really, seeing as you’ve been busy lately and we haven’t talked. So I wrote a bit about time with J. today. Go easy on the comments please: I know the tensing is a bit off, and you might roll your eyes at some of the imagery. Remember that memories are not something to go at with red pen. If I don’t catch you tomorrow morning you can share whatever you want here :)

Talk soon

***

We got coffees in Ashfield after part-time work and started walking. I might not like coffee as much as you but I do love that in Sydney you can just say “let’s get a coffee” and then you do, it doesn’t matter where, and sometimes it doesn’t matter when.

We ended up in Ashbury, you know those streets where everything is a semi or a multi-story mansion?
I say “over there is a sloping park that has a gazebo-observation-tower-kind-of-thing, you can get a pretty cool view of Sydney from there, do you want to go?”
She raises her eyebrow. “Pretty cool?”
“Yeah, I can’t remember the last time I was up there so I hedged a bit.”

The top level of the tower greeted us with a couple making out. She pulled my arm and we ran back down the stairs.

On the other side of the park her steps slow and she asks “What are you most afraid of?”
I point back to the tower “Other than…”
She laughs “Yes!” Being immediately understood is so much of the good stuff in relationships.
I don’t say anything.
“But” she pauses “what are you most afraid of?”
“Ummm…”

She puts her palm in front of my face. “OK. Hi. You’re a very thoughtful person, but I really don’t like it when you say ‘umm’ and then pause, it feels to me not like you’re working out what you’re going to say, but rather whether or not to say what you truly think. I’m not gonna force you to say anything, but I’d just like for you to either say what’s real or tell me you can’t.”
“So, better to say you can’t say anything than say something fake?”
“Yes.”
“I think I’m not ready to answer the question.”
She smiles.


We reach a particularly sloped intersection. “Hey!” She points. Over the sun-bleached rooftops of the middle class you can see the whole south of our city.
“Surely this is better than…”
“Yes” I nod, laughing, returning the understanding.

She sits in the gutter sipping her second coffee, and pats the ’seat’ on her left. We talk about all manner of things and as we do, the lights come on. When someone smiles for real, their face doesn’t light up perfectly symmetrically, and Sydney is no different.

As the park lights come on we argue about the difference between a lie and a good story. When the stadium lights first flash she’s telling me about how no two types of amnesia are the same. Cars flick their lights on as I tell her about a thought experiment which explores whether or not we’re the same person as the person we were five years ago, and if we’re accountable to that person. As people start to arrive home from work and turn their lights on she mentions her parent’s divorce and wonders why she’s talked extensively to her dad about it and yet hasn’t even asked her mum about it. The streetlights flicker to life and I describe finding an old songbook of my mum’s whilst cleaning out brother’s room. You remember the one right? Bookmarked to the piano notes for a love song about bees and in the top right corner of the last page of that song there is a heart around dad’s name.

And now every light that will be on is on, like reaching the end of a slow-motion video of your favourite person in the world smiling. I breathe in.

5aii.

2017, a journal entry

The other day Mum asked if J. made me happy. I didn’t know what to say to that.

Today is probably the closest I’ve come to answering that question…

We are sitting in the gutter. I feel that thing in my stomach, that thing that I feel before I say something that’s never previously left my head.

“I’m afraid that whenever people talk about the love they have for their family, I have no idea what they’re talking about, and that’s something I never will understand.”
She dips her head slightly and catches my gaze. “Wow, OK, ummm…”
I laugh.
She gently giggles and lays a hand on my right shoulder. “How long… how long have you felt like this?”
“Probably since we stopped being teenagers and I looked around at my friends. They hated their parents or their siblings or all of them in high school. Or at least that’s what it seemed like. And now…”
She makes a small noise.
“Those friends, now some of them don’t want to stop spending time with their families. I didn’t really experience either the hate or this new thing.”
“And you feel this way about everyone in your family?”
“So maybe this is the sign, I see my sister as a friend more than my ‘sister’? And maybe my grandpa, if I’d known him longer… conversation with him was always engaging. I don’t know, even that analysis is pretty unfeeling.”

She shuffles across the gutter a touch. She breathes in, and as she does she moves her left hand to my left shoulder and lays her head on my right shoulder.

Lights begin to switch off. Neither of us say anything.


“Do you want to listen to some music?”
She squints and opens her right palm “No phone?”

I pull out my iPod and some headphones.

She smiles. I breathe out.

5b.

sometime around the present

The front door is open. Hrmmm.


“Hey mum, why is there a ladder here?”


“Hi boy, I am angry with your father.” She’s standing with her right hand on her hip and her left on the bench.
 I sigh, quickly. I suspect I am not going to find out about the ladder.


“What happened?”


“Our credit card bill came in the mail and it was astronomical, and I was really angry, because, your father, he just keeps making these purchases without consulting me.”


“What kind of purchases?”


“It’s these stupid new old keyboards… they’re kind of like your stupid keyboard…” she keeps talking, gesticulating as she mentions how loud they are.
My mind turns over the phrase ‘stupid new old’.

“Did dad…”


“So I thought, what have I always wanted to get but that our budget hasn’t allowed?”


“A... personal chef?”

“No.” She sits on the ladder and looks at the ground. Her right hand motions limply to the hallway.

I walk. The other night I was listening to an album whilst lying in bed: the devastation song reflected the major dramas of my life in their quietness. You and someone don’t blow up, rather you stop making the effort to talk. Or you apply for an exciting job, are rejected, and not a single person in your life ever knows about it. Or you break up with the gentlest of words, go home, and read the words you wrote each other as you listen to music. Does anyone else in my family break like me? I slide the back door onto the courtyard. In the middle of it are several boxes that read ‘Samo’s Bees’. I frown. Why do people do this to each other?

I hear a sob coming from the kitchen/dining/living area. Mum is wiping her nose with her hands. She muffles “Should I have gotten those?”

“You know…”


“I know…” She throws her head back, and as her head rocks forward her hands come to meet it. She groans. “But we always talked about getting one in our 20s. We had this vision to keep bees as friends at our third friend’s place, and then later when we were courting we thought we could have them in our own home.”


“But you…” Glancing at her head still in her hands, I fizzle… “Go on…”


“We’d be like these young people in love who have bees.”

I stifle laughter “Is that a dream real adults actually have?”

“It’s a dream we had. But we didn’t have money to sustain the initial financial outlay. And next our home was an apartment, and next by the time we did have the money and the place we had already found out…”


“About the anaphylaxis.”


She nods. “I know I’m a terrible person.”


“No…” I walk to the door and close it. Glancing across the room I see mum laugh and lift her head up. I see her electric piano in the back corner. Boxes of files and finances are piled on the left of it.

Our eyes meet. She shakes her head “So stupid”. I give her a hug, kind of. It doesn’t truly work because of the ladder.


“When is dad getting home?”


“His flight gets in tomorrow afternoon.” Didn’t know he was away.

“Do you want me to cook us some dinner?”


“No, it’s ok, I was actually thinking I would cook for once, make some wings, but the recipe had… you know…” she motions her head to the back of the house “and I couldn’t.”


“Yeah” I laugh.

She nods softly, and a slight smile escapes.


“Do you want to get some takeaway?”



We watch two episodes of a TV show. A subset of a group of friends have some kind of disagreement over a little perceived injustice which then turns into a big argument, and by the end of each 25 minute episode, they have it all worked out and are back to adoring one another. She kept laughing, even at the mildly cringey stuff, something I never do. I wonder how people feel watching TV with me, them taking the risk to laugh, me reacting to nothing?

Mum puts down her empty plate and sits back in the couch. She sighs for several seconds.
“What should I do boy?”

“Ummm… probably not keep a bee box in the backyard?”


“Yeah… that’s what I was thinking.”

As the next episode begins, she takes off her glasses and gets out her phone. As soon as she starts browsing… whatever it is, the internet, social media, some freemium game, I’ve lost her presence. I yelp a little bit.

After three seconds she turns “What was that?”


“I don’t really know, I think I was trying to get your attention.”

“You’ve certainly done that.”

“How often does this kind of thing happen between you and dad?”

“More than I’d like.”

“And... are you usually in tears about it?”


She draws her eyebrows together. “You don’t usually ask these kinds of questions.”

“Ummm… do you remember talking the other day about grandpa’s use of crying in the family?”

“Yes!”

“I don’t know much about your history with crying despite how much you talk about his.”


She nods. She taps her fingers on the arm of the couch. “Your father is probably the main reason I cry. He just. He just does stupid stuff and he does it without telling me. Like in 2018 there was the…”

“Stupid new old car?”

“Yeah.” She laughs and shakes her head.

“I didn’t know you cared so much about that.” How did sister know that dad didn’t tell her about it beforehand?

“Someone once said to me that sadness reflects you care. I care a lot about your father.”

We say nothing. She gives me her plate.

I stand. “You gonna be OK?”

“I'm OK. I just don’t like when he keeps things hidden from me.”

I walk around the back of the couch, running my finger along the dust on her piano.

I ask “do you and dad know that you care about each other?”

Five seconds pass. She asks “did you say something?”

“Thanks for sharing with me mum.”