first string.

Ok… I know this is going to sound pretentious, but I was at this concert for this singer-songwriter type - before they were cool - it was very intimate, blah, blah, etc. And they were into their set, in the typical way of a small concert; personal anecdotes between every few songs with themes (like transcendence) and motifs (like the chew toy of a dead dog buried on a hill somewhere next to a pile of tyres on a farm that they visit every year with their sister) and explanations of why they came up with these particular songs and not some other songs, when they started breaking the strings on their guitar, one by one, E-A-D-G-B. It’s true that I looked that up, I didn’t want to appear incompetent… which now that I think of it, don’t we all spend so much time in our lives trying and trying just to convince others that we’re competent? So they only had high E left. And they proceeded to play the final two songs of the set on that one string. High E again and again and again; stretching one string to perform the roles of a whole guitar. It was terrifying. Of course it was impressive, almost magical, pretentious (as per expectations), but terrifying. I wouldn’t know how to feel as that string: special or vulnerable, a liar or the truth, infinitely valued or lonely only in the way that something next to vacated space can be.




Lately, I can’t stop thinking about that concert, that one string…

1.

sometime around the present

My good pal keeps asking why I stopped journalling. This conversation progresses tensely to the point where they say something like “you’re less chill than usual”, which I would argue is a horrible way to get someone to feel like explaining themselves. Yesterday they suggested an “easy strategy" to restart the practice was to think of a memory for each of my family members. It’s easier to tell someone you did what they wanted than to tell them why you aren’t doing something, so here we are. My family. Actually, let me use random.org for a moment. I wouldn’t want some subconscious factor to sway the order and give the wrong idea. OK. The (random) order:

1. Brother
2. Dad
3. Mum
4. Sister

• Brother: his wife, Joyce, significantly raises the bar for what it ought to look like to call someone “nice” - it’s so easy to call someone nice, I’m sure pretty below average people have been called nice just because they were friendly to someone they were attracted to, or because they were able to talk confidently about their job title and then asked the other person in the conversation “what do you do?”. Truly the best way to describe Joyce is “nice”, but if all these mediocre guys at pubs and people we’ve only met once in our lives get called “nice”, it makes me upset that that’s the best word I have for her. Anyway… brother has this habit of talking about the personal lives of all his friends and family with people who are not the people he is talking about. I remember a time - after about three years of them being married - we were walking through a park when someone mentioned this mutual friend, Yianni, and brother’s wife said “he told us he was thinking of breaking up with his partner, and I felt my heart move more than I expected, because, poor Yianni, I don’t think that’s good for him.” My brother takes the nicest-person-in-the-world-at-least-out-of-the-people-I-have-met-so-far and turns them into just a little bit of a gossip.

• Dad: I had a friend over for lunch semi-recently and they brought ramen, and my dad now refers to that friend as a ‘ramen-monger’. He also asked me for their number (which I didn’t give him), and then asked me repeatedly - over the course of watching a basketball game - if I had sent them a message with a list of movie recommendations he thought my friend would love based on the fact they love ramen. Late in the game I told him I did send the list (ummm...). When he immediately asked what they thought of it I said “sadly they don’t really watch movies.” Dad nodded unsmilingly and said "but we both love ramen..."

• Mum: convinced the local burger place always gave her more chilli than what she asked for, mum went into the store to pay for the family’s meals using a box of 5c coins with almost infinite tape on the bottom. It was her preferred method of self-vindication: not enough evidence she had been wronged, no clarity to the one being punished about what they were doing wrong, complete confidence it was a good idea even after the bottom of the box gave out in the middle of our kitchen/dining/living area.

• Sister: in 2019 she was at the library with dad when dad was stung by a bee and experienced anaphylaxis. She removed the stinger, administered his epipen, called an ambulance, and stayed in hospital whilst he was under post-adrenaline observation. She skipped some kind of important meeting (interview? date? house inspection?) to do so. Three months ago she used that experience as the central anecdote of a presentation on turning problems into opportunities. She had gotten two assignments done in the four hours dad was hospitalised. I asked one of the attendees what they thought about her leveraging the anecdote for the context of a presentation. They stated “she was so right, you can’t let anything compromise the value of time. It’s the most important resource we have because it’s finite.” When I said nothing they added “it was a strange place to be stung by a bee though.” I laughed and the interaction was over. Sister cancelled the gelato we were supposed to have afterwards and then criticised me for not checking my emails before I left work.