#30 Sad thoughts, bad thoughts

And not being a Saturday night friend

Jolly and bright? Not me, not today.

Here instead we have a compilation of all the shittiest thoughts I’ve had lately.

All I ask is that you read this with your tongue in your cheek, which is how it was written.

Love,

Belle XOXO

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Do you ever wonder what the point of life is?

I think about it mostly in quiet moments, like when I’m walking up a long-ish staircase and I pause to look out over something below me, a black cat on a brick wall. Or sitting on the tram, observing blank eyed people in their sensible flat shoes. I certainly don’t think about it when I’m running to my car in the rain. Or when I’m purchasing an expensive blue dress that is much too short to be worn comfortably.

But I do think about it.

Sometimes life feels exhausting. Even my soft little life with cups of earl grey tea and no sweet-eyed dependents. Not a dog or a cat or a child to keep alive. Lately it feels like senseless forward motion. Like running for the train to get to the job you don’t even like.
There is beauty too, of course. I see it in the inky-silky petals of a snow pea flower. I see it in my niece’s tiny fat fist wrapped around my index finger as she takes a step. I see it in Liam handing me a plate of pasta. Especially that.

My toxic trait is that I assume something has been stolen after looking for it for the minimum amount of time. My air pods, a half-used $38 tube of hair mask from Aesop, a black bikini top. All things I have momentarily misplaced and mentally accused someone of thieving. Only to have the thing turn up exactly where I last left it.
Usually what makes someone a culprit is that they’ve recently been in my house, you could be my best friend or the plumber. Either way, until I’ve found it, you stole it.

“I’m not a Saturday night friend”, I said to my friends on a Sunday afternoon.  It’s a thought I had been quietly having, but this was the first time I’d said it aloud. I added, “people will get an after-work wine with me, they will ask me to go on a walk, they will get lunch with me…but they won’t make plans on a Saturday night with me.”
It feels yuck to say that. But it’s worse to feel it, mostly because it’s dumb and so oddly specific. You can tell I’ve really been thinking about it. And if it is true, it’s most certainly because I’ve made my own bed by being too attached to my own bed.
But I laugh heartily at your stories, I tell you that you look beautiful, and you will call me when you need advice. So, I guess it’s fine.

Every year when Meredith Music Festival happens, I feel the same way about it; I hate it and I hate everyone who goes.
I went once in 2014 and spent the entire festival feeling like a body of water around a body of oil.
I didn’t have the right appeal, I didn’t have the right set up and most importantly, I didn’t have the stamina.
“Whose car is that” a small manic cool guy yelled out, he said the words car and that in a way that made it clear; the car was ugly.
The car was mine, reluctantly given to me by my Nanna when she had her license revoked. A maroon coloured 1998 Ford Falcon. It was ugly, but it was reliable.
Later that day I licked the dregs of someone’s MDMA powder out of crumpled tin foil, I two-stepped lamely to King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, I cried and cried and cried as my ex-boyfriend glanced around hopefully for any excuse to run into the peopled abyss, I watched the famed sunset on the famed hill and cried some more.
Mercifully, either the MDMA or the baked spuds had traces of lactose in them and my dairy intolerant friend became so sick that at 7am we drove out of that gently lit field. Leaving the smooth-cool kids with their troopies and their way of moving underneath gumtrees, behind.

I am so much less fun than I think I am.

I’ve started to think more about having a baby. Exactly because I am not a Saturday night friend. What else is there to do? That’s a joke, but it’s also not a joke. When you’re 32 and you wonder about the point of life, there is something about having a child that pulls you in. Your worries about not being the kind of person that people want to spend their Saturday nights with would surely melt away. They would be replaced by heftier, more purposeful anxieties. How do you keep the baby alive? How do you define yourself as person with a baby? How do you make sure this baby is the kind of person people want to spend their Saturday nights with?

Every day guilt hangs over me like a cotton ball cloud. It’s like being a student all the time, for your whole life. You should be doing your homework, but you’re not. You’re looking at TikToks about how to make vegan beef stroganoff.
And instead of happily doing all the things one does to grow a life; painting with watercolours, talking to a friend on the phone for 2 hours, washing your sheets. You do them with a thick buttery guilt. Because you should be doing something else. You should be writing.

There is a bottle of Veuve Clicquot perched lamely on the highest shelf in my kitchen. I will pop it when I’m published.

Maybe never.