words I liked: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

This book had so much beautiful writing to capture. The story itself is touching. There so many themes of love, friendship, life and achievement.

A really interesting way to capture the way and the reasons that we might segment the loves in our lives:

Alice was clever, but she had the kind of cleverness that verged on the unkind … Sadie didn’t want Sam viewed through her sister’s acute and often forgiving lens.

I just love this turn of phrase - she effortlessly made a storm with her eyes:

…she slammed the door, and then once she was alone, she effortlessly made a storm with her eyes.

Loving doesn’t have to mean fixing the problem, always a useful reminder:

Freda simply nodded and took Sadie in her arms. “Oh, my love, this must be a very great loss.” She … canceled her afternoon, and she took Sadie to lunch at her favourite restaurant”

Attention is a form of love:

No one took him, and his queries, more seriously than she did.

Sometimes all you need to do, is choose to stay:

He was about to leave, but then he didn’t.

… and a reminder of how easy it can be, to be meaningful:

…he made the world a little easier for Sam, and it cost him next to nothing to do so.

There are all kinds of friendship:

They had the rare kind of friendship that allowed for a great deal of privacy within it.

Don’t forget to check for whether careful handling is required:

“There are people like you and like me. We have bad things happen to us, and we survive them. We are sturdy. But with people like your friend, you must be exceptionally gentle, or they may break.”

…and sometimes flexibility is strength:

Somehow, Sam was able to bend to her criticism in a way that he had never been able to before.

When we are young, we are brave by default. We don’t know any different:

The child’s body moves the way a body can move before it has felt or even encountered the idea of pain.

…but maybe we can choose that same bravery, even once we have learned a little:

These, of course, are the kinds of vows young people feel comfortable making when they have no idea what life has in store for them.

After all, why stop playing?

“You can watch if you want. I’m going to play until the end of this life.”

“That’s a good philosophy.”

I can’t quite put the words to what these ones capture, but they belong together:

He wanted Ichigo’s life, a lifetime of endless, immaculate tomorrows, free of mistakes and the evidence of having lived.

“How do you get over a failure?”

“I think you mean a public failure. Because we all fail in private.”

While Sadie experience this period of indecision as stressful, Sam didn’t feel that way at all. The best part of this moment, he thought, is that everything is still possible.

We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn’t chosen. And sometimes, this other life felt as palpable as the one you were living.

This one does need a bit of an understanding of the story itself to appreciate. The beauty is that in the same sentence it captures the harrowing absence, yet enduring presence, of a love:

Sadie’s instinct had been to tell Sam, but they weren’t speaking at the time.

A reminder to embrace the doing and the creating:

There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.

If you have read the story, it’s hard not to love Marx, and Marx knows love:

To Marx, it seemed foolish not to love as many things as you could.

…and:

“I rather like to be consumed.”

…capturing a certain kind of love:

Marx was a prodigious reader, and he felt like Sadie might be the kind of book that one could read many times, and always come away with something new.

There is beauty to be found in the world:

It was only when he was alone and he couldn’t participate in the business of living that he tended to notice how lovely being alive was.

When you look for it, it’s everywhere:

Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know - were persimmons his favourite fruit, or had they just now become his favourite fruit because there they were, growing in his own backyard?

To embrace the beauty in life, fill your infinite days with something!

“I suppose we drink and we smoke for the same reasons it is done elsewhere. We must fill our infinite days with something.”

Porter Robinson

I really liked a bit that Porter Robinson had to say on the Switched on Pop podcast:

And I really do believe that human beings are beautiful and worthwhile and amazing.

And so anything that seems to strike a chord with almost everybody in a positive way, there's a beauty in that, you know?

…

I wanted to basically wear this like embracive cliché and no embarrassment, no shame. It's actually something that's beautiful and worthwhile. I think it's something that a lot of the hyperpop world has done in a roundabout way before me.

…

And I guess one of my favorite things in the world is finding something new to love or something new to appreciate. Like, dude, we're all gonna die. Like, I think it's like the more things you can love while you're alive, the better.

And so if anything can open my mind in a new way and make me love something, I find that just to be ridiculously valuable.

writing skills: David Copperfield

I usually title these posts “words I liked” which I am reluctant to use in this case because what I liked about the words I have picked out of David Copperfield was how they invoked a feeling towards a character - feelings of dislike.

The skill or the sentiment was actually captured very well by Owen King, speaking about his father Stephen King and his ability to add “… a touch of sneer to an abrasive character.”

With that in mind I give you these gems, crafted to inspire your disdain for Uriah:

…replied Uriah, with a writhe

…his damp cold hand felt so like a frog in mine…

…and a snaky undulation pervading his frame from his chin to his boots…

He sat, with that carved grin on his face…

…he gasped rather than smiled at me, he writhed and undulated about, in his deferential servility…

…that crawling impersonation of meanness…

Anything to equal the low cunning of his visage, and of his shadowless eyes without the ghost of an eyelash, I never saw.

…he was squeezing my hand with his damp fishey fingers…

…with a writhe of his ungainly person…

His eyes, as he looked at me, seemed to take every shade of color that could make eyes ugly.

…he reminded me of an ugly and rebellious genie watching a good spirit.

I now saw him with his mask off. The suddenness with which he dropped it, when he perceived that it was useless to him; the malice, insolence, and hatred, he revealed; the leer with which he exulted, even at this moment, in the evil he had done…

He is such an incarnate hypocrite, that whatever object he pursues, he must pursue crookedly. It’s his only compensation for the outward restraints he puts upon himself. Always creeping along the ground to some small end or other, he will always magnify every object in the way; and consequently will hate and suspect every body that comes in, in the most innocent manner, between him and it. So, the crooked courses will become crookeder, at any moment, for the last reason, or for none.

words I liked: Book Lovers by Emily Henry

I really enjoyed reading this, the author posted on Instagram a really good explanation of how she feels and thinks about the romcom genre:

It’s not about a formula, any more than any other genre, though that’s how romances often get oversimplified in discussion. Some people scoff at the concept of a genre with a guaranteed “happy ending,” but the truth is, we all know the characters’ lives go on after the book ends. They’ll suffer other hurts. They’ll struggle. We’re with them for just a moment. But in that moment, there is so much hope.

That’s why this kind of story is so important to me. Sometimes our world is shitty. It’s unpredictable and terrifying and cruel and we constantly have to find ways to hold joy in our hearts even when we’re tired, grieving, or angry. We hang onto and believe in that hope: that no matter how bad things get, there is a force on earth that makes life brilliant, beautiful, and worth living.

Love is what holds us together when everything falls apart. It’s not about one singular happy ending we’re aiming for. It’s about weighing all those moments of sheer joy throughout our lives as heavily as they deserve.

On to the book itself, this about two sisters’ love was nice:

I didn’t know it was possible to miss a person this much while she was sitting right next to you, so badly everything in you aches.

As a slow reader I liked this turn of phrase:

Libby’s not a startlingly fast reader. She absorbs books like they’re bubble baths…

An expression of a more urban, densely populated life:

…the feeling of being one person among millions, as if you’re all nerve endings in one vast organism.

Love and passion in cooking terms!

I feel like I’m sugar under a blowtorch, like he’s caramelizing my blood.

This resonates:

…that’s what made me fall in love with reading: the instant floating sensation, the dissolution of real-world problems…

…and this!

“You’re in books. Of course you don’t have a life. None of us do. There’s always something too good to read.”

…and more:

Some books you don’t read so much as live, and finishing one of those always makes me think of ascending from a scuba dive. Like if I surface too fast I might get the bends.

Being brought tangibly in touch with your past:

That’s the thing about being an adult standing beside your childhood race car bed. Time collapses, and instead of the version of you you’ve built from scratch, you’re all the hackneyed drafts that came before, all at once.

Did I mention that I love words?

I read once that not everyone thinks in words. I was shocked, imagining these other people who don’t use language to make sense of everyone and everything, who don’t automatically organize the world into chapters, pages, sentences.

…and:

Maybe that’s why we as a species love stories so much. All those chances for do-overs, opportunities to live the lives we’ll never have.

Lastly:

Maybe love shouldn’t be built on a foundation of compromises, but maybe it can’t exist without them either.

Not the kind that forces two people into shapes they don’t fit in, but the kind that loosens their grips, always leaves room to grow. Compromises that say, there will be a you-shaped space in my heart, and if your shape changes, I will adapt.

words I liked: Ghost Cities by Siang Lu

There was a technique in this book where an ancient and a current timeline were somehow connected. I never quite grasped how it came together, but I did like a lot of the writing.

These ones may be viewed as pessimistic, or as appreciating that the impermanence of things makes appreciating them in their time more important:

Everything crumbles in time, but that which is conceived as a ruin is forever perfect in its ruination.

…and:

…even the mountain would erode, slowly but completely, and someday cease to be.

Related, and an example of how language can aid connections:

‘You know, in Chinese, the word “forget” is wang ji. And how we say the word “remember” is ji de. So the two are linked by a common root, ji. But in English it doesn’t make sense. Forget. Remember. There’s nothing telling you that these to words are related. Doesn’t that seem wrong to you?’

Again on language and memory:

‘…If only there was an authority on the English language! I would write to them and request that they fix “remember” and “forget”. Because to me, the natural opposite of “remember” is “dismember”.’

‘But that’s already a word.’

Yuan sighs. ‘En, I know. That’s what I mean. It’s too messy, the English language! But when a memory eludes me, like the edges of a dream, where no matter what I try I can’t remember the details - only it was important and now I have lost it maybe forever - then I am dismembered. I have lost a part of myself. Violently so. That is actually how I feel. A dismemberment.’

It this about books, or about people?

‘Why didn’t you just buy it from a bookstore?’ I ask.

‘I like library books. They have more personality. They never quite belong to you and must leave you eventually. So you race through them to make sure you don’t have to return them unfinished, and savour every minute you have together.’

This one definitely people:

Each day we part, and the next day it is as though we have become strangers all over again and must find some way to know each other once more, to dust off the rusty rhythms, fall back into step.

From the ancient timeline part of the story:

Once, staring into the Moonlit Pagoda, He had come very close to asking for help, though for what exactly He was not quite sure.

How we carry our past:

…for now that he had placed his aches, he could no longer misplace them.

Capturing the magic moment when we are in the throes of drink and good company:

…we spend the next few minutes with arms around each other’s shoulders, squinting at the bottle, scrutinising it, its secrets ever more clear to us with every subsequent swig. We take turns telling each other extremely funny jokes. We feel our brains enlarging by the second, approaching a perfect understanding of everything. Somehow, in the babbling stream, we have rediscovered our vestigial tongues.

Now, nothing is beyond us.

…followed by a succinct capture of the state that may result after that magic moment:

I am not yet properly calibrated to the day.

These two on speaking, and words:

‘Then don’t you see? To profess is to tell the world, but you are a confessor, in this and all things.’

…and:

It is hard to know, anymore, if we are still playing with words, or if we are saying real things.

I felt a little disappointed at the end of this book, but revisiting all the beautiful phrasing has made me appreciate reading it much more.

The grass grows tall and tangles everything into stillness

I just loved this sentence from writer TheBigCat over here.

words of wisdom: The Picture of Dorian Gray

More words that I liked from this book:

Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.

The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live - undisturbed, indifferent and without disquiet.

I think you will tire first, all the same. Some day you will look at your friend, and he will seem to you to be a little out of drawing, or you won’t like his tone of colour, or something. You will bitterly reproach him in your own heart, and seriously think that he has behaved very badly to you. The next time he calls, you will be perfectly cold and indifferent. It will be a great pity, for it will alter you. What you have told me is quite a romance, a romance of art one might call it, and the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.

Each class would have preached the importance of those virtues, for whose exercise there was no necessity in their own lives. The rich would have spoken on the value of thrift, and the idle grown eloquent over the dignity of labour.

But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself.

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

…beauty is a form of genius - is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty.

I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it.

I adore simple pleasures … they are the last refuge of the complex.

Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners.

My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect - simply a confession of failure.

Faithfulness! I must analyse it some day. The passion for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.

He says things that annoy me. He gives me good advice.

People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.

…hinted at prudence, quoted from that book of cowardice whose author apes the name of common sense.

…for which he could not account, and which for that reason was all the more dominant within him.

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

To be in love is to surpass one’s self.

I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices.

If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us.

…the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning…

They get up early, because they have so much to do, and go to bed early, because they have so little to think about.

It is said that passion makes one think in a circle.

Ugliness that had once been hateful to him because it made things real, became dear to him now for that very reason. Ugliness was the one reality. The coarse brawl, the loathsome den, the crude violence of disordered life, the very vileness of thief and outcast, were more vivid, in their intense actuality of impression, than all the gracious shapes of art, the dreamy shadows of song.

Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts and appetite into an art.

His own nature had revolted against the excess of anguish that had sought to maim and mar the perfection of its calm. With subtle and finely wrought temperaments it is always so. Their strong passions must either bruise or bend. They either slay the man, or themselves die. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.

on being small in the world

Two bits that I’ve always liked, speaking about being small in the world.

I Like Giants, a song by Kimya Dawson:

Rock and roll is fun but if you ever hear someone

Say you are huge look at the moon, look at the stars, look at the sun

Look at the ocean and the desert and the mountains and the sky

Say I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye

I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye

An extract from On The Vanity of Existence, an essay by Arthur Schopenhauer:

...if we turn from this, and look at life in its small details, as presented, say, in a comedy, how ridiculous it all seems! It is like a drop of water seen through a microscope, a single drop teeming with infusoria; or a speck of cheese full of mites invisible to the naked eye. How we laugh as they bustle about so eagerly, and struggle with one another in so tiny a space! And whether here, or in the little span of human life this terrible activity produces a comedic effect.

It is only in the microscope that our life looks so big. It is an indivisible point, drawn out and magnified by the powerful lenses of Time and Space.

saved by Stacy Gougoulis

Danny Glover was forty years old when he muttered that he was “too old for this shit” – an  affirmation for the afflicted of life experience. 

It’s the same way that I feel as I wait for the train on another Saturday morning. I’m going to work. 

I don’t work in hospitality, I don’t work in retail. No, I work in an office. A Monday to Friday, nine to five, paper shuffling specialist. Except for the three and a half years since the first lockdown, the Monday to Friday has consistently spilled into Saturday too. Forty-three of fifty-two available Saturdays last year. 

When you’re a teenager, working the weekend is nothing. The work might be monotonous, but odds are you’re doing it with people who are becoming your friends. You’re all in this together. 

When you’re forty, it is lonely. 

I’ve left a family still sleeping in our home just to get here. They will live another day while I am gone. 

Yet I also have company on these trips.  

His name is Stacy Gougoulis and he’s been hosting Weekend Breakfast on triple j for at least as long as I’ve been doing this. 

... 

I’ve tried to explain Stacy to my friends in the past. It never quite lands. 

Maybe you are reading this on your own solitary odyssey, in the right frame of mind to understand. 

The way that Stacy brings light to his work. He starts his shift at six in the morning on a Saturday, backs it up on Sunday. There is no co-host for Stacy, no Hing to his Hobba. Stacy sets sail solo. He is ballast for the rest of us who might otherwise drift. 

It feels safe. You would call it a bond if it weren’t for the one-way broadcast of radio. The connection is real but unrequited. 

I had a confidence that needed to be exchanged. The train bore no takers, so I put it into my phone and out into the world via +61 439 75 7555. 

Sixty seconds into the next song I received a message from an unknown number. 

This is my personal phone. Your secret is safe with me – SG. 

... 

This Saturday I’m greeted with track work. The train has now become a bus, battling the rest of the traffic on the roads. 

If going in to work on the weekend isn’t exciting (it’s not), the extra twenty minutes each way on the bus is a further let down. 

It’s a week since I texted my secret to Stacy Gougoulis. I don’t usually tune in on a Sunday, but I had last weekend to make sure he was still there. I guess when you share a secret there's a terror involved. Have I done the right thing? What does the other person think of what they know? About me. 

Begrudgingly boarding the bus, I plug in my headphones. I’m nervous when I open the app. 

Deep breath. 

Seventeen Going Under is being covered by Camp Cope. Seventeen doesn't feel all that long ago, even though the date says otherwise. I may still be going under. Coping is a veneer that is thinner by the day.  

The song finishes and I hear Stacy is there in the studio. That breath can be released now. I can feel it in the back of my teeth, the veneer is buffeted at least another day by the sense of relief.  

TrainLink will let you down. Stacy is ever reliable. 

... 

It’s Tuesday evening and I’m back at Dulwich Hill station. Thankfully this time it’s the return journey. 

It takes an appreciation for a certain kind of Sydney beauty to treasure this place. The station’s nestled amongst a mix of those old brick apartments they built in the 1970s, and houses that no longer sell for a million dollars. They haven’t fallen, they just inexplicably start at two million(!) now. 

There are some newer apartments too. There’s a bit of a renaissance on foot, they’ve brought new ground floor retail that can cure or create your ails as you please. A pharmacy, physio and a psychologist to put your body and mind right.  

The Loose Dozen – I've wondered if it’s named for a selection of its products, or a selection of its frequent customers. You can drive through, or they’ll deliver the drinks to your door if you’re not quite up to it.  

I feel the light buzz on my wrist that signals a new message. 

Hey – I've been thinking about your message, and you. What's news today?  

I wasn’t expecting to hear from Stacy again. 

I guess I’d tempered my expectations. The first time I found myself depending on radio hosts to lift my spirits was the breakfast shift when I was only trudging to work on weekdays. 

But then the duo came to an end. Alex was around lunch shifts for a cameo or two, then ended up running for Wannan in an election. Matt deserted the radio to pursue the oasis of writing and acting. 

Still – this seems an invitation to knock about with what feels like an old friend, even though I know we're strangers. I never believed that you shouldn’t meet (text) your heroes. 

Just got off the train. Fighting the battle between the good (walk straight home, have dinner and read a book) and the maybe better, maybe worse (stop in and buy some drinks first). 

... 

I’d ended up posing the question about what was behind the naming of The Loose Dozen to Stacy while I walked back to the train station the next morning.  

I did stop in to pick up some drinks last night. It was the most relaxed and care-free dinner I’d had with my family in a long time. Maybe it was the wine, but I think it was also the buzz fizz of a new friendship. 

When did it flip that most of our new friendships and relationships started with messaging? I remember when it was going out with a friend who brought along another friend you’d never met before, or you just started talking to somebody at a gig. 

In person often came with rejection, but at least when the hammer fell it was quick. Messaging is all anticipation and fear. You can’t read if the other person really wants to keep going, or if they’re just trying not to be rude. You just wait for those bouncing dots. 

Making a new friend takes mettle, nerves of steel, or just the willingness to fall flat on your face. 

Snow White and the seven dwarves, but they went pro so needed to add roadies, a social media manager and an agent? 

The thirteen dwarves from Lord of the Rings, minus one after a raucous night with the Hobbit? 

I can’t tell you what part of my brain took me straight from dozen to dwarves, but here we are. 

He replied, so I haven’t hit pavement with nose this time. Hooked on the thrill that my radio friend might become my real friend, I’m all in. I reply: 

Oh god, you have to stop. I'm so far down this rabbit hole and if I don’t come up for air I’m going to be on the train crying with laughter. People will think I’m weird. 

... 

My heart had stopped. 

Stacy Gougoulis is leaving Weekend Breakfasts. When I’d seen it announced, I felt a little lost, and maybe even a little betrayed. 

I knew it was irrational, that I wasn’t being fair. Still – I messaged Stacy with a screen cap overlayed with no message other than exclamation and question marks. 

Exciting news right? I can’t wait! 

Before I knew it, I was back at the confessional. I spilt it all in my reply – the grieving for a ritual lost, the fear that I would never again have his show pick me up from the doldrums. Pavement, meet face. 

Heavy!!! 

Fear not, you need to read it all! 

Eight and a half years of Weekend Breakfast is done. 

Four afternoons a week on Double J Arvos is why! 

There are no goodbyes here – it's hello at a different time.  

I had to go and make it weird, didn’t I. 

Even though the relief was palpable, I could still feel the metaphorical pavement on my face. 

Another message came in: 

One last weekend shift before I sign off for weekday hours. 

Might skirt the rules a little on the way out. Think about it for a while and send me a song request. Tick, tick, tune may not be a fair contest this week. 

I knew right away that there was only one song for my request, but I wanted to let it sit a while before replying. 

... 

Good Riddance (Time of Your Life). I sent it through late Friday. 

I hadn’t felt nervous at all when I first confessed my secret to Stacy – on the station text line no less. It had seemed so disconnected from anything real.  

Now I held dread. I anticipated the hurt if the promise of playing my request had been empty. 

Saturday morning had come and gone, and now it was Sunday. 

There had been tributes from a series of newsreaders. I'd heard them across the station, nearly all had started with Stacy.  

I’ve already decided that I’m not going to message next week. 

A few days of messaging have altered the way that I look at the world. The joy has spilt over and my loved ones have felt it too. 

Maybe we will have a lasting friendship, but just what it has been already, is rich. 

I’d momentarily forgotten the dread that I was holding onto, and was lost in my own head. 

A stuttering acoustic riff and a faint expletive brought me back to the real world and the radio world. 

Under the guise of one last Tick, tick, tune Stacy had played my request. 9.57am on Sunday 30 June 2024. 

... 

It started with a confidence shared. 

I’m not going to tell you what it is, that’s between me and him. 

Holding it on my own had caused a strain in my neck, and the distension was spreading to my relationships. 

Stacy may not know it, but at the toughest time of my life, he helped me to roll with the punches. 

Thank you. 

guilty

Read and liked this extract from The Vanity of Existence by Arthur Schopenhauer:

We are always living in expectation of better things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again. We look upon the present as something to be put up with while it lasts, and serving only as the way towards our goal. Hence most people, if they glance back when they come to the end of life, will find that all along they have been living ad interim; they will be surprised to find that the very thing they disregarded and let slip by unenjoyed was just the life in the expectation of which they passed all their time. Of how many a man may it not be said that hope made a fool of him until he danced into the arms of death!

words I liked: In Pieces by Sally Field

This book was written by Sally Field about her life. Without giving it away, there was a lot of trauma.

Even if it’s not necessarily nice to read about, there were still some beautiful phrases:’

all of them with wounds that wouldn’t heal because no one acknowledged they were bleeding

A wonderful way to describe a place that’s missing that sense of being home:

a place to stop but not to live

Describing someone in her life:

He had an intuitive sense of anyone’s despair and like a hound dog on the trail of fugitive feelings, he’d root them out, lock his focus on the injury, then comfort and soothe.

On a relationship between two people, but growing as individuals:

how do two people grow up together, build strength in their own legs, when they’re always leaning on each other?

The challenge of sharing:

stuffed to the brim with words that pleaded to be spoken but unable to get the first word out

On assumptions in relationships and conversations:

I pushed away from her, filling in the blanks with my own answers as clearly as if I’d heard the words

Lastly, our past is not our fate:

We’re all locked into the drumbeat of our history, but eventually you have to drown out that tune with your own voice.

beautiful sentences: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Just some sentences that I thought were a beautiful arrangement of words. It’s fair to say I loved reading this book.

There was something in his face that made one trust him at once. All the candour of youth was there, as well as all youth’s passionate purity. One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world.

There is some answer to you, but I cannot find it.

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a … form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?

…thought has seared your head with its lines, and passion branded your lips with fires

Time if jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses

“Ah this morning! You have lived since then.”

Talking to him was like playing upon an exquisite violin. He answered to every touch and thrill of the bow.”

She was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest.

…eyes that were violet wells of passion, lips that were like the petals of a rose.

The sunset had smitten into scarlet gold the upper windows of the houses opposite. The panes glowed like plates of heated metal. The sky above was like a faded rose.

The moment was lost in vulgar details.

“…if she can strip them of their selfishness and lend them tears for sorrows that are not their own, she is worthy of all your adoration”

He was trying to gather up the scarlet threads of life and to weave them into a pattern.

dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.

“When they make up their ledger, they balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy.”

It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin.

Origins

Beth had to explain to her friends what a buyer’s agent was before she could even start on what she did for work. Following a boy to move into a Potts Point studio had seemed like a good idea until she found that he too, was flat broke. 

With no qualifications other than having finished high school, job hunting had felt like trying to fish in the harbour with only a piece of string. 

Applications to ads on SEEK for anything with the word junior in the description resulted in nothing more than radio silence and the depression of checking her spam folder six times a day. 

There had been the briefest of stints in a call centre selling double decker bus tours to retirees travelling overseas for the first time. After the two day training (brainwashing) program and three weeks on the phone with only a single sale, she had been enticed to leave with the promise of a reference that would attribute her exit to changing business needs rather than her meagre sales performance. 

Beth had dragged herself in to get a coffee after yet another interview that went nowhere. The job had been to sell training courses to desperate job seekers, or those who just wanted a course to satisfy their student visa requirements. 

She knew she could barely afford the coffee but needed a moment to escape the traffic noise and the rain. The barista barely looked up as she ordered, and there was none of the flirty friendliness she might have been looking for as much as the caffeine that the coffee provided.  

So it’s fair to say that Beth was not expecting a break in the clouds, but there it was. Posted on a small corkboard was an old-fashioned notice with the tabs you tear off the bottom. 

HELP WANTED. NO EXPERIENCE REQUIRED. MUST BE ABLE TO USE A COMPUTER AND LEARN QUICKLY. IMMEDIATE START. 

Beth grabbed a tab with the phone number to call Jasmine. 

By the time the barista handed over her coffee she had decided to narrow the odds. With coffee in one hand, and the entire notice ripped from the board in the other, Beth made the phone call that would change everything. 

... 

Fast forward eighteen months and Beth is living the high life. 

Well, kind of. 

The main skill she has developed in this job is to be a dab hand at photoshop. So a casual browse of Beth’s Instagram feed suggests she is adorned with chic clothes and designer accessories. The truth is that it's all a fabrication, the trappings of wealth artificially dropped in to her photos while she killed time at the office. 

A little bit of embellishment here and there has become part of the repertoire. 

... 

“What we do here is we help with buying investment properties, usually up north” is how Jasmine had explained it to her, at an interview booked all of two hours after she had walked out of that cafe. 

She started working in the office the very next day. 

Beth had watched Jasmine’s mobile sit on the desk during their interview. In the entire ninety minutes, there was barely a second where the phone wasn't lit up with somebody trying to call her, or the ding of a new voicemail notification. Calling it an interview might belie its informality. It was mostly Jasmine talking about what she needed to do for the rest of the day, punctuated by the most personal of enquiries about Beth’s life. 

What wasn’t on the desk however, was a computer of any description. No laptop, no screen, not even a tablet. It was just the mobile, its charging cable, and a paper diary. 

Beth started work on a Wednesday, for no other reason than it was the day after the Tuesday that Jasmine had interviewed her and told her she had the job as soon as she wanted it. 

Jasmine intrigued Beth. When she had Jasmine’s attention it was undivided, and it was like there was nowhere else in the world to be. Just there, absorbing. It was this mild obsession with her new boss that had Beth alert and awake at five-thirty in the morning. She decided to use the burst of energy to start her day earlier than planned.  

The previous day’s rain had cleared, so taking advantage of the bright weather let Beth walk to the office rather than catch the 311 bus. It didn’t take much longer to walk and it meant she wasn’t relying on a bus that might not come to be on time for her first day. 

They had agreed on a nine-thirty start – Jasmine was “not a morning person.” Confirmation of this attribute came with Beth's wait at the office’s front door before Jasmine stepped out of the elevator and let her in, forty-five minutes after the agreed time. 

Beth’s eyes wandered to the desk that served as a small and solitary barrier between the front door and Jasmine’s office. There was simply no other space in the office, so it was clear that was where she would work. The desk was completely bare, the drawers cleared out by anybody who may have occupied it previously. 

“You’ll need to start with the tools of the trade. I’m useless with a computer, so I don’t have one. Your job is anything that needs doing on a computer.” 

Which all sounded wonderful to the (previously) tragically unemployed Beth, as she swivelled her head left, right, up and down, seeking any signs that a computer may actually exist in the office. 

While Beth remained perplexed, Jasmine had unlocked a drawer in her filing cabinet and produced a wad of plastic gift cards bearing the trademark yellow and black of JB Hi-Fi. They were all marked as being worth $250 each. 

So it began, Beth’s first task as operator of the computer, was to source the computer. 

“Get yourself a mobile phone for internet too. We don’t have an office connection and you never know when we’ll need to work on the go.” 

... 

Anything that needs doing on a computer so far had included: 

• Typing anything that Jasmine had dictated to be sent as an email 

• Taking scraps of paper supplied by Jasmine and entering them into templates for property purchase contracts 

• Writing fake negative reviews for competitors; and restaurants that Jasmine felt had wronged her 

• Jasmine’s internet banking to pay bills (Jasmine hovering what felt like milliimetres from the screen throughout) 

• Photoshopping property photos to replace an overcast sky with a sunny day, removing a scuff mark on a wall, and occasionally adding a window where none existed 

• A lot of personal browsing and social media for Beth 

Beth hadn’t started with a lot of computer skills, but there was a ton of downtime between requests  so she just used Google and Youtube tutorials to figure it out. 

The first time that Beth was asked to replace a cloudy day with a bit of sunshine it took her three days until she was happy with it. Jasmine didn’t mind at all, she hadn’t asked for anything else in between, and was thrilled when Beth showed it to her. These days, Beth has a folder on her computer desktop, chock full of sunny skies ready to go. She has taken to snapping a shot of a bright blue day on her walk into the office. 

The walk to work is the highlight of Beth’s day now. The boy and the Potts Point studio hadn’t lasted all that long after securing the new role. The job interview’s pointed questions about Beth’s personal life hadn’t stopped there, and if nothing else had intensified during the gaps in the working day with Jasmine. 

They hadn’t exactly discussed remuneration in the interview, but Beth’s first pay was a welcome shock. The second pay had been even more surprising, because Beth had assumed when she received her first pay that it was how much she’d be paid every fortnight. It turns out it was that much every week. Jasmine had asked where Beth was living, who she was living with, and Jasmine’s disdain was palpable. 

“I’m paying you enough that you don’t need to be weighed down by a cramped studio, or the starving artist type now living the high life by your good grace.” The disapproval made Beth’s cheeks sting. It wasn’t long before she moved into a new apartment in Darlinghurst. By herself.  

So now her walk to the office took her through Hyde Park in the morning, with ample opportunities for a picturesque skyline. The photoshop work on the properties took her ten minutes now, rather than hours. Her (virtual) ability to re-model a property was worthy of The Block. 

... 

It was two weeks before her trip back home that Beth realised she had miscalculated. She hadn’t left Sydney since moving, but now she was going back home for a cousin’s wedding. 

For close to two years now, Beth had been curating her Instagram feed. Curating was a nice way of saying lying of course. She did not own a single item of designer clothing, jewelry, or accessories – but this is not the impression she had cultivated. She would be home for five days and people she had been to school with, had expectations that her wardrobe would not meet. Comments suggesting these people envied Beth’s success were an irresistible hit of dopamine. 

Between the ego boosts and the realisation that Jasmine’s requests for a little photoshop sprucing were growing grander in scale, Beth’s moral compass may have been a little off-piste. 

She figured that she could solve her deficit of finery with a focused binge of retail therapy. It was time that her wardrobe was updated anyway. Amongst the various emails that Beth had typed on Jasmine’s dictation, every six or so weeks was a request to the bookkeeper to obtain and send a new bunch of gift cards to the office.  

The types of cards always varied. There had been plenty of JB Hi-Fi cards like she had been handed that first day, as well as Officeworks, Dan Murphys, KMart and Google Play gift cards. Jasmine explained that she used them as gifts for clients who bought properties through her, and that it also helped her put a little bit of personal fun through the business for a tax deduction. 

Beth had seen the bank balances while doing internet banking. She didn’t think that Jasmine would miss it, and she could pay it back later, it would just take her a few months. She knew she wouldn’t find what she needed at KMart, so even though it would be taking a risk, Beth had to request a card from the bookkeeper she hadn’t seen in the mix yet. 

“K – can you send another twenty $250 cards as Westfield gift cards, have run through the last lot – J xx" 

Beth’s heart skipped a beat as she hit send. 

... 

The cards arrived in the mail eight days later. Beth slipped the envelope into her bag on the way back from the post office.  

Compulsive is the word you would use to describe her checking of the email to see if there had been a response from K. There had been nothing until the gift cards arrived, and Beth still had to find the time to shop before her trip home. 

While there was nothing from K, one email had piqued Beth’s interest. 

It had arrived while Jasmine was out for the morning – she had told Beth that she had a personal matter that required her presence. The email’s subject line read LETTER OF DEMAND, which sounded ominous. 

Even though she knew that there was nobody else in the office, Beth’s movements of the mouse were slow, cautious, and she felt the hairs on the back of her neck standing. "Anything that needs doing on a computer” was clearly part of the job description, and Beth had been reading Jasmine’s emails on her behalf for over a year. Nevertheless, there was something about reading this email that felt not quite right. 

Not quite right was, of course, a slope that Beth had long slipped down. 

We are instructed by our clients in relation to funds of $320,000 provided to you in your capacity as the sole director of 22 Nudgee Road Hamilton Pty Ltd, in accordance with the Finance & Development Agreement executed between the parties.

Following independent due diligence on the status of the promised development, we have reason to believe that requests for investment progress payments were made on a fraudulent basis. We attach:

1. Photographic evidence of no construction activity on site, other than the erection of temporary fencing.

2. Forensic expert’s report alleging that progress photos provided to our client were electronically created and manipulated.

Our client wishes to resolve this dispute in an amicable and prompt fashion. We have been instructed to accept a return of the $320,000 provided, plus a sum of $20,000 to cover due diligence and legal expenses, as fair consideration for the premature termination of the Finance & Development Agreement. These funds are to be provided by bank cheque within thirty days.

In the absence of an agreed resolution, our client intends to contact Queensland Police.

The sound of the door closing is what drew Beth’s attention back to her physical surroundings. She could feel beads of sweat up and down her arms. 

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost” remarked Jasmine. Beth knew by now that a remark often masked a question, and the more that Jasmine’s attention lingered, the more probing the questions became. 

“My cousin just sent me a message – she's having second thoughts about the wedding.” 

... 

When Beth arrived home that evening, her first priority was a little bit of desktop research. She hadn’t been game to do it in the office with Jasmine present, even if her attention span was notoriously short. 

The clicking of the mouse was the only sound to keep her company now. The satellite view on Google Maps showed an old Queenslander house at 22 Nudgee Road. A couple of old cars in the front yard, rusted tin roof, and an inflatable pool in the back, all gave the strong impression of cheap rent and a student sharehouse. The imagery was dated 2021 though, so Beth knew it wasn’t conclusive proof of anything today. 

Street view painted a more recent picture. The old Queenslander had gone, and in its place was an empty lot with temporary fencing bearing the hoarding of Hobson Developments. It was a name that Beth recognised from the contracts that Jasmine had her prepare, and narrations on payments landing in the bank account. 

If an observer had been watching, they may have noticed that Beth had gone from sipping a glass of wine to sooth her nerves, to a relieved swirl of the last drops. 

Until she noticed the updated image capture date. This untouched site had been snapped only a month ago. 

At the very same time the street view represented, Beth knew that Jasmine had her working on Photoshop renovations for the very same development. She was tasked with taking a photo of a near-finished lounge room, and increasing the dimensions of the window. 

“Alex is planning to put in a larger window once the frames arrive, he doesn’t like the way these ones have turned out” had been the explicit instruction. That the slightly overcast day seen through the original window ought to be enhanced with a bright blue sky was implicit. 

Beth opened a new tab on the browser, adding an extra flight to her holiday itinerary. 

... 

The combination of shock and creeping doubts had almost led Beth into a grave oversight. She woke early on Friday morning and realised that she still had the gift cards in her bag, with a flight to catch to Brisbane in the early afternoon. 

Beth was relieved when Jasmine answered her phone at seven in the morning. Partly because she had been worried that she wouldn’t pick up at all, while also knowing that Jasmine was less likely at that hour to closely scrutinise her last-minute request to take the extra day’s leave. She seemed to buy the excuse that there had been an urgent family request to head home earlier to help with wedding preparations.  

Given that little of Beth’s current wardrobe was suitable for the impression she desired to make back home, her packing had involved cramming toiletries and make-up into a suitcase, and calling an Uber. 

She had been a store clerk’s dream when she arrived with a desire to shop, a deadline to leave, and a wallet full of gift cards. Decisions were made without delay or fitting room review, so long as the brand was upmarket and prominent. 

It was all done by twelve-thirty, with a now-full suitcase placed into the Uber heading this time for the airport. 

... 

The week away had been a heady cocktail. 

There was an intense thrill in the jealous stares and disbelieving comments from the people she had grown up around. Beth was noticed. 

Waiting just on the periphery of that thrill however was abject terror. 

Because before she had arrived home, for the wedding first, then dinner and drinks with the people she had known from school, there had been a moment of disbelief. 

Beth had stood at that corner where there ought to be a near-complete apartment development. What should have been a boutique block of twelve remained simply a patch of grass. Not even the temporary fencing was there – replaced by a For Sale sign with photo of a grinning agent, and a headline of “Development Approval secured.” 

She had waited until after the wedding was done to call the agent’s phone number. His veneer of politeness fell aside rapidly when she had explained she wasn’t in the market to buy, she was trying to find out about the development that was supposed to have occurred. 

“Did you know that I’m keeping a count? You’re the twenty-third person to call me in the last five days, trying to dig up details on what happened with this supposed development. And it’s only approved for twelve apartments! I’ve been hired to sell the fucking block, nothing else.” 

He texted her a link after he hung up. The precise detail of it escaped Beth, but she knew that “Notice of Appointment as Liquidator” had no good news for investors. 

Beth had partied more than she was used to, in an effort to avoid connecting more dots. It had been futile though. She didn’t have the files with her, but she could recall enough of the contracts she had drafted, the photos she had edited, and the transactions in the bank account. 

The knots in her stomach betrayed that the brain knew something was awry. 

Despite the crushing sense that this was trouble. Two thoughts remained constant. She had to know what was going on – and... 

...no amount of impending doom could take away that when Beth felt noticed, she had felt irredeemably scintillating. 

... 

So she had fronted up at the office on Monday morning. Jasmine was waiting, and thus began the monologue that would change her life. 

“It appears that we need to talk.” 

(Turns out it was possible for nerves to climb further from Beth’s stomach to her throat.) 

There was to be no chance for anybody to sit down, or run. Jasmine had moved to position herself between Beth and the door. 

“You're a smart girl, but you’re at best naive. At worst two steps behind where you should be. 

K called me Friday morning. It took me a moment to realise I definitely hadn’t asked for $5,000 in Westfield vouchers, but then the gears started to turn. It may have been a few hours after you’d called me – shrewd work to get me while the brain fog was heavy, by the way – but I knew nobody would be open before at least ten.” 

Hearing it was like listening to a true crime podcast. Jasmine had arranged for somebody to find her at Westfield, and tail her from there to the airport. They had watched her board a flight to Brisbane. 

“I know by now that you’ve pieced together at least part of what goes on here. It’s not exactly above board. 

That also means I keep a wide network of contacts. It’s a ninety minute flight to Brisbane, and that’s before you’ve had to wait to pick up your luggage. I could have organised it with my phone and thirty minutes, so you even left me with time to get coffee. 

No need to fix up the weather on these ones.” 

Jasmine laid out photos that showed her getting into a taxi at Brisbane Airport, from across the street at 22 Nudgee Road, and again of her boarding the onward flight that evening for her actual visit home. 

“There are some obvious risks for me here, but I’ve also had a week to plan the ways that I could bury you. 

Do you remember your first day with me? Did you think it was an accident that every contract that was sent, was done on a laptop that you bought with gift cards, connected to the internet with a mobile phone you signed up to in your own name? 

I didn't plan this part – but you really helped it along with your shopping spree at my expense. You’d be surprised how willingly those stores will send my colleague the video footage when they’re told it’s part of a fraud investigation. 

I know you've got some picture of what this is now. What you don’t know is how successful it is, and how deep it goes. It’s more than just me.” 

Beth tried desperately to read Jasmine’s expression. It was made difficult by the sense that she was looking down on the whole situation from above. She could see her desk, adorned with the laptop that had caused so much damage. She could also see out of the corner of her eye that in Jasmine’s office, the filing cabinet and drawers were cleared out into a single moving box. 

She expected to see fury in Jasmine’s eyes. Beth had seen it before – Jasmine was not slow to anger, but Beth had never felt that harsh glare directly. That was not what she could see, it was something else. Beth was jolted back as Jasmine started again. 

“So there’s no use in running. But maybe you knew that already, because the one thing I didn’t expect is that you would turn up here today. 

I like you Beth, and you have the skills to do this well.” 

Jasmine kept talking. Beth had stopped hearing the exact words that were being said. But the body knew. It was the same electric feeling that came from turning heads at the wedding. The glisten she had seen looking back through the mirror when she dressed herself in deceptively-obtained glamour. It felt scintillating. 

Beth crashed back into the present on Jasmine’s final words, before a drawn out pause. 

"So what do you think, partners in crime?” 

departures

Will you be OK?

I’m a tree. I’ve done this a thousand times before.

Done what?

Goodbyes.

Really?

Think about it. Leaves.

From Still Life by Sarah Winman, page 117 on the paperback copy I have.

This book was given to me as part of a workplace secret santa! Never has there been a more perfect secret santa gift.

good advice

Just keep going.

Something a friend said to me when going through something difficult.

Often people don’t know what to say when there’s nothing they can do to help - I know that’s the case for me at least.

This felt like good words to lend support.