The Unlovable Girl

 

Once upon a time[1] there was a little girl, who became a teenager, who came to believe she was unlovable.  Though perhaps not undesirable…

 

I’ve been listening to Alanis Morrissette. I’m thirty-two.  I don’t know why this is happening. One day, a few weeks ago, I felt the need to start listening to Alanis again. It came from nowhere. No obvious prompting, just a sudden unexpected craving, like the day a few years ago when  I sat at Latimer Road tube stop, and suddenly out of nowhere wanted to smoke, despite not having picked up a cigarette in over a decade. A moment later I realised my hands were hurting, which is this odd thing that happens to me when I’m stressed and busy, and for some reason, that day, my body had remembered a response to stress from years and years ago, and asked me to feed it nicotine. And in a similar way, I think, Alanis is an old response to angst that I thought I had forgotten, but that when the right set of circumstances occurred, I remembered it. This musical stress release was buried deep in my memory, but throw me a handful of emotionally,  and (at the risk of sounding pretentious) spiritually confusing situations, and I turn to this angry, angsty music of my teens and early twenties.

 

The day after boxing day I find a clip of Unsent on youtube. I used to love listening to Alanis confess the things she would have said to the various men in her life, had she but sent the letter. Sometimes, when I listened to this song in my early twenties it made me feel normal. I had many unsent letters written in anger, in bitterness, in jealousy, in stupid over emotional teenage angst and melodrama. Never send those letters. Write them. They are cathartic. Sing along to the unsent letters of a celebrity, imagining her story is your own, but never ever send the letters. I have made that mistake. I thought I had the answers. I thought I could fix the problems of others, as though a neat solution was what they were looking for. I thought I stood on the safe high ground of good morality. I was young. I was misguided. I was wrong.

 

On the 27^th December, 2014, sometime around midnight, I lie in bed, exhausted but wide awake, and the words of Unsent hover around me. I find that though the words fall to the same emotional place, of love, loss and longing, that place has changed in the intervening years. I’ve grown up, and I’m hearing what I didn’t hear before.

 

 

… Where this belief sprang from is not entirely clear. It started as just a little thing, a hint, a fear that she was on the outside, the outside of cool, the outside of belonging, the outside of success. The girl grew up, and as other ideas and beliefs took firm residence inside her heart/soul/strength so did this one. The easiest explanation is that she believed this about herself because nobody asked her out, if indeed that was a thing that people still did. This wasn’t entirely true. There was lovely boy when she was fifteen or so, who admired her in that intense and embarrassing was that only a teenage boy can, and he called her up, and actually did ask her out, and she said yes, or sure, or some such thing because saying no seemed rude. That was a mistake. At the same time, she started to follow a boy, in a niave and hopeless kind of way, for nearly two years, craving his attention, his friendship, his approval, in the way that only a very well behaved, risk adverse, church going private school girl can. Another girl, a broken girl, who lined her eyes with smudged black  mascara, who had a bad relationship with food, who listened to Tori Amos would tell her that she was too beautiful. That is why, she reasoned, in the self assured way of a fourteen year old who has been lying about her age, that is why he doesn’t talk to you/go out with you/act in anyway interested in you. No, the heroine replies. No, and hindsight hasn’t changed her mind. No, that simply isn’t true. And for the record, she says, I wasn’t overweight then and neither were you…

 

Verse three of Unsent, is addressed to Terrance, who was ‘open hearted and emotionally available and supportive’. Alanis recalls ‘how beautiful it was to fall asleep on [his] couch and cry in front of [him]for the first time’. Oh, that was the line that got me every time. I wanted that. I wanted someone I could sing that to. I had so much longing for what I had never had.

 

Excuse me for a minute while I yell at Freud.

Hey, dude, what do you know of women, of me, of my sexuality? Don’t you for a minute make assumptions about me, and what I lack and what I long for and what I desire. And don’t tell me giving birth will fill all my aching, empty spaces, because so many people spin that lie, but none spun it quite as absurdly as you did.

 

I am aware that many women have expressed this at greater length and with more intelligence that I have.

 

 

… the unlovable girl wandered through adolescence and on through her twenties. She watched the other girls at church get married. She imagined her feelings of not belonging, her fear of missing out, her unhappiness, her lack of success might be resolved if she too was lovable, like other girls. She could be just as good a wife, just as good a mother. She could live that life, couldn’t she?  But she knew, that although ever since she could remember she had dreamed this happily ever after for herself, deep down she knew it was not for her because she was still, and maybe ever would be, the unlovable girl. She was the girl who went out with no-one, who kissed no-one. She was busy, and anyway, romance bored her. In fact it practically revolted her. It belonged in other fairy tales, but not in her own story.  She got on with life, got a job, eventually went to university. Ran a youth group on Friday nights, sat on parish council at her church, planned a Christian summer holiday camp every year for ten years.  There she was this young, bright, energetic, loud, opinionated girl organising children and grown ups, arguing and reasoning with people more learned and experienced than herself, being useful, having a purpose. Sometimes those who were older than her, would ask if she was going out with anyone (yet), but as if she had time for that nonsense. . .

 

… She never had any intention of straying from the path, of stopping to pick flowers, of talking to the wolf. But time, and time again she did, because at twenty four the unlovable girl learned to flirt. Or rather, she learned who she could flirt with, because she’d always flirted. Goodness, she’d been doing that for a decade at least, but now, finally, in a world full of performers and artists and creatives and intellectuals she found her audience.  And for her efforts, the wolf gave her the consolation prize. The unlovable girl, learned something she had always suspected, was not, it turned out, undesirable…

 

**

In 2009, at a church home group meeting in London, I first stumbled across the practise of Christians sharing “a picture” they had received from the Lord. Often it was something very generic, something vaguely motivational. I have a picture of a path, in the country, winding through snow and up a mountain. There are no people. But I feel like the Lord is telling me/you/us that we need to be strong and keep going because he will carry us through to the other side of this problem/trial/sickness/hardship. That sort of thing. I don’t mean to be insincere. It was a very odd thing to witness.

 

This year, this Christmas, when I go home to my own bed, and lie there in the darkness, the absence of your/his/a body so tangible, you almost seem present, I have a picture that won’t leave my mind. It is a picture of a memory, of another Christmas, of another boy, from what seems a lifetime ago. It is unwelcome. I don’t want to see it, but it persists.  I’m in church, it is freezing cold, its Christmas Eve. I am on my own. I can’t remember if I had walked there on my own. I feel like we’d been fighting. I imagine I asked him to come, and he refused. I can’t remember. Earlier that night we’d gone to mass at the Catholic church. His brother had wanted to go.  We tossed the idea around at dinner. I can’t remember if anyone was actually that keen, but it seemed like the thing to do. I would go. I was not going to sit at home while they went to church. I didn’t mind about the branding. We threw on our coats and ran down into town. The church was full. We sat, gloved hands in our pockets, shivering, two atheist Irish boys with a strange love for the rituals of a church they never ordinarily visited, and me, a Sydney Anglican. Dumbly we sat through mass. Not one hymn was sung by the congregation. I felt like a spectator, an uninvited, unwelcome protestant. Maybe I told him this. Maybe I complained on the way home. Maybe I gave an annoying and ill-timed speech about the reformation. Maybe I told him it felt wrong not to have sung. I wanted to sing. I wanted to be involved.  Probably I cried. However it happened, I ended up at the quiet Church of Ireland service. During communion, I turned around. He is by the door. He catches my eye. I stand up and move to the back of the church. He goes outside, he is pacing back and forth, stamping out the frozen night air. He won’t come in.

 

In the summer, at an open mic night in Oxford, friends convinced him to read a poem. In his poem he recalled that night. He said he waited for me, in the snow, while I went to see my other boyfriend. I’ve never been a “Jesus is my boyfriend” kind of Christian. I hate that. But I knew what he meant. He had looked at me in his room in South London. You are beautiful, you are desirable, and you are in my bed. [But]. There is always something we don’t say.

 

And now, this Christmas, four years later, that picture of him outside, in the darkness, in the cold, won’t leave my mind. He used to accuse me of having a remarkable ability to see literary devices in my own life. How did I fail to see this example, this image, this picture at the time?

 

This Christmas, I remove myself, or perhaps am removed, from the gaze of another, who also tells me I am beautiful, but… but there is the pull of my ‘other boyfriend’, and his love, community, expectations, and ideal. And if I’m feeling less generous, his restrictions, his cage. Sometimes, when you’re at the door looking in, the inside is the place of warmth and light, but often, even though your feet are freezing in the snow, it is not.

 

**

 

“dear Jonathon, I liked you too much. I used to be attracted to boys who would lie to me…dear Marcus…you had a charismatic way about you with the women…dear Lou…the long distance thing was the hardest and we did as well as we could…”

 

Once when I listened to this song, I longed to know what it might be like to be able to tell the stories contained in this unsent letter. I projected the petty goings-on in my teenage life onto this song, seeing my foolish adolescent grievances to be bigger and more life changing than they were. I hit twenty, then twenty one. At twenty three a delightful boy told me I was a spinster. I felt old. I wondered why I was not more sought after. I was (am) vain. I was fairly certain I was attractive, that I was as good an option as the next girl, yet, I remained the unlovable girl.

 

…The unlovable girl became an adult. She stepped out one day and got distracted along the way. She wandered on and off the path and flirted her way through life, because though unlovable, she was not undesirable and that was nearly good enough. But fairy tales, are also cautionary tales, and it turns out that Prince charming is not a prince, and charm is not a quality to throw your glass slipper at. Sure it gets you free champagne and dinner, and a stack of cheeky text messages. But it doesn’t tell you he has a partner or that she is pregnant. Mr slightly awkward and un-cool might flirt with you online, act bashful, and be as suggestive as can be without being repulsive, then finally after many weeks hangs out with you in person, drinks till late in the night, and because he knows he is escaping interstate the next day, puts his pudgy stocky hands under your shirt, all over you, and suddenly he seems repulsive after all. The unlovable girl leaves the country, she finds someone who loves her, because that is what happens when you open the cage door and fly out. Your little metaphorical wings let you embark on that great literary trope of journey and awakening. And the unlovable girl learned she was a loveable woman, (and there is much more to say about this, but goodness I’ve said way too much already), but this wasn’t the end, this was not to be her happily ever after, because lovable women still have things they long for, and they project their longings on to another, because they are young and misguided. Lovable women can still be lonely, can still desperately crave recognition and belonging, can still be cheated on, still be left, still be broken.

 

 She would work with men who thought they were rockstars, one who would place his hands on her thighs (over her dress, mind you) to ascertain if she was wearing  stockings or pantyhose – she would let him, she wouldn’t really mind, she may have even implied she would be wearing her suspenders and stockings –  but somewhere it stung that this was the only way she could remain in his good books. Another would take her out when her heart was dashed to pieces and feed her pinot grigo until she could hardly stand, and tears were streaming down her face, and he would tell her all sorts of pathetic things, and she would go home, alone, and wonder how life had come to this, and still another would surreptitiously take her hand at a party after his girlfriend had gone home, and they would look at each other and in a brief moment seem to admit to each other an impossible truth they had been dancing around for over a year, and then they would let go of each other’s hands and the moment would be gone. And the unlovable girl learnt that she kind of hated being a desirable girl. Maybe she was too beautiful. Perhaps if she could still catch the attention of the right boy, perhaps he would think she was intelligent, interesting, thoughtful, generous, patient, lovable.

 

Better still, perhaps she could be the lovable girl, and not need anyone to tell her she was.  And the still the journey goes on, because it is life and not a narrative, and the happily ever after is not an end point, ‘ever after’ is happening all the time, every day, sometimes happily and sometimes not so, but still…

 

Today, when I listen to Unsent, I feel like I have now met all of the characters. I know these people, some well, some only in passing. I know what it is to have had these conversations, these feelings, these moments, these friendships/relationships/flings/encounters that lead to these confessions, these unsent letters. The song now hits an emotional space that knows, but still longs, not for unknown experiences, not for the magical, mythical cure all relationship, not even for evidence of my own desirability, but for calm, for rest, for comfort, for honesty, for enjoying vulnerability and security maybe in the arms of another, maybe in friendship or belonging to a community, or maybe just for contentment, wherever it lies.

 

 

… still, but still, I’m still looking at you, arguing with you, and yelling at you, yes even you Freud, because still she longed for much, still she felt lonely, still she wanted to know how beautiful it was to fall asleep on your couch and cry in front of you for the first time…

 

 

 

 

 

…Dear terrance, I love you muchly. You’ve been nothing but open hearted and emotionally available and supportive and nurturing and consummately there for me. I kept drawing you in and pushing you away, I remember how beautiful it was to fall asleep on your couch and cry in front of you for the first time. You were the best platform from which to jump beyond myself – what was wrong with me?...

 

--Alanis Morrisette—

---Unsent---

 

 

 

 

                                        

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[1] Starting with “once upon a time” signifies that this can not be a true story. .right?

 

Does it matter that I’m a Woman?

Ramblings on Gender, Veils, Identity and Christianity

 

I sit in church, at 8:30 in the morning; I’m wearing a floral dress made on a 1950s pattern. I’m following a Book of Common Prayer order of service, singing hymns, reading the bible, Listening to a sermon on 1Corinthians 11:2-16, a passage I’ve never considered particularly controversial but today, the minister is talking about gender and I’m I’m squirming in my seat desperately wanting to hide. This is not a “ladies, be quiet and don’t preach” sermon, or a “submit to male authority” issue, but as I sit there, I’m hearing the words ‘masculinity’, ‘femininity’ repeatedly, and what seems to be an exhortation to men to embrace their masculinity and for women, their femininity,  and  I’m left thinking something is horribly wrong here, but why? What is it I take issue with? Is it because I am a woman? Or is it something else?

The irony of a (straight, white, Christian) woman wearing a dress cut on a 1950s pattern, one of the most endearing images of 20^th Century femininity questioning the appropriateness of these words, feeling a little squeamish on hearing them ring out from the pulpit does not escape me. The absurdity of being someone who grew up in one of the institutions most seen as promoting heteronormativity, suddenly feeling like the dialogue on gender being presented was somehow misplaced and inadequate is also not lost. So why did these things suddenly rock me? Was I being overly liberal and refusing to hear an unpleasant truth? Or is it possible that Paul doesn’t really care, primarily, about my gender?

Somehow, despite this text clearly addressing both men and women and at times separately,  I had never thought of it as a gendered text. It is a text addressing a mixed congregation (which, as pointed out in the sermon, was radical) about appropriate approaches to the acts of prayer and prophesying. And as it happens, the text gives one instruction to Men (don’t cover your head when you pray) and an opposite instruction to women (cover your head when your pray), and I just don’t really see these instructions as being about gender, per se. Paul doesn’t give this instruction because he expects women to be feminine or because covering your head is inherently feminine, or because quiet femininity is godly, or because women are less worthy of display than men are. Surely, he gives this instruction as a way of providing a practical, but also cultural and historical solution to a spiritual concern, a still relevant question on our attitude towards worship. The solution he gives is gendered, because his society was, but there is no reason to think it has to be. Paul expected a certain attitude from his congregation, and that attitude, for those in church, is arguably timeless. We could throw about words like humility, respect, awe, reverence. He expected both men and women to approach God with awe, to take prayer seriously, and for whatever cultural reason, he knew no other practice, the practical solution he gives, is gendered.

I’ve never had a problem with this, despite never having covered my head in church. I think I always assumed that Paul expects me to be polite, modest, and respectful, to not revel too much in my rights. You know, I have every right to stubbornly hold whatever opinion I like, to dress however I want, to flaunt my body however I chose, but yet I choose not to wear a bikini to church (or work, or university or anywhere other than the beach for that matter). I dress nice, not to show off that I own expensive clothes, not because I want to be stylish or cool, but because I want to show, through my clothes, that I respect the ritual of going to church. Just like how we put on our good clothes – whatever they might be - to go to a birthday party or a wedding or a job interview. I’m not going to suddenly wear my bikini or ripped jeans to work, and spout some silly line about God being my ultimate boss now that I’m a Christian, and therefore making following the dress code of my employer redundant.  

 Lets face it, if every woman in Corinth, or in my society, was getting about in a head covering, for whatever reason (dad says, the church says, society says) but now as a Christian I no longer felt such behaviour necessary, and threw my veil off because I did not want to be oppressed by the expectations of my community, would anyone respect me as a serious thinker, as an example of morality, of a right way to live?[1] Or would I be considered a brazen, immoral revolutionary? There is nothing wrong with challenging the status quo, with challenging gender stereotyping, but sometimes one must take baby steps not radical leaps.

Yet somehow, despite taking no issue with Paul here, despite having spent years myself spouting the Anglican line about equal in value, different in role, despite my minister claiming qualities like bravery and humility as both masculine and feminine, as I heard him claim that ‘Jesus redeems the beauty of gender’, something didn’t sit right.

This passage just isn’t about gender. And I’m going to go as far as saying, being Christian shouldn’t be about gender. Gender is about how I form my identity, it is related to my biological sex, my sexuality, my character, how I present myself, but for some people the intersection between these things is fluid, and sometimes that fluidity is a joyful, wonderful thing, and sometimes it is messy and confusing. Whether as adults negotiating our relationships and the gendered roles we fulfil in them, or a four year old boy wearing sparkly, sequined ‘girly’ shoes, gender is a complex playground, and whether they should or they shouldn’t, words like ‘femininity’ and ‘girly’ still suggest very fixed ideas.

Gender can be about how I conform to or subvert what society tells me being an acceptable woman person is, it can be about how I stand up to the world and say, ‘this is who I am and what I do’. As a Christian, am I not called to see my identity primarily and fundamentally not as a woman, not as a daughter, a marital status, a profession, but as a follower of Christ? Maybe Jesus redeems the beauty of biological difference, because “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male or female, for you are all one in Christ” (Galatians 3:28).

Perhaps, my problem was primarily linguistic rather than say, theological or ideological. I cringed when from the pulpit I heard someone effectively say, go be feminine, and be feminine for God, because being feminine, sets off alarm bells about being the ideal feminine, about being a home maker and cake baker, domestic, passionless, silent. And despite the controversy of 1 Corinthians 14:34, I don’t think Paul wants this. He wants me to pray. He wants me to participate in church. Not because I am a woman, but because I am a Christian. And how I do it, whether I wear a veil or not, and ultimately, whether I am a woman or not, has nothing to do with it.

I can see that maybe my working definition of ‘gender’ is not the same as the definition understood by the majority in my congregation. But it is a dangerous word to throw about when it means certain and specific things to some people. I can see that talking about ‘biological sex’ or ‘biological difference’ is clunky, but there is a reality that amongst many people that gender is a construct or choice, something to grapple with, to display, to embody. And for some people it isn’t clear cut. For some people it is painful. And as a church we need to welcome those people.  Even if you go on to say things like men and women are interdependent, are complimentary to each other, to use words like gender, as synonymous with ‘biological sex’, to use them from the pulpit, the place of instruction really sounds like we’re pushing normativity and gender performativity as godliness, because for so many of us, the words ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ signify traditional gender roles and stereotyping, when actually, rather than redeem (or bring back) the beauty of gender, which rather than sounding like embracing difference, sounds like embracing traditional gendered ideals, even if you mean otherwise, Christianity should free me from the need to conform to an expectation that my life will follow a certain constructed trajectory, because these feminine things like motherhood and nursing, these masculine things like being tough and providing an income are not Christian ideals but culturally constructed gendered ideals, and they do not create worth or value.

I used to hate feminist literature. I thought it was written by bitter, grumpy women. Maybe I have become a bitter, grumpy woman, or maybe I saw through the lie that women are better at parenting because they are women (gender), and that the reality was something like women are better at breast feeding because they have breasts (biological difference). For a long time I didn’t get the nuance. I thought gender was just an inherent thing that went hand in hand with biological sex, and despite first starting to reluctantly read feminist theory in 2009, it is only now that I’m really understanding statements that teach us to perceive “ ‘feminism’ as a political position, ‘femaleness’ as a matter of biology, and ‘femininity’ as a set of culturally defined characteristics.”[2]

I write this because I think my concern, as I sat in church, in my modest 1950s style dress, was one of words and what they imply. Its true, that I probably do hold some views that are a little too liberal for what most Anglicans adhere to, and that are simultaneously a little too conservative for what my society upholds. That is my problem to work out. But it doesn’t make it any less important, that as church, we get our language right, just in case we send a message we didn’t intend. There is nothing wrong with asking the men and women in your church to be humble; to revere God; to approach worship appropriately. But there really isn’t any need to throw the language of gender into the mix, because exhortation to behave in a manner consistent with one’s faith is relevant to the whole church.  Advocating these attitudes has nothing to do with being feminine or masculine, despite the fact that we are all gendered, one way or another. Being these things has much more to do with being a decent human, and well, with being Christian, and I don’t think my being a woman is, in this instance, remotely relevant. 

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[1] Interestingly, when I was in Dubai in January, I covered my arms and legs in public, and covered my head when I entered a mosque, despite knowing I had, as a white Australian woman every right to wear whatever I wanted. I didn’t do this because I think I am a worse woman if I did not, but because, a) I don’t want to stand out like an idiotic tourist, b)  I don’t want to offend, and c) Can I hope to be respected by and enter into dialogue with someone who expects a good woman to appear a certain way, if I refuse appear that way?

[2] Moi, T, ‘Feminist, Female, Feminine’, in  Belsey, C and Moore, J (Eds)(1989), The Feminist Reader, Basil Blackwell, New York

Be Good, Work Hard, Get Married

Once a upon a time I shuddered at feminist readings of texts. I thought they were written by angry, bitter women who needed to grow up. I thought Feminist Academics were stuck in a world so far removed from the every day, from my life, that they had nothing to say to me. I wanted to get married. I wanted to have the opportunity to be a mother, and how dare they, the Feminists, make me feel less than other women, less than what I could be, essentially, how dare they make me feel other, for not wanting what they wanted...

Today, however many years later, I sat down with the year 7 girl I tutor and we turned to her English exercises and began to talk about genre, about the difference between the plot and themes, and then how these things related to fairytales. For example, I said, why don’t we think about Cinderella. What is the story, what happens? She gave a fairly comprehensive run down of the girl who is made to do the cleaning, her ugly step sisters, the ball, the fairy godmother, the pumpkin, the glass slippers, the prince, the shoe fitting.

Ok great, I said. Now, what do you think the themes of this story might be? She thought on it for a minute, and then I kid you not, straight as anything, without a trace of irony, reluctance or bitterness, because she is 12, she said, be good, work hard, get married. Yes, I said, yes, that is absolutely a theme of this fairy tale. And now that we have established a theme, or perhaps even a moral, we can take the time to think about it and decide for ourselves if we agree with the theme, because sometimes we will agree and sometimes we won’t. I left it there. She has to make up her mind. Liberty to think is hugely important.

Now, don’t get me wrong. If twelve year old girls dream of marrying princes, good on them. They have every right to do so, we all did, didn’t we? And I don’t, for a minute, want to tell her not to work hard. In the twitter feed of my mind, I was hashtagging, protestantworkethic (this is another concept which made me very angry in first year uni, because as a protestant, I kept thinking, working hard has nothing to do with being protestant. Oh, how little I knew of my own heritage). What shocked me was that it took a girl saying these things to me for every revolutionary instinct inside of me to beat against my brain, asking for permission to rant  - I didn’t, that isn’t my job –  and for me to finally realise that not only were the feminist academics right, not only was meta narrative everywhere, and oh my it is so, so, so pervasive and persuasive, so subtly shaping us as so that we accept story as truth, but – and this was the scary part – somewhere, somehow, I had fallen a sleep a poor girl consumed with longing, obsessed with lack (oh God, Freud, how did that happen?), and woken up as a feminist having to tone down what I really think about fairytales, feeling like I was subversive. And I am really not all that subversive. I’m a good girl, the glass slipper fits me, doesn’t it?

I have to admit that during the course of my twenties I changed my mind. I stopped caring about getting married. I stopped craving motherhood. Because longing for things I didn’t have made me deeply unhappy, not only did I have nothing, I was nothing. But everyday I’m learning to choose that I can be something. So girls, let us take a moment to remember Cinderella. She started with nothing and ended with everything. Work hard, be good, and what do you know, you get everything. Or at least you get a prince, which is kind of the same thing. Or alternatively, wake up, and joyfully realise the slipper doesn’t fit. 

Gin Tears

Oops. Double shot. Summer in London. Christmas a year ago or a year to come. It doesn’t matter.

Exhibit A. After midnight. On the kitchen floor. No more, no more joy for her world. 

Exhibit B. The dying days of winter. But before the April sun has fully risen. A text message at three in the morning, to Exhibit C. Why, why, do I sabotage my own…

                  Sabotage (From the French) n & v. Deliberate damage to productive capacity, esp as a political act.

Like her facebook usage. She’s giving up her Australian passport if (when) the Liberals get in. 

In London, exhibit B reads The Guardian. Making her open minded, intelligent, concerned, yet unattractive to a certain class of boys.  Nice boys. Suits. Country homes. Lunch in the City. Tweed. Not for you Guardian reader. Go quietly home and cry them, cry your gin tears.

Cry them for yourself. Cry them for what will never be. But much more so, cry them for the underprivileged. The voiceless. The nameless children on the streets in Syria. The protesters in Thailand, Kiev, Egypt. Cry them as a political act.

                  ..especially as a political act…

                  French from saboteur ‘make a noise with sabots, bungle wilfully, destroy.’

Exhibit C. Exhibit C, Also a Guardian Reading Ranting Dissatisfied Leftie. In the North. Years ago, weeks old snow packed on the ground. Darkness descending by the time you’ve cleared away lunch, or soon enough after. In the early hours of the morning, or the late hours of the night, The Monster sat on the end of the bed. The Monster read the right paper. He made her seem conservative. She loved him once.  He would only disappoint, he insisted. She really ought to cut her losses and run, run back to the sunshine. Hurt, she ran, she ran home to the south to cry for the years that would never come back, but that outcome was inevitable, really.

Exhibit B is planning a holiday. To Cornwall, or Scotland or the South of France. It doesn’t matter.

France. 1789.

Originally the idea of Right and Left stemmed from the seating arrangement of the National Assembly after the French Revolution. The deputies on the left of the chamber wanted to carry the goals of the revolution  - liberty, equality and fraternity – through to their logical and radical conclusion. (Mc Knight: 2005: 3)

Exhibit B is away for the summer. She doses under a tree, mild sunlight slowly thawing her fingers and toes and cooking her milky white English skin. Another summer, in another time, in another place, there was someone who lay beside her and pulled little daisies from the ground, ripping, tearing, shredding, removing their tiny petals. What are you doing? She’d asked. But hadn’t heard his answer. In her mind, he’d confessed to his unoriginality, apologised for being a literary trope, a metaphor a device. Taking the petals off daisies, then casting them aside. For god’s sake. Then it was September and they had to go their own ways, she had to leave, had to do more important things. Study things. Write things. Be things. Though not be her writing, or perhaps always be her writing. She wasn’t sure if she was dead or not.

But, perhaps foolishly, she was sure she had to grow up and leave the boy and the broken daisies behind her, like everyone else before her. She was not, there was not anything new under the sun. 

 Gin. Why. Double shot. Again. Oops.

In London, still in possession of her Australian passport, exhibit C refills the Pimms and Lemonade with Bombay Sapphire. Why? Why? Next you’ll be on the stairs, in tears. It is how this always ends. It always does, and always will. Again, and Again.

Or it could end like this. Two. To Marylebone. As the late summer sun is rising, and the birds sing an ode to 5am. Minimal sleep on an unknown floor. Fully clothed. Stockings and Heels and all.

Like a perfect pin up, Exhibit A is still in the kitchen. Neat skirt, perfect hair, stockings, heels, apron and all. Dinner is organic, always organic. She lived with a boy a while ago. In a haze of contentment, because he was just so perfect, you know. They could discuss the logical and radical until today turned into tomorrow. He had no intention of marrying her, but it didn’t matter.

But life moves on, and tomorrow fades into yesterday, and the haze of contentment lifts, until one day you find yourself cooking a dairy free, grain free, locally produced organic meal for one, and wondering what the appeal was. What your appeal was. Your baking, your stockings and heels? Because what man reclines on his pillow, afterwards, and looks into your eyes and says God, you’re intelligent.

Fucking Feminism. Quite literally.

Exhibit A sings carols again. Joy, joy, not necessarily happiness, to the world. Though, she’s fairly certain she’ll find herself on the kitchen floor at midnight crying the gin tears again one day.

And, so again and again, at 3 am we ask, Why, Why, do I sabotage my own happiness?