wanna grow up to be a debaser

NOTE TO SELF, written 1.25 am in the Frank Tate building:

Soraya. Do your work. Doyourworkdoyourworkdoyourwork. Start researching your essay on French cinema due in 15 hours instead of eating sour gummy snakes and YouTubing Pixies videos all night (because if you listen to Debaser one more time you will have listened to it more than any other song you have ever heard in your entire life).

Can?

the persistence of memory.

5.54 a.m., a few weeks ago. I got home, turned out the lights in my room and took this picture--the view from my window at so early in the day. I tried to sleep after: hanging poised over the hazy, beckoning swill of sleep. I should have fallen into that swill immediately--somehow I imagine it's a milky navy blue, like the colour of the sky when I took the photo--but it took longer than I hoped. Turning things over in your head/Is not the best thing to do before you go to bed. I thought about things I'd said and done and wished such things didn't matter the way they did.

I wanted to be far away. I wanted to be like the city lights in my picture of Melbourne In The Morning. Alight and ablaze: but unfeeling things, unburdened, keeping impassive vigil through the night via filaments and wires and glass.

whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.

Some days you can never have again. It's these days you wish you could bottle, so you could observe them suspended pale and frozen in some sort of formaledehyde-esque substance. Today it was cool, not cold, so I wore two layers out--no coat necessary! I love weather like this: crisper than the crackling on the slab of pork belly Dheepan roasted one week, with powder blue skies and a wind more flirtatious than vicious. This morning I strolled through a flea market and bought nineteen little Dutch pancakes from a vendor, bathed in maple syrup gleaming gold like the sun on the Yarra River. Lunch at the spiffy KFC at Crown, with eight of us sitting round a pseudo-posh wooden table licking our fingers clean and talking about types of punishment meted out at school. Walked home from Safeway in the blissful weather. Saw a guy in a Bathory T-shirt and wanted to say, "Is not Blood Fire Death one of the most iconic black metal albums EVER?"

It's so interesting to me that it wasn't a day particularly out of the ordinary, because it wasn't. I did fairly mundane things all day--I mean, KFC for lunch in one of the world's food capitals? Really?--but I'd still bottle today, I'd still want to relive it. I'd want to possess a repetitive memory of the wind and the sky, the laughter and the pancakes--fluffier than clouds, and compulsively edible. I remember how upset I was when I heard I would have to start at Melbourne first. I think--now knowing how this place works its subtle magic on you--how much more upset I would be to have to leave.

soraya

a place in displacement

I could tell you what I know so far about Melbourne, but it would seem a shoddy, patchy skimming of the surface of this restlessly dynamic city. What I do know is that here, charm and edginess rival one another for dominance, albeit quite peaceably; and here, amidst the Victorian buildings, my half-decently cooked dinners, and the city's little corners that await exploration, I feel oddly transplanted. I feel at home, but not at home, simultaneously.

I have, slowly but seamlessly, managed to insinuate myself into the experience of living and studying in Melbourne. In an ordinary day my Literature & Performance tutorial group might discuss Coleridge and Wordsworth; I might have char kuay teow or $2.50 pizza, then walk to the city to get a notebook and gelato at Lix. I know where to get the cheapest Revlon mascara you could possibly find. I know where to find pancakes, souvlaki, passable Malaysian food, and lychee smoothies. I've been taught Making Up Excuses Explaining Why I Don't Have a Tram Ticket 101. But how much of Melbourne will I ever really know? How much longer before I can say, "Yes, I know Melbourne well enough to say I love it."?

I like Melbourne. I can see why so many of my countrymen have made this place their home, and I wouldn't be opposed to the idea of living here. I like the people I've surrounded myself with, I like card games in the kitchen, heading over to Union House after class, the weekly band performances at North Court. I have found second homes on the warm, welcoming upper floor of Cotton On, where the spinners bulge with flats and pumps in mouth-watering colours; and Collectors Corner (where I bought The Stooges' Fun House, FINALLY) with its racks of secondhand treasures dusty not with age but a kind of smug experience. Even the blustery, bone-chilling winds I can handle. But until I know for sure whether I will be spending the next three years here, or in New York, I fear I may not be letting myself love this city too much.

I have seen and experienced only a minute fraction of Melbourne. There are so many other piercing shops, secondhand bookstores, restaurants and grungy nightclubs I have yet to venture into. But the black and white print of Times Square I've placed on my notice board beckons, and even in the monochrome the city feels dazzling, technicolour, a million shades of exciting. And every time I look at it a tiny voice tells me, "You might be there in a few weeks."

When you are torn, how do you sew back your two halves so neatly the stitches become inconspicuous? Or can you only hope to do your best to learn to forget they are there?

soraya

first

"...and laughter took the place of everything we knew we were not."

some things you can't run from, even when you're miles away from home.

i'm with you and the stars are crashing through.

we're standing under the air-conditioner but
i'm not cold because
warmth is coming off you.

The body must know what the heart says.

Can anyone see this? I wonder. We are standing here and there are people staring. Are they privy to the subtle, arcane intricacies of this body-heart correspondence? And if they are, what are they thinking?

soraya

on a wave of mutilation.

It's extraordinarily apt, this song I'm listening to, for a night like this. When I feel like I'm Fading Out; unseen, unimportant. I hope whoever you are you're in a considerably happier mood than I'm in, I really do.

Cease to resist, giving my goodbye/
Drive my car into the ocean/
You'll think I'm dead, but I sail away/
On a wave of mutilation/
A wave/
Wave

soraya