Jane's Blog

[notjanaeswriting]

Falling and falling

Sonnet's EP like a hot knife. I am slashed straight through the middle. Where did I put my love? Where did it go? Land over tectonic plates. One song and a millions of years of solid rock cracks over where cracks were once before. I listen straight faced fighting an urge to scream. My throat burns with icy guilt. I have loved and love since has never been the same. I have a partner. Everyday I convince myself I will one day trust him and love him the way I loved before. It's been more than a year of this. What have I done? There is someone else, who watches over me. He is the universe. It's a stupid thing, a fake thing. Years change people. I didn't know him when I had him, otherwise I would've known that he didn't love me. He's standing right there on the footpath. Dark blue night, air like shattered glass. A silhouette, unmistakable. Every way I think I've grown in the last two years evaporates in the light of his eyes. I never moved across the country, I never grew. I am young and bare and we are together. No words, no explanation. We wake from a dream. A faraway place where time has no effect. Luke cannot love me because Luke doesn't know Tom and Tom is me. I gaze from atop of the escarpment, the boy bikes around Wollongong and laughs with his eyes. He thinks his dog is his brother. I am the quiet in his home, the silence of his sister being born. The anger at his brother for not explaining why. That makes up me too. I never was real, never was anything before him. So how am I anything after? Where do I put my love? I write this and I weep so I know I must break up with Luke. Even though I never wanted to hurt anyone the way Tom hurt me. But I am still here waiting for him. Francesca asked me if a heartache gets better I keep telling her yes but I know my answer is no. I hate myself for this truth. Its my deepest secret.

[notjanaeswriting]

it's 2:17am

I am thinking about my ex. I am thinking about my boyfriend. I am concerned with how often still more than two years on I confere with the imagined version of my ex. I say imagined because I know I wouldn't know him anymore. It's frustrating to hold a truth that you know is the truth, a logic that makes you grown up and in touch with reality and to be completely defying it everyday. When I was sick in Queensland while I was seeing Luke I pictured Tom in the doorway, watching over me. I made you god because it was all I knew how to do. Just looking. He didn't hold me didn't touch me. I just have this sense that he knew me and knows me in ways no one has ever seen. I pictured how I would break up with Luke tonight. I won't do it any time soon, and maybe its a fleeting feeling. But I can feel the process, the grief. The little way I'm being let down again and again. Explectations faling flat, betrayals that I let slip. Currently he is in a lonely place, my Luke. He is in Port Lincoln waiting for me. He thinks if I'm there it might add value to a part life. Part time work, part time friends over the phone. He is lonely in Lincoln and losing touch with his Melbourne friends. In my eyes, little effort is being made to fix it. I cultivate, I create. My life is mine and its a series of active choices. All high and mighty I feel so often. It's a flaw. Luke reached out to friends I am making my own. One of those betrayals. I don't frame it as such. I don't even know if I should bring it up. Selfish really. The man who has waited, and waited and waited. Made big sacrifces. But I want someone who expands my world. Who rips at the corners with their gritted teeth. Who teaches me about the world. That's all I am here for to learn, learn, learn. To see more and more and keep expanding and growing. He wants to be inside, to attach to things I've made for myself. It's hard to swallow because he keeps letting me down here. Melbourne in two weeks and I think he won't see his friends, only mine. He reached out to the girls in Port Lincoln who I am trying to bring into my world, trying to enter theirs. We will already work and live together in the life we're working towards in Port Lincoln. So I thought about my ex. Because I always do. Tonight I pictured meeting for dinner, I wondered whether I'd get a martini or a red wine. If he would say I've changed. I didn't wonder about what he might drink, or if he'd changed. And this is probably very telling. That I'm not interested in him, the current Tom, but Him an imagined one who loved me and then didn't. And I want to win his love back, to fix what I've lost. Probably only for the sake of validation than happiness. Just want to see myself from his eyes. I thought I would repeat what I said when we broke up - that I felt like we were on the same wave lenght. The world a big show, and us the ones in the commentary box. Everything a joke only we understood. I thought about how vulnerable I felt under his eyes. That he knew me, he knew a me no one knew. That Luke certainly doesn't know. Then I thought about how unequal that dynamic must've been between Tom and I. I never knew what he was thinking, going through. I didn't feel like I had a screen into his heart at all. WIth Luke I do really. Sonnet said her mum told her in every relationship someone loves someone more. You just need to figure out if you want to be the loved one or the lover.

[notjanaeswriting]

I keep thinking about everyone I have had sex with. Consensual sex with, the other I will leave in its box. The lovers I've had, the handful, six I think, I'm grateful for mostly. There was the boy when I was 19 and insane. There was the long term one. Then there was the ones after, my friend who I never should've but we did anyway, sort of an unanswered question. I am grateful for him, big arms and a kind heart. I remember his hands around my neck in a way no one has been able to pull off since. So kind and caring. I thought about him and my sexual lineage because I was going through my journal, something I had to actively stop doing because I kept falling backwards and getting nowhere. I read that the boy back home had texted me that he loved me late in the evening of Valentine's Day 2024. I had forgotten. We had a tumultuous relationship after the long term one ended. I came back home and we slept together but he reeked of cruisers, he was so so drunk that night. I also got my period part way through. It was klutzy and unromantic and unsatisfying. And I thought that was it. But going through my journal I realised I had sex with him again the morning of Christmas Eve 2024. So it was recently I saw him. I can't remember if that was any better, but I think it was. Maybe that's when he held my neck. I remember early morning with birds and white light. I remember his voice and stubble. I also remember being worried about his thinning hair, and how much he drank. I love him in a way and I've always found him attractive when I look at him I feel like I see something others wouldn't. It's a shame because I know we can't ever be friends again the way we have been but I also couldn't be in a proper relationship with him. But I revisited the journal, revisited our messages. I pictured him holding me, I know he loves me. I know he loves part of me no one knows. I feel very vulnerable. He knows my worst parts and he is still my champion. He is very special. So I am grateful for him. I am also grateful for my beautiful girl that visited me in her van. I wish to hold her by the face and tell her she is a vision, a dream. I hope I changed her life and lifted her up the way she did for me. I hope she knows she's beautiful and I wish I could be braver than I was then. There's a one night stand in the mix there too, my only ever. He wanted to do it while we watched Big Bang Theory. But he was kind and older and made me feel grown up. My lover now is the best I've ever had, a boy that knows me better than I know myself. I look at him like he's art sometimes. So beautiful. But he is so far away. Always apart, always missing. I am not sure why it has to be this way, why it's always been this way. I keep telling myself I am learning and that there's greater forces working. But part of me is worried it will always be like this, and that I am to blame. Never happy, always wanting to be somewhere else. I never know what will make me happy and I've been the recipient of such beautiful care and I always take it for granted. I think sometimes I need to be alone. That I love too many, my heart is everywhere and there's too many me's to know. I have this feeling the only one that will ever know me is the voice I write with and my imagination of the long term one. I'm still remembering he's not real.

[notjanaeswriting]

The sky was white through the car windscreen. Wheat fields rolled into themselves like the creases of a baby's elbow. Birds overhead came in droves. If the wheatfield was a newborn's golden skin, the crows were its tufts of hair, scattered and soft. It was 5pm ACST, but sunlight lasts too long in the south, the director's cut of a day. That's why I was on the road. Port Pirie hails a 'Bridge to Nowhere', I was on the drive to nowhere, the drive to no one. The bridge to nowhere leads to mangroves and sand in an underdeveloped industrial estate. My drive to nowhere lead me to Port Broughton, some 40 minutes south of Port Pirie. I parked in a 45 degree angle outside the pub. Lights twinkled from umbrellas out the front on the pub's lawn. Cover band soundcheck. Mates catching up. Deep laughter and a child squealing. The umbrella's read 'Coopers Brewery' like it was the local rugby team. I strolled up and down the water, pebbly with algae foam bubbles. The sea was silver, reflecting a sun set to sink into the water like an Olympic diver in a frame-by-frame replay. I said out loud, "this is going to be a cracking sunset". So I flattened out my towel, laid on my belly and stuck my thumb in the navel of my orange. I peeled it from the inside out just like Luke would. I finished Trent Dalton's 'Love Stories' right there on the grass. One chapter was about a man who spent his life searching for rare stones in the outback. He kept close the only video he could find of his deceased wife, a video she filmed talking about taxes. He describes that clip, her simply speaking down the barrel, as the rarest find of his life. Love is not a thunderbolt, not a flash. It's a thing and it's yours to give. But that's the catch to be loved, you need to love. I know this. This book was just a 300-page reminder. I closed the book and looked ahead, blinding myself with the white sky, the white ocean the white sun. Love is the most important thing, and when all is stripped back, ego, place, things, it is the one constant that remains. Love Stories made me miss Luke, made me miss loving Luke and being loved by Luke. It's never the same for my heart through the phone. I can neither give the love I want to give, nor trust the love I am recipient of. I miss Luke and I cried thinking about all our planning, luck, time and belief, and still, we might not be together. In the same timezone, maybe, but still without skin touching, without his breath joining mine. The dream of dinners, and sleeps and love through silence, still a dream after all. I drove home to Cameron Winter. God is real, God is actually real. I was stirred. Key into the door and Snowy the dog was waiting. He had moved his bed like I did and it made me weep. I knelt down and told him we were both similar and probably both a bit lonely. I want a life for Luke and I wish I could make it work for us in Port Pirie. Then like Graeme's arthritis my 2026 resolution shots pain through my nerve endings. 'Find happiness where you are'. And I wonder if I could make it work spending Sundays listening to Rocket Man covers at the pub in Port Broughton, if loving each other right here is enough for Luke, or if I would watch him wither, and with him I wither too.

[notjanaeswriting]

To Luke: Born in France, made in Melbourne, living in my heart. Being close is the feeling a waveless ocean. Sunlight through blue. Olive skin, warm, I struggle to ever picture him in the grey streets of a big city. Yet I fly across borders to see him there. He scruffs the heads of his siblings in a house that has grown to fit all six of them. I could stand back and just watch him be but he sees me and brings me in. He rubs my knee on the small couch. Then we go away. I grab him by the face and I spill into him. So much to learn and it's never enough. Murky, clear eyes, a smile with a chipped tooth and I think everyone must love this boy. Body caressing body in a room I know he has slept in alone. I wish to take back every sleepless night. He said he has changed in the last year, and so have I. Open, with more heart. I try to tell him but I think he has always sensed a warmth. I find myself more caring then I thought I could give. It has been about me for so long. I give it away to make sure he is alright, to make sure he is loved. This urge, this need to drag him into my life to show him it all to have him live there. So far this has been written for me, but Luke, my love. I have changed, and I am changing. I want you in my fray but more than that I want to be everywhere in yours. To circle your life like a low flying bird. You are following me to Port Pirie, but that's only for now. Because Luke I want to be with you every way. I am proud of you when you speak with charisma to strangers. I am proud of you when you speak low and honest to me. I love a you I have never met, I loved you right there in Mackay's humid heat, and I love you now. Our hearts connected, through borders and recoiling to where we are right now as I give this letter to you. You have changed me and taught me things. I know this because I remember how it felt last time I let someone in close. I thought I had a love and I would never again. But being with you I feel I can be unabashedly me, and I keep checking, thinking it will send you away to give you more of myself and yet you remain, you hold me closer. I can be funny and smart without compromising one for the other. I can be sexy and take charge and still be the recipient of your care. I can be sad you pick me up. You believe in me. Luke, I have never had that before. I can explore so many sides of myself and still land back with my head in your lap, your hand on my face. I want you to feel my love for it to give you courage and purpose. For you to know that you are always safe here, that I will see us through whatever times are ahead. We have done it so far, and while it's been sad, it's never been laborious. I love you, I love us, I have loved our time this year. For all the weird turns and events I wouldn't change it. I know it will all make sense in the end. I love you. Merry Christmas. Happy year anniversary of us. Happy New Year. I love you very much. Thank you for trusting me. All yours, Jenae.

[notjanaeswriting]

Just working out paper: Luke waved to me from the line for security at the airport. It marked three and a half weeks since I got off my plane at Melbourne airport and fell into his arms. That was five weeks since I had last seen him. I have never spent so much time apart, or so much time with him. I am trying to mentally prepare for a new job, a new life in Port Pirie in South Australia. After being restless for six months, failing at 'saving my family' whatever the fuck I thought that would mean. I am now packing my bags for a job in a town that poisons your blood with lead. Is this confusing? Are you confused reading? I know I am. My head is fucking spinning. The last six months I have slept in six beds regularly. Melody's room on the farm, then I moved to the cabins, then I got the share house in Newcastle, when I sleep in Sydney it's in April's bed, when I have work on the Central Coast I sleep in Ella's spare room. Bags packed and unpacked clothes stuffed in last minute. I never have a pantry, never cook bulk meals. I have no regular track to run or bed to make up. It's gifts and thank yous and taking taking taking. Thinking about when I am going to see Luke next. I'm a little hamster on a little wheel going week to week unsure of where I will be and who will be there. Before I left for Melbourne I felt a real shake to my shoulders. Make time mean something. That's what Mackay forced me to do. Six weeks holidays - spend them wisely. In Mackay I had to use my time to build my life. Host parties, find a running track, seek out something new. Then the coin flipped and I was back home, casual with all the time and leave in the world. Really, a dream. I wasted it. These past six months I have been so embarrassed of my reality, of how little I have achieved. That's professionally and personally. I feel uglier, fatter, sun spots on my skin that I have never seen before. My relationship with my mum and brother not healed. Billy spent his school holidays on the farm in aircon waiting for something to happen. Zara and Sharna beautiful people in a beautiful sharehouse I am constantly leaving. Two people who I haven't thanked enough for giving me a landing pad. So I am now in Gosford on the Central Coast. Thinking about Port Pirie. I bawled my eyes out in the car realising that Luke was sacrificing so much to be with me. And that I want to show him the same. That its been chaos since I've left Mackay and theres a ball of anxiety or something horrible that sits on my chest and evaporates when he is near.

[notjanaeswriting]

I am like driftwood. I don't know if his songs are for himself or me. Mine are for him. Beautiful boy with the beautiful hands. I am missing the north Queensland sunshine. I fear I am a scratched record tripping over itself, the same beat banging on with a warped melody. My heart feels what I felt moving to Sydney at 19, the way I felt in school and stucco and tomorrow and yesterday. Lonely, lonely while I am wasting precious time. Always this push to be doing something, doing more, swelling big and bold. It's that need for brilliance and bravado to have an interesting story to tell. Pictures to post on Instagram. Now I feel dizzy, unable to decipher the path ahead. So many branches, so many brambles. Secrets from a girl who's seen it all. You never know when it's there only when its gone. Light on your skin and love in your heart. Breathe in breathe out the beach is all yours. You warm your hands and your tongue with sea salt and tea leaves. The boy holds your leg playing french songs. He takes you to a forest and cooks you a meal with basil. A weekend no longer a fear, but a gift to be shared. The five days you are in uniform is five days of storytelling. You laugh. You create. You care. And then you leave. You leave on a whim. Honouring a past Jenae. You see her from a distance. "Wait" you shout, half of her body shadowed from the door frame. "are you happy?" But it's too late. The wisps of her sunbleached hair whip into the blackness. I'll take care of those I care about. I'll go back to my better life. How will you care? What better life? The life in the city that was mapped by the boy that broke your heart? Where the smog climbs in your lungs and the world is rendered through the window? Busy Busy Busy. We can get a coffee on the mainstreet or buy things. Or you can live on the farm where your room, your life is no longer yours. The place that hasn't been home in six years. Where three years ago I slowed my heart down to a tempo that took me to hospital. You fear dinner, you fear breakfast. Angry that I can't function when all I want to do is care. So I will take up a share house in a city half familiar. A city where I can make out the outline but I don't know the picture. That's exciting. But it will be hard knowing how good it all was. Knowing I will always be on the run. Eyes on the door. Where is my beautiufl boy. And Who am I. Where am I most me. Was it reading in the sunshine. I like how I look in the reflection of his eyes. He is not here. He will never be beside me. Hanging on for visions of my past and I never realise my present, never can look forward to my future.

[notjanaeswriting]

I read the first half of 'The Museum of Modern Love' with deep-seated skepticism. My friend Dan recommended the book in the Hobart Bookshop. I was looking to learn more about his hometown. The author Heather Rose also grew up off the mainland. So you can understand that I was very cross to read and find myself in MoMA in New York instead of wildness in Trowunna or so-called Van Diemen's Land or so-called Tasmania.

I scoffed, thinking it was cheap to write a story around a piece of seminal art. I use "around" in the literal sense. Rose's characters physically orbit Marina Abramović's performance piece 'The Artist is Present' (2010). I wouldn't have known the artwork's name but I had seen the clips. "You Were Not Just Another Visitor, You Were My Life". I daydream about seeing Tom in a crowded city and saying the words.

Marina performed 'The Artist is Present' late in her career. She sits at a wooden table with an empty chair. Spectators are encouraged to sit across from her and meet her eyes in silence. Rose's characters interpret the piece in real time, situating the book in New York in 2010. This bothered me as the time and place of 'The Artist is Present' is not at all relevant to its allure. I recognise some art is moving in light of its context. The Great Gatsby a window into shiny pre-depression America read at a time of economic and cultural turmoil. Waiting for Godot questioning where the Mighty Saviour was after another World War. To stare into another's eyes however, could be moving in the first decade of the new millennia or at genesis. The use of the performance to situate characters in a book seemed insulting to its immortality. I thought credit to the book was just credit to Abramović.

And then, I realised I had mapped terrains still unknown. I had finished pages before reaching them. Yes, the book was in New York in 2010 (and not Tasmania...) but like Abramović this was just circumstance. The stillness of 'The Artist is Present' was not stagnation but catalyst. Like the first stone that attracted all those after to create the universe the woman across from the empty chair offered a basis for all characters. Whether they sat or not, all wanted to be seen. And to be seen, said Rose, is to be Loved.

"The Museum of Modern Love" is about human desire for full transparency. That is Love in the simplest, most concentrated form. There is no room for a Love re-imagined for one's career or music or friends. Love is the bounding of your hair with your partner in the public realm. It's existence as a single entity. The kind of intimacy only afforded with proximity and time, with surrender and sacrifice.

I have been skeptical of romantic love for some time now. I couldn't find reason to give up what I had created to make room for someone else. I had a half-life once, then I made it a life for one. I had to find meaning in the absence so I called it freedom and dedicated my heart to other things all more important, all more reasonable.

The truth is, I left someone behind in Queensland. In the clouds in the Winter sky I think about how he smiles with his eyes. I think about his hands and his hard work. I think about how much I felt I was playing pretend, how calculated I was to only give away just enough to string it along. And then feeling isolated when I was misunderstood.

Maybe he would see me if I met his eyes. If I added another seat to the wooden table.

But I ran away and I know I will lose him. Neither of us were willing to look up for long enough. 'The Artist is Present' asked participants to be vulnerable and asked Marina to break herself in the process. Love is to be seen, Love is to sacrifice, Love is to surrender. I did not have enough weight to sustain him holding the arrow, nor I the bow. But I know I miss him. Not just another pair of arms. I think I would see him in Marina's brown eyes. Realise the closedness of my open heart. I desire to love now. A month ago I did not. I want to fly to another state and do other stupid things.

Instead I will wash my face and wipe the dishes and take up the room in a bed for two. 

[notjanaeswriting]

January 13th

The colours in Mackay are electric. A visceral green that leaks from the leafy palms and tall sugarcane and buzzcut lawns. A sky blue as blue until the sunset when humidity clouds rise up from hot concrete and descend into the sky. I run around the university oval three times in the cool breeze that only exists during dusk. Last night there were thunderstorms. I was visiting my friend on her birthday, her dad died two days ago (and yet I write about my grief!) Lightening cracked across the sky like shards of glass. Big zig zags that zig zagged into tinier zig zags. Like the universe was breaking, like something behind the sky was entrapped and raging to leave. Endless numbers of bats flocks across the grey skies, like waves rolling on the shore.

I came home at 1pm to an empty house. I pissed with the door open and took a phone call on speaker phone. Then when the call ended I was left by myself, and with my own thoughts. So I screamed into my pillow. A big hoarse dry scream. I think Gabby, my housemate downstairs heard. She knows I am sad. Everyone does. And it’s no longer worth enquiring about. I was broken up with a year ago, and the sugarcane town of north Queensland I moved to didn’t change that. And there’s other things going on I guess. I have a job I care about. But I know that love is everything, I know love is the only thing. And when I am in Mackay I am not loved.

I am romanticising the big open sky and the teenage tantrum weather and I think about my ex. I stop at traffic lights and I think about my ex. I buy organic soy milk, and pluck a splinter out of my toe, and cough and smoke and drink and fuck and lie and I try to grow up or change but I still think about my ex.

His name was T and I miss the version I had of him. He has changed and I guess I have too. And nothing in particular broke us up I don’t think, just time and circumstance and age and a longing to know what’s out there. I wonder if he likes what’s out there. I don’t. But I lie and I pretend and I can fake laugh and I can smile and I can ask people how their day was and I can report the news, and sometimes I do it well and I am proud of myself, and when I don’t I think 'that’s okay I am too creative for this bullshit anyway'. And I think of my mum back home and how I don’t show her enough love, or how I only call my sister when I don’t feel up to showing the ugly side of myself to anyone else. And I forget things all the time, things about my friends. And I am always googling the calories of meals. And it’s all the same and I have the same bad habits I had at 21 except I have a serious job where I have to take my nose ring out. And I convince myself that I am growing and changing but the more I change the more I come back to who I used to be. Before I learnt the lessons I learnt from T.

And I am lucky in ways, and I should find a new subject to write about. A year on and it's pathetic. And I can feel myself not trying now. I had something to prove because I thought T and I would get back together and I wanted to keep my friends but I come back from Sydney and realised I am good for a catch up but not for too long. 2 hours with me and I will exhaust you. I am a wind up friend. Wind me up and I can go around in circle clap-clap-clap. Perhaps I am good for a call while you’re multi-tasking on the other end of the phone line, once a week, when you remember I exist.

So I am wondering if I move to Tasmania will I be happy but I know the answer and that’s that I have never been happy not even when I was with Tom. I have the journal entries to prove it. I felt suffocated, now I feel alone. And I feel ambitious and then I feel overwhelmed. And I never know. I never never know. So I will apply for jobs because then I can tell people I am applying for jobs. And I will go to work tomorrow and the next day and I will scream into my pillow and masturbate to go to sleep. And I will wait and wait and wait and wait. And learn and unlearn and take and I buy organic soy milk, and pluck a splinter out of my toe, and cough and smoke and drink and fuck and lie and I try to grow up or change. And then what.

[notjanaeswriting]

I remove my fly screen to smoke out the window.

I remove my fly screen to smoke out the window. An airplane twinkles in the navy sky. I look down to a big open road of bitumen, like a soviet dictator above the masses. A grey cocktail seeping from my fingertips. Lester young on Spotify. I write so I can talk to a friend. I know a whole cigarette will make my head spin. I am worried how much my hands shake. Everything is a front. So much play pretend in Mackay. If anyone questions the smell, I will say I am burning incense. A dark cat slinks across the driveway. Trees like the one from the story book where the man with the moustache sits under the plum tree. I was left high and dry from girls I am trying to make my friends. I was desperate enough to accept a call from someone who was my friend years ago. I didn’t like speaking to her. I have a housemate outside my door doing dishes. I know he is alone too, and I keep trying to connect with him and show him I care but he doesn’t respond. I don’t like to talk to him because it is too closely a reflection of myself. I have liked meeting new people in Mackay because there is an excitement in being someone new. Someone bold. I come to the conversation with a novelty. With him, we are both alone. We both know it. What else is there to talk about really. Sunsets are wide here. With all the quiet I can do things I never have time for, like yoga before work. But the distraction is life. So much time on my hands like excess butter on a knife. But it is too much, and I could make myself so small. No real reason to have meals, no one to look after me. No one to watch the cracks in my eyes. My housemate has closed his door now too. I don’t write for an audience; I write for a friend. Same observations. In a loop. I looked into ways to leave, and I wish I hadn’t. I came to Mackay to escape but what if it’s a prison. I can’t go home for Christmas. I feel suffocated now when before I felt bold and big. I ran alongside the sugarcane and watched flocks of birds coast above the powerlines. I’ve given myself a nicotine headache, but I don’t want to stop typing because I am scared of the quiet. The quiet of the keys, the quiet of the night, the quiet between trumpet and piano on the track “almost like being in love” by Lester young and Oscar Peterson trio. This is the box I spoke about not opening. Now spilling out, pools like dark wine.

[notjanaeswriting]

In the quiet

It always comes back to him. He is me. I am him. He is my memories my old self. Times I don't remember. Seeing him for the first time after covid. I thought I had never loved him so much. But at the same time I read pages and pages. Word like "suffocated" words like "claustophobic". What is the truth? Did he expand my world or constrict it? Is there an answer, probably not. Like the clouds in the sky they change and fold and depend on the angle you look from. But I guess my next question is, will I always be looking back. Will I always be comparing notes. Times memories. Even if I know there to be no truth. No one recount of the times now lost to fully trust. I am not sure. But it feels like as soon as I am with myself, without obligations. I try to communicate with my past self. To hear her message. Were you happier then Jenae? I tell myself yes but I look on the pages and hear the cries of a girl who felt unnoticed by so much of the world. I want to hold her but at the same time I am jealous of her, she doesn't know much much love she has. She doesn't know what true isolation is. Is this nasty? I read the hurt but I don't believe her. You should have relished in what you had. I can't take that back now. I just have to know I had love once and I lost it. It seems a cruel joke to give something so serious to hands of a 21 year old who can't even conjure the mental strength to eat dinner let alone to nurture a relationship. What does the world mean, what does it want. I still don't know the lesson I was meant to learn. I still miss him. In the quiet it always comes back to him. How do you know the point to life is love and then you lose it?

[notjanaeswriting]

In the quiet it always come back to him, us, me. Interconnected. I know myself in how I know him. Lately I have been dealing with the decisions I make when I am not accountable to anyone. I can be hard on myself when they are not the right ones. Like trying to sleep with my housemate. Or talking in a pitch of voice I am not used to. It has me thinking two conflicting thoughts. One, I like the kind of person I was around him. I never felt good enough so I was always trying to be the best version of myself. Not to drink or smoke or sound stupid and how over time I came to cultivate myself into a better person, one who talks more articulate, is calmer, softer spoken. The other thought is one that questions how much I put to the wayside to always be on my best behaviour. If the music I listened to way truly my own if the books I read the way I spoke. And at one stage I thought my life had room for two and I could feel the emptiness in my bed, in my heart, in the meals I cooked. But what if this life is all mine. And what if I stretch my armm right across and spread my legs and fill all four corners. its the best I can do because I know in my heart I muss him dearly. But I also know the boy that was mine is dead. And all I can hope is that I find someone as broken as me. And we can help each other find love again. Because as much as I prod along, doing career things, giving love and light to friendships and family. I still believe in love and I still believe that it can colour and give meaning and purpose to 24 hours of a seven day week. I need to believe that or I will throw myself in front of the cane train, or in to Mackay Harbour or off the pioneer river bridge.

[notjanaeswriting]

Im just learning how to cry again

I put my feelings on hold so I could do this new job. I like this metaphor 'on hold' because my feelings can only remain suspended for so long. I picture my mind like an attic. In it are boxes. The box with my love for Tom and the devastation of its end keeps being stuffed and stuffed. So often I hear a song, think of his hands, or remember how loved I felt with him and I think - I can't do this right now. And another piece of myself gets gets tossed over into the box. Everyday I am losing myself, and I realise how much of me was him. It is so painful to think about going back. Because he is still with me. In that stupid fake account. In the way I can't call him my ex. In the way he got me here. I think about the first week of losing Tom. How lifeless and hopeless I felt. What kept me hanging on was the thought that things could change. What motivated me to pick up this job was in part his reaction. Now I am here. I am alone in a too quiet sharehouse in a suburb that has had a stabbing, a murder and a meth lab explosion. I sit here, facing the window, in a winter that gives you a suntan and heat stroke and wonder why I thought I coudl trick myself to rejig my priorities. To think I can live with my love in a box in the attic in my brain. And time and time again I come back to the question that I try to stop asking myself. How you go from knowing the point to life is love and then you lose it?

[notjanaeswriting]

First Day

I don't know why I am writing here and not my journal. I begun the first day of my job. I loved it. I felt confident and calm. But I dont love it enough to think losing tom was worth it.

[notjanaeswriting]

Whitehaven Drive, turn onto Trinity Parade. I run like an arrow but it turns back into Whitehaven Drive. Round and round in a maze of bitumen and overgrown grass. Cars with duck taped doors and kids unsupervised on makeshift milkcrate bikes loitering on the roundabout. Roundabout turns onto a roundabout turns onto a roundabout. My head feels dizzy swirling and swirling around at every corner. I had little expectations. I feel like my heart is too heavy for excitement or nerves. I don't feel let down, just suffocated. I have lived a life of privilege, I still do. I have this optimism that everything will work out. So I was running to Dolphin Heads, a part of Mackay that overlooks the ocean. There is a resort. I try to make the most of it. But I am still caught up on the fact that it takes me twenty minutes to get out of this housing estate.

[notjanaeswriting]

How do you go from knowing the point of life is love and then you lose it?

[notjanaeswriting]

I thought at 23 I had it figured out. In the past, my life's worth was to be found in the marks on a test. When that didn't cut it, the point was the stories made on drunken nights. Then I grew up. The end of 2019, the parties lost their shimmer. One night in particular it went too far. I went home, I cradled myself silently. My skin wasn't my own, my body wasn't my own. So I poured my energy into my future job. Hours of writing, resumes, submissions. I was in my second year then. My future career seemed sprawling out in front of me like a long carpet, threads falling off the sides, creating their own pathways. This at the time strengthened me. This at the time felt enough. But in the midst of two hour drives to the city to sleep in a bed that wasn't mine, to do an internship that didn't pay. I found the point. I found the feeling that made it all worth it. A boy with blonde curls, whose face went red if you asked him personal questions. I spent three years slowly giving myself to this boy. Piece by piece I found parts of myself with him even I was yet to discover. The parts I hid, he held up in glory. At one point, even I learnt to love them. He is gone now. Perhaps he saw too much of me. Perhaps the pieces I tried to hid get uglier in the open light. How do you go from knowing the point of life is love. And then you lose it. How do you go on. How do you fight the urge to push yourself onto the train tracks. I know how it feels to have a point that's not love. I know how it feels to work on yourself. Fucking lonely. I have done this before. I am stronger with him. How do you go from knowing the point is love, and then you lose it?