Jul 27
11 years.
seen from Israel
seen from Israel
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Czechia
seen from Israel
seen from United States
seen from Australia
seen from Czechia
seen from India
seen from T1
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from T1
seen from Italy
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Russia
seen from China
11 years.
10 years.
Eight years.
cw: horrible grief shit
There are some pieces of information that intuitively make sense, that fit neatly with what you already know. There are some pieces of information that you forget immediately upon being told. Then there are some pieces of information that make no sense, that your body rejects, that don’t fit into your brain no matter what way you squeeze them.
“Kat has been dead for a year”
is that last kind.
It’s 2+2=3.
It’s fucking wrong, and it’s offensive how wrong it is.
It’s satire from a parallel universe where they don’t understand humour.
It’s doing the same equation, over and over, and always coming up with the same lack.
A year?
What have I even done in this last year? I’m trying to think, like -- lost friends, got fatter, procrastinated. Stopped writing, stopped playing basketball, stopped doing DnD. Cried a lot. Bought a bunch of books I still haven’t read. Retreated from everything that Kat encouraged me to do. Great.
(I could write a positive-sounding version of that paragraph, but it wouldn’t feel as true to me right now. Right now, I just want my life to fuck off and leave me alone.)
The truth is: it doesn’t feel like I’ve ‘grown’ from this. It feels like I’m a terrified 5-year-old from this. It feels like everything is wrong and I don’t understand and I want to help but I can’t because I don’t understand.
The truth is, something snapped between me and the world on July 27th 2015. I’ll live in the world, and we’ll get along fine, but I’ll never forgive it for what it did to her.
You hear me, world?
You are not forgiven.
Not now, not ever.
Why isn’t her voice here, saying new words? Why aren’t her lips here, kissing new people?
There are so many people she hadn’t kissed yet.
It’s 2+2=3.
It’ll never make sense.
NYWF 2015: The happiest time of the year is here agaaaaaaaaaain
NYWF 2015: The happiest time of the year is here agaaaaaaaaaain
It’s that time of the year again, when the decrepit old cow that is the city of Newcastle is covered in a fresh infestation of young writers: The National Young Writers Festival. This year is probably my tenth year of attending the festival in some form – I’m writing up a kind of review, a kind of nostalgia trip for my Cliffwalk event on Saturday morning, where I go through the memories that…
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When Stars Collide
For Kat. It's 2 am. My rehearsal call is at 930. In Bundoora. I haven't had a good sleep in almost a month. The fragments of sleep I catch are populated with dreams both good and bad. Sometimes I wake up with my arms out stretched as if I was reaching out for her, for that final warm hug, last kiss, or a reminder that she'd even been a part of my life at all. There've been nights when I lie in bed thinking about stars, and the formulations of galaxies, the rules of thermodynamics, the conservation of energy and the knowledge that nothing is ever truly gone, it's just in a different form to what it was previously. It gives me very little comfort at times, but at others and immense comfort because i know that every time I see a smile, or feel a touch of a hand against mine, or lift a pint glass to my lips, part of that energy is hers. That every particle that made her exists somewhere still. Death is not a term in the physicists lexicon. Often though, I am angry at physics for being so perfect yet so completely fucking inadequate. She might exist somewhere in the universe, but that somewhere isn't here, with us, where she's always been. It is times like these when I wish I hadn't left the church. Apart from being total fantasy, at least religion gave me a way to cushion the blows of grief, the knowledge that we'd see our beloved somewhere when our life as we know it ends, and that really, the things we do in this life only serve to prepare us for the next. Grief is a strange beast. It's an acknowledgement that we form attatchments to other humans, feel their presence sometimes intimately. It's a recogniton that we don't exist as solitary creatures, but rather we were meant to be, for want of a better expression, pack animals. Primitive humans however, did not have complex emotions. Love, even sadness, weren’t really developed in the primitive psyche. Early humans developed bonds for survival, and when they broke they were replaced. As we evolved, our abilty to feel things evolved with us. Grief is a recognition that we’ve evolved, but it is often the hardest, and most difficult set of feelings humanity comes with. I have never been good with feelings, nor the attatchment to other human beings. Childhood conditioning taught me that feelings were a sign of weakness, and to avoid weakness you must avoid feelings. Over the last month I have both felt nothing and everything. Sobbed heaving sobs and then felt everything inside me fall silent. Drowned out the clamour of my own thoughts in alcohol then dealt with times I could think nothing at all. Neil Degrasse Tyson was describing the make up of planets and he described the observable planets being not the only ones in existence. He referred to potentially millions of them existing without being present in the solar system as “rogue planets”. That’s what I’ve been, for most of my life. I haven’t been part of a solar system for very long, and found it hard to co-exist with the planets in my now established system. Kat helped me. She saw me when I needed to be seen, not as a rogue planet but as a vital part of the solar system that is our friendship group and community. I cannot remember the precise time we entered each others lives, but I felt a little less rogue every time we met, even if it was just casually, for a drink or coffee, or after a feminist or writer’s event. She made everyone in her orbit a stronger planet. I will miss the light she brought us, the gigantic heart she brought to everything she did, the things she said, that gleam in her eye, and the way she’d totally give the fact that she was going to tell a joke away by laughing just before she’d tell it. And those hugs. Those fucking hugs where time would stop and it was just the two of you. I used to think that if you ever wanted tangible proof that time could slow down and grind to a standstill, just ask Kat Muscat for a hug, and you'd feel it. We never know the precise value of stars untill they burn out and are unviewable. But we do know, when stars collide, they become a galaxy. I hope we will become galaxies again soon.
more scattered Kat thoughts, on the day of her funeral
The way she called everyone “darling”
The way she poked her tongue out and crinkled her eyes whenever she found something cute (that’s the one)
The way she flirted shamelessly with everyone
The way she’d say, “Right??”
The way she’d lean back while you were talking, smiling and squinting slightly, like she was scoping you out but you were making the grade
The way she wrote sentences like “In this metaphor feel free to consider the minotaur a benevolent creature of multiple orgasms.”
The way she shivered with delight when you’d tongue her lip-ring (and how she’d joke that this was the cheat code for making out with her, and totally unfair)
The way she hugged (voluminous and tight)
The way she was so excited to talk about those youtube videos fixing the Star Wars prequels (such a magnificent dork)
The way she combined defiance and empathy (and found feminism in the space in between)
The way she suffered (worse pain than I will ever understand)
The way she loved (generously and embracingly)
The way she was everything that she was (so much)
I miss you so much, Kat