A Garland of Camellias, Lupins & Dandelions

The crisp asphalt of the new, undulating road is lined with the giggle of weeds—elegant and upstanding, like narcissists in petal fedoras. I drag my black sneakers, dusted with red dirt and millipede corpses, up the manmade trail, scouting for a gap in the endless electrified fences where I might shortcut up Noble Hill. No such luck. Madonna blares through my earphones and I shakily frame my Nokia camera on the scatter of flowers. In trying to pick a lupin for myself, I uproot the entire plant, stumbling back in an “oh no!” that slouches into a “whatever...” when I remember the council gardeners will likely be murdering them en masse soon anyway.

The gluttonous layers of milk chocolate chips and cookie dough are finally colliding with the sharp acid of morning coffee, and my walk is growing unbearable. I think about going on holiday somewhere—Canada, maybe. Recreating the same walk, but at night, the paths lined with sleet and a sugar dusting of snow. I think about getting out of here. The countryside is the closest I can come. I think about that one old friend blocking me and wonder why. That’s the second scissor-snip this year. I can’t help but feel like the most evil person alive. I keep walking.

On the ride home I push myself to trek through a book for the sake of my Goodreads Challenge—Secretary by Mary Gaitskill. I guessed it would be like the film, but instead it was a set of jagged little stories: a sex worker falling for a kind and awkward man, a woman with a psychosexual obsession with her dentist, a girl working as a secretary for a perverted lawyer, a runaway who lands a babysitting gig and gets abandoned. I liked them all, though the dentist one clung to me the longest—the idea of being infatuated with the routine pain delivered by someone who is the polar opposite of sadism. A boring, boring dentist. I get it, in some way. Lately I’m obsessed with the mundane, the boring. And with how you can pervert it, contort it into meaning. But some boring people are irredeemable—only made interesting by one’s imagination. That itself is a fact, too.

My dad politely offers to come with me on a grocery run after I let slip that I refuse to buy milk or raw meat, claiming I can survive off frozen chicken nuggets. This won’t do. We drive to the nearest supermarket on the edge of the train station, and I buy essentials, along with ranch dressing, peach-flavoured sparkling water, and a mouthwatering array of aburi salmon nigiri and chicken katsu sushi. It is incredible. In the frozen section, searching for onion rings, something odd happens.

Seemingly out of nowhere, a slim Asian man darted past, pointing at me with a sudden flare of recognition. “Shirt!” he shouted, grinning, before disappearing faster than the refrigerated air. My dad laughed and pointed at the Soviet propaganda tee I wear like a second skin under my olive corduroy. That moment was like a supermarket version of street theatre. I laugh at the simplicity of it—it reminds me of that one night on William St when two boys shouted “Aphex Twin!” at me with unimaginable volume, then drifted off into the humid evening air like starlings forming a pattern. At the checkout we laugh at the broken machines, crying out in their standard Australian monotone: “unexpected item in bagging area.”

Recently I’ve been maladaptively daydreaming so much I could almost write a diary entirely from my dreams. I think I want to meet my boy so badly that I’ve lost any shred of shame, that I’m willing to creak open the door of the travel agent’s office and start planning. After all, in a few weeks it will have been a year of us speaking—if you don’t count the on-and-off rhythms of Tumblr mutualism. I hope for that. I also hope to get into a Masters program (I’ve been applying furiously), to polish off my thesis and exams, and then to fly away somewhere interesting. One must hope that, by graduation, I might be newly polished myself.