Lilting

It’s nice when the night air is still and warm, slowly coming into Spring, soft whispy scents that you pass by along the streets, that sense of being the only moving thing, the sky doesn’t really exist, not, as we understand it, because it only exists that way for a few hours of the day, during sunlight it’s a few kilometers deep and a blue colour, to us that is, but at night, it’s much deeper, at night it feels more like a window and less like a curtain, you get a sense of the size of things, even though the lights are only very small, it’s interesting, the night sky seems infinite but it’s still just this small overhead, glowing with stars and galaxies incomprehensible ages away, not just, metres, not just length, but also time, literally ages, stages of existence, it’s a strange thing to think that we can see light which has existed much longer than we have, than as far as we know, life has.

I was at a lecture recently where the man asked us to create an invisible box using the space in front of us, a space which seems empty to the eye, he told us that actually there is an enormous amount of data, of information, in that space, which we don’t see, to us it’s just an empty imaginary box, the least anything can be really.

I saw Alle today, my ex for a definition, she smiled the way I remember, and spoke the way I remember, and things felt memorable, we’re both dating new people, obviously, since it’s been a while since we were together, but when you make a plan to spend a life with someone, it’s strange to see it develop differently, to know that will never be, that you don’t want that future anymore, even though it was so appealing, so desirable, at one point.

People think it’s strange that we’re still close, but to put it simply I think people are strange for thinking the way they do, you don’t suddenly cut out someone like that, not if you’re being reasonable, we’re both, rational people, maybe not normal, but rational. For both of us it was our first relationship of any length, we grew together, we were young when we met, at seventeen, we both know sides of each other that haven’t really existed for half a decade, it’s strange to think that there are parts of me which are real to her, that no one else will ever know, and that technically those parts don’t even exist anymore, but they’re still real.

Similar to James and I, we have been in each other’s pockets since we were about 12 years old, about 1999, last century, it feels longer than that though, relationships always do, nothing ever feels like the length it is.

For a period there, when Brent was being thrown out of home he was going to come live with me and Robyn and Terence, until the end of school or so, but he decided that wasn’t enough of a reason for him to stay here, he hated Sydney, he hated his life here, I was a good aspect of it, but, he did the hard thing and he decided to go and try and make something of his own, rather than slide into the life that I was creating for him, that is impressive at any age let alone for a badly depressed 15 year old that is being thrown out of his home by an ill natured mother-in-law, I’ve always, always, admired Brent.

Lately, all I’ve been thinking about is how terribly unlikely everything is, and yet how it’s all, real, how it’s all here.

I saw Michael as well today, my half-brother, a relative stranger (ha), until he moved here about a year or so ago, now it’s like we’ve been together forever, it is natural, genuinely natural.

I grew up as an only child, and I have a different sort of criteria I guess, because, I don’t think family is that, special, we’re all born with family, it is a necessary prerequisite, so in that sense, you get family without ever having to do anything for it, but we, make, friends, through our own effort and through their effort, it’s much more real and reflective, you choose your friends you don’t choose your family. I often describe my relationship with my parents, Robyn and Terence, as being more akin to being friends than say parent and son, and people always take that negatively, like there’s a failure in the relationship somehow, that I feel, detached from them.

My grandmother gave me a green-stone (jade) talisman a bit before she died, she was more open to me about her upcoming death than anyone else, I think because we communicated in letters and gestures, not really in conversations, there are things you can’t say to a person, that you can write to a person, that you can gesture to a person.

She would send me CD’s with music that outlined her feelings, and write me letters, with hints and number of other things. The talisman she gave me had the Maori symbol for friendship carved onto it, she had it made especially, I was young then, maybe 12 or 13, but I knew what she meant by it, she thought the same way I did, which is, rare, even among family or friends, it’s rare to find two people who think similarly, who understand what is meant even if it’s not what is said or shown.

Alle was talking about that today, that the reason she understands me so well wasn’t because we were similar, she actually thinks we were very opposite, but because we both took the time to learn about the other, to think and understand the other.

It’s all specific isn’t it? There is no simple universal gauge, the way, you can be close to someone who is the opposite of you, the way you can be similar to someone you’ve never known, the way you can be understood by someone without ever having said a word, all of it, is possible, with different people, in different settings, I think it’s interesting, the way you can be all these things, all at once.

One thing I’ve noticed is that people can be very naive in their judgements, they put too much faith in the totality of what they know, and they extrapolate beyond what is reasonable. From what I’ve observed, most people extrapolate using their preconceptions about a person, or from a character they’ve created in the heads from a very small amount of information, not from the information that person gives them, just the information that they have decided is vital. You can tell when a person is doing this because you’ll see them conform the information to match their agenda even if the information goes against their preconception, a simpler way of saying that is that they will use the information that shows them to be correct and ignore the information which goes against their preconception, sometimes you’ll even see people doing it both ways, so they use the same bit of information negatively in two different ways whilst refuting it’s legitimacy for any other usage.

I despise Brent’s stepmother, she is the only person that I really despise, but her biological children love her, it is quite a thing to think that a person I hate, is surely loved by someone else, a person I love is surely hated by someone else, a person I think is vicious is surely kind to someone else, a person I ignore is surely worthwhile to someone else. Everyone, at every moment, is many dozens of things to many dozens of people, and it’s all real, none of it has to be a lie.

So although we like to think of ourselves in absolute terms we’re only ‘ourselves’ in the very narrow definition of each person we interact with, and that changes from person to person. I am, one person to me in my mind, but I become

another to James, to Brent, to his stepmother, I am still me, I am still the person I see myself as being, but I’m also the person they see, whether I agree with that or like that or not is separate. 

There is no one so simple that they can be known in their entirety, even to themselves. Isn’t that a fascinating thought?