When you’re a stranger

Yesterday and today I went to the Mind Body Spirit festival in the city. It’s your average New Age/alternative health fair. I enjoyed it. But what really got me down was leaving the city and going home at 7pm on Friday and Saturday evening, just as it seemed everyone else was arriving.

It was strange – I get out so little I have no idea what people wear or do, or where they go. All the girls seemed to be in little dresses. I guess that must be the fashion now. I never did go out on the town with friends, in a little dress. Never had friends and money at the same time.

And how did my life so get away from me, I wonder. Then again, maybe it’s always been this way, with a few brief and infrequent exceptions. I’ve always been on the outer. The rotten thing is how passing all those frocked-up girls on my way to a dull night in reminded me of that fact. It brought back all those memories of schoolyard rejection and perennial loneliness. The awkwardness of just being in my own skin with the weight of others’ scorn on me. Being judged undesirable and unacceptable every time I am seen.

Now, all this is reawakened with the embarrassment of knowing that I have been ostracised – or at least isolated – for so long that I don’t know how to fit in. I don’t know what a girl is supposed to do on a Saturday night. I don’t have the skills it involves. It feels, in some ways, like I have never come of age. I have never come out and been introduced to the world.

Hmm… incidentally, I’m not even sure if I am a girl anymore. Are thirty-two year old females girls or women? Or does it depend on the person in question or the context? Of course, all those girls and guys on their way somewhere in the city may not be going anywhere I’m interested in. I remember going clubbing with friends in first-year uni. (That’s right, I couldn’t afford a dress.) I didn’t really understand the appeal. You dance clumsily to bad music that’s so loud you can’t speak to anyone. And the only guys who approach you are appallingly sleazy. 

And what do my sort of people do on a Friday or Saturday night?  I wish I knew.  Do they even go out?  Do they spend it with friends?  Do they do the American thing of dating a different person each week? 

I am tempted to believe that there’s nothing here.  That Sydney is an empty city, devoid of any real depth or culture or personality.  That its people are soulless too, and any semblance of life is a cheap and brittle veneer.