Actually, I heard that hexagons were the new black. If you aren’t wearing hexagons at right this instant, consider yourself terminally unfashionable.
I don’t have any duck or lava stories today. This may disappoint you but will probably not. I do have a very small story about going back to a place and not sure you should be going back.
I have terrible trouble with commitment. I can work, I work 14 hours a day very happily. I can write all day, or draw or paint or do anything useless like that. Relationships, no. Hard to think about. Very hard. I ask the same questions about relationships as I ask about everything else. Why, why, why. Everything must have a purpose. Everything must create meaning. What purpose does a relationship have? A temporary one fulfilling needs. In the long term?
I hate the long term. The long term is so done. It’s so written. You settle down, you get a house, you start paying for stuff together, you share a car you have children you get married you work hard you don’t go anywhere as much as you’d like you get older your children grow up and you die. Relationships end in death. They take up heaps of time and then you don’t do what you want to and then you die.
So if I’m in a relationship, I want it to be everything. It has to warrant the loss of time. Time is the only thing we really have. The only thing we have to give. The only currency. You die for someone, you give them your time. You give birth to someone, you invest your time. Investment in the legacy. Investment in the future of your genetic material. Children are a legacy, but I never chose to build my legacy through children; I will do it through writing. So then, what place does a relationship have in my life?
Maybe it has none.
Driving from Tumut to Bathurst, which generally takes about four hours, I started to think about this. I started to think very seriously about my relationship. I doubt that I can ever give Ryan what he wants. I doubt he can ever give me what I want. I get tired of this always going up and down and not knowing if we can make it through and breaking up and making up, I get tired of explaining to people whose business it isn’t and losing friends because of it. I get tired of this stuff. The more effort you put into living in a single place, the more you lose when you leave. But as I thought in the car on the drive to Bathurst, do I want to be in a relationship I’m not sure about? Is any relationship ever truly sure? Don’t those little discrepancies really add up in the end?
I didn’t know, and so when I got to Bathurst, prepared to tell Ryan this, and that no, I wouldn’t be finding a house to share with him (at the moment I’m not on the lease) forevs and evs, I didn’t unpack the car. I walked up into the house with just my wallet and keys. I had the talk. If I was going to be kicked out, I didn’t want to drag everything inside and then have to put it all in the car again.
But he didn’t kick me out. I’m not homeless. And I don’t want to share a lease with him, and I don’t want to share a car. And the urge to run is sometimes greater and sometimes less. So it is day by day. Day by day by day.
I say all this, and then I tell you something like, I don’t care where I am so long as I can work. 😀
So here it is, taken from a window in our apartment rather than from a caravan park:
Picture of the Day 45: Bathurst
And just one more, just in case (note the T-Rex):
As for tomorrow and the next day and the next day? Who knows?
Skullventure! 