Things that almost last

On killing your darlings

I wrote about my decision to flee Australia for Mexico back in 2022 in my first Substack piece titled I ran away and I don’t regret it. I then mentioned in Why a broken heart ain’t so bad that heartbreak once led me to discovering writing prose.

This piece is from that heartbroken time.

I’m sharing it in the hope that anyone else who is hurting (and considering where that hurt might go) might return to something they once loved. I’ll always be grateful that a failed fourth-month situationship made me so depressed I fled my home country (no one has ever accused me of not being dramatic) to find a beautiful life waiting for me on the other side of that decision. But more than that, it led me to writing.

Ps. I delivered my second son yesterday. Right now I have little Ravi Carranza Hawthorn in my arms. I hope the image brings some love and joy!

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Things That Almost Last

I have a photograph called “Moonbather II” hung on the wall opposite my bed. It’s of a solitary woman sitting in Coogee Beach pool in a bathing cap and speedos as the sun sets. She’s drinking in the last of the day, elbows hung on the sandstone walls that keep the ocean out, or the pool in. it’s hard to say who’s containing whom. I hung it in front of my bed to remind me to walk the 500 metres it takes to get to that exact location each morning. Although it doesn’t always work. Often it just induces guilt for preferring to stay warm in bed.

My mother gave this picture to Mark, my stepfather of 24 years, for a wedding anniversary. I can’t recall which one and it doesn’t matter because they had an unhappy marriage and he’s dead now. Which is how it ended up with me, via inheritance. No one else wanted it. But I think it’s beautiful. I always did.

Moonbather II by Ian Lever

Maybe initially I thought it was beautiful because I hoped there might have been more happiness in their marriage than there ever was. Then when the picture lived in my house in Melbourne, I was still in grief over his death and it simply reminded me of him, of home and of the suburb in which I grew up: Coogee. Although my memories of that pool are scarce, if I’m honest.

Having come full circle, living in Coogee again in my thirties, I’m surrounded by memories. But they’re not really memories, they’re something physical. I walk down a certain street and my body seems to recall things. Maybe I tried to run across a road where my dad pulled me back before being hit by a car? A meal eaten on a particular park bench next to the cricket oval, perhaps? I don’t know, but my body seems to. My hairs stand on end like little magnets pulling me to a past life.

Some days the woman in the photograph seems almost phosphorescent with calm and other days melancholy. In any event, she reminds me that nothing is permanent, nor as it may seem.

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The morning you and I meet up to talk about things, I look up at the Moonbather and write a dear little list to myself in the Notes app on my phone titled “things to do if we end today”. And on that list is “buy flowers - two bunches”. So I walk down to Coogee Bay Road and do exactly that. Coffee in hand and with a hopeful heart I trundle back to my apartment with sunflowers and something like carnations but I’m not sure. Pink! Bright! Hopeful!

As I snip the bottom of the flowers and find vases for them I feel part 50s housewife in denial (arranging flowers in a moment of total domestic agony) and part empowered young woman, because I bought them to remind me to be kind to myself because I knew, inevitably, that we would end that day. But I also hoped, in spite of the obvious clues, that I would come back from the beach with a full heart and a home full of flowers.

Two and a half weeks later, the sunflowers are well and truly gone. After leaving a window open, they were knocked off the credenza by the wind, the dirty flower water leaving a foul smell on my rug, making a fool of me. As I write the word credenza, I think of you once saying “whoever uses the word credenza, anyway?” So I guess I’m using it here to prove a point. That I know how to do things, say things, use things. That I’m smart and maybe worth loving.

The something-like-carnations are still sitting atop my bedroom dresser, half of them wilted and half hanging on for dear life. If there’s a better metaphor for where I’m at, then I don’t know what it is.

The hopeful ones, still soft to the touch and pale pink, move me. They’re trying so hard. I want to tell them there’s no hope. It’ll be over soon, but they just seem so oblivious to their fate that I let them exist amongst their more cynical neighbours.

I’m looking forward to the moment I bin them. My final act. Kill your darlings, as they say.

But I don’t think I’ll get there a second before they do.

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A few weeks later, we go to the Cinema under the guise of friendship, to see a movie and grab some dinner. As we walk to find a restaurant you put your arm around my waist and at one point pick me up and carry me upside down and I feel a rush of blood to my head. Not because I am upside down but because you are carrying me in a way that makes me feel I am yours.

When you put me down I notice the women at the table near us look over and smile at the sight of young love, and I feel a fraud for relishing it.

You ask me over the stodgy paella and half priced margaritas what my relationship history is. As an afterthought you add how “funny” it is that you haven’t really asked me that in the past four months during which we’ve spent every other day together. But it isn’t funny nor a surprise to me because your big relationship, the one holding us back from being together, has taken up all the air in every room we’ve sat in.

I list my string of failed relationships and there is a pathos in your face that deepens with each story. At one point you say we have been life rafts for one another, which seems absurd to me because I feel literally as though I am drowning, air entering my lungs with great effort. And when I get home my stomach is in knots from the dodgy mussels in the paella.

I spend the following day feeling lost, working from bed and lying on the headland looking out over the beach. The same one I’ve been convinced will always remind me of you. But I’m pretty sure that changed today. Today it became the place that reminds me it wasn’t the paella hurting me, it was your failure to be any kind of life raft in return.

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That night, I fall asleep listening to Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well (Sad Girl Autumn Version)” on repeat. Despite the title and patently tragic nature of this fact, it comforts me that someone as successful and beautiful as Taylor Swift is still ruminating over a three month relationship that ended a decade ago.

After waking to my alarm at 6.15am I walked, heavy-footed, down to the beach for my second bootcamp session. All part of my attempt to distract myself from being a Sad Girl. It’s windy as hell. The ocean is absolutely howling. But I persist.

After we finish the session, I get into my swimmers and plunge into the ocean. There’s only one other guy out there braving the conditions for a morning baptism in the middle of winter. I wonder if he’s sad about something, too.

Towel around my waist, warm hoodie over my head and one piece swimsuit pulled down to my waist, I make my way to The Beach Shack Cafe. The coffee flows down my throat, warming me for a moment. It reminds me that tiny things can be good, that tiny things rescue terrible moments.

When I get home I look up at Moonbather II, think of Mark, and realise that grief is a reminder of love.

I quietly bin the flowers, grateful that Moonbather II did her job this morning.