Ghosts

It’s been so long since I blogged! In that time I have indeed received comments and not lost my audience completely. All I seem to do is post posthumous blogs. After the feeling has faded. That’s just the way it goes.

The vice principal just made a whole speech based on the ethos of Vanessa Amorosi’s song Shine. “Make the best of what you’ve got” he booms. He says there are words to live by in that song. And to those trouble makers up the back he reminds them that this is NOT a joyous occasion.
All I can hear is Green Day’s Having A Blast over the speeches.

Am I going to regret leaving here? This year is my last chance to do all those high school things. I haven’t taken advantage of it much. I am going to the formal this year; without an official date. Although I think my only gal pal and I may have conned the boy who can make an advance and conversation at the same time into going. Mr. Crushing and I argue about the stupidest things these days, evoking the second connotation of his name – his stubbornness and ability to make an argument out of anything. When we were courting, for lack of a better word, he thought it strange when I confessed that sometimes, when we argued about things, that I wanted to just cut him off and make out. Something about it evoked that clichéd movie sequence where one moment the two are passionately arguing and the next they are passionately… well you know. This was not one of those times. This was the complete opposite. I can’t even remember how the conversation came about, but someone was microwaving something in the school’s communal microwave with a plastic bottom and a cardboard top, and one way or another I said that I would much rather have the taste of cardboard in my food than plastic, if I had to choose. Mr. Crushing piped up that plastic left much less of a taste in food than cardboard did. I said that regardless of that, I would rather have the flavour of cardboard. He cut me off saying that the taste of cardboard was much stronger than plastic and it would be stupid not to choose plastic for this reason. I told him that of course one would choose the one that gave less taste to the food, but hypothetically if they were the same strength, which would he choose? He spat back at me “But cardboard has a stronger taste!” I corrected him putting emphasis on the fact that I had asked him that if the strength of the taste was the same, which flavour he would rather have. He told me that cardboard was porous and had more influence over the food, but plastic was specially made to be clean and not do that. I told him that he couldn’t understand basic logic. I was asking for a qualitative observation, not a quantitative observation. He didn’t seem to know what this meant. I asked his friend which one he would rather have. He didn’t get a chance to answer before Mr. Crushing cut him off with more incredulous blather about how cardboard was more intense. He obviously hasn’t noticed the difference between the taste of a coffee from a cheap Styrofoam cup and a good quality paper one.



It just occurred to me that I could have been half way to Melbourne by now. My English teacher is away, I don’t have class until 2. So I slipped away like a ghost out of the corner of the school. They’ll probably pick me up on the records later, but they seem to be having a bit of trouble adjusting to the new electronic system. Some of my teachers are as technophobic as my mother. And what am I going to tell them? Play the convincing fool and tell them I was just wandering around the school and forgot? Not again. I can’t believe she bought it the first time. No, I’ll tell them exactly what I was doing. Shopping up town. There isn’t a thing they can do about it. My parent won’t care, I don’t care, I even have the audacity to tell them to their faces. And I’m wondering, is that anarchy? When you know full well that its wrong, and you do it anyway because you don’t care about the consequences? Even if it’s not exactly a demonstration or blatant disregard for the establishment or ‘the man’. Although I can see how to a young anarchist the faculty and disobedience could be seen in this way.
A few people, who were friends of mine at the time, tried to run away a few years back. They planned it just a few days in advance, and then, almost as if it was a snap decision, they slipped away in the middle of the day out the side of the school just like I did. I had almost wanted to go. At that time it would have been something I might have done. But I knew that the plan was doomed from the start. All the planning, plotting and scheming hadn’t even taught them to pack properly. They didn’t have nearly enough food, water money, or common sense to pull it off. I told them that it was stupid. I told them that they were fools. But it was such a noble dream. Finally getting the hell out of this town, away from your overbearing parents, escaping to a real city and living off younger relatives or friends that you could trust not to dob you in. They packed their bags and headed west, I don’t know what the plan was exactly, but I should have told them that they were heading the wrong way. They made a stopover at one of their houses to get something they forgot. They were almost caught. When they didn’t return from school the parents sent out a panicked search party. They ended up spending a freezing sleepless night (it was around this time of year actually) in the park of the neighbouring town and were found by the cops at first light. The punishment was ten times worse than anything they had run from to begin with. I didn’t hear much about it after that.
I wrote a song about it some time after. It was told as series of interlinking takes with fake names. I read it to one of them, the girl I try not to talk about, over the phone and later she told me that she had cried. She had such emotion for everything she did. So unrestrained. So unlike myself in so many ways. “You are everything I want, ’cos you are everything I’m not” - in the words of Taking Back Sunday. In spite of the time and the distance it still makes me emotional to think about her. I still haven’t given her that note. It needs more depth, she deserves more. I still can’t get over the fact that I hurt her so badly. The chances of finding someone like that in the mental wasteland of high school and rural living are phenomenal. And I fucked it up. And the worst thing was I didn’t even know it was happening, it got progressively worse in fact. It took me forever and many nasty notes to realise what had happened. Of course I apologised immediately. But my apology would not be accepted. And the more I apologised the more distant we became. All the time I held the belief that she had been hypersensitive and her anger and pain unfounded; I couldn’t possibly believe that I could have unknowingly hurt her so badly. A few years ago, long after we stopped being friends, I actually managed to realise what I had done and make a sincere apology. But it never broke my heart quite like it could have. It was a defence mechanism. If I hadn’t had that bubble of arrogance about me and realised at once the full repercussions of what I had done, then I don’t think I could have stood the pain. So I have carried that last bit of lingering ache with me ever since. It’s been made fresh by the thought that we won’t see each other ever again after the end of this year. She looks more and more like Curt Kobain every time I see her. And each time that unspoken tension and distance. To begin with I just wanted to be friends again, now I know that could never work. We would be walking on eggshells around each other and they would be the broken remains of our friendship. Maybe I’m just trying to tie up a loose end. Does that make it any less significant? I hope it doesn’t. It occurred to me how FUTILE the whole exercise is recounting how it can never be fixed. But still, there is still this need, this unexplained, unequivocal need; to say something or do something. And every time I try lately I just get so caught up in what’s relevant and what’s not, that I can’t put anything down. I gave up on my note tonight. The time will come.


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