Meese!
S comes over. Losing her job in two months. Just four days before Christmas, she is called into the office, with Fleur (I think). Sache has had a baby, she's in the paper, a beaming proud mum, a celebrity. Her deputy manager, Fleur, starts off telling S that she's a great designer. So much talent. So much potential. Was this ringing warning bells? Cattie tells S later "It's in the managers' training books. Build them up before you let them go." S is friends again with Cattie after breaking up with her whilst she and I were together in 2004 or so. I was never told the reason for the breakup, it happened after the crucial time when S started excising me from her life, sometime in 02 or 03.
Four days to Christmas. You're a great designer. When you get back from your month's unpaid leave, we will have a few weeks work for you then we will get two young girls with licences to do dispatch.
"I'm so sick of being disposable to everybody" S says again and again as we go to score.
"Do you think you're disposable to me" I ask, painfully. A few seconds silence, which speaks volumes to me as S always has the snappy retort. Then.
I think we were both different things to each other. This needles me greatly. I respond, snappily,
"Yeah, dealer and lover." Alluding to my current belief that I loved her and she loved me for gear.
Pained expression. "You can't mean that."
S is fluctuating between "We spent all of our time together stoned so therefore you don't know the real me (a variation on 'We did nothing but use together' motif)." and "We did nothing, just sat around".
We go to score. S has cash, for a change. We stop at the Owl. I am grooving to Pixies. She starts chatting to two dudes at Neos. I don't know them. I turn up Pixies to drown out the separation between her friends and her, and me.
She gets in the car, pissed, turns down volume. We drive to Goodna, to score a $250 bag from a man washing his Merc, while The Man's uncle puffs on a cigarette two metres away. Previously there had been some pretence, a charade, that the uncle did not know what went on. Tonight, with just T and the uncle, the deal happened openly. Uncle knows what goes on.
We drive home, S riding me to not speed. A mini, the new type, comes alongside. We race a little, S professing her love of the mini, how her mum had one once when S was child. S is disappointed.
"I talk about doing shit, getting a business started, being a great designer. But I just talk about it. I never do anything.
I use this as my opportunity to spiel on about people who get to 30, realise they won't achieve their dreams, so they breed, and say "I will make this child avoid all the errors I made that made me miss my dreams."
I point out that there's a fatal flaw. That these well meaning parents may eradicate the fault that ruined their dreams, but they won't remove the faulty that stopped the great grandparents achieving their dreams. Unless some families have a catalogue of obstacles to dreams.
I am very happy with my parents' raising of me. Perhaps I am overly emotionally distant, but who's to say what caused that. But my parents, even if they followed my theory of trying to produce a specimen that avoids their mistakes, never considered the addiction problem. Never entered their heads. "As if a child so smart would take drugs". I can hear the conversation now. That snobbishness innate to all humans, born of inexperience. So the wrap me up warmly and send me into the maws of addiction.
Unwittingly.
All I am saying is that you need to get your own life right. And if having a kid is part of that perfect life, then great. But kids should not be the raison d'etre. The sacrifice to make up for all your lost dreams.
I could not live as a walking talking offering to ashes in someone's mouth.
If S ever reads this, know I love you. Know I wait for you to come back every day. But that I hope you gain the strength to break free of me and follow your dreams. Love with you would be beautiful but perhaps ill somehow.
But know that I dream of a love with you without gabo. In the country somewhere, in a cabin built by my hand.
SImplicity in life, simplicity in love.
The Meese reference is to a dark brooch that Cattie gave S tonight. What is the plural of Moose we discussed whilst stoned. As you do, on copious amounts of gabster.
(And why do I get so jealous. Why can I not trust a girl that I profess to love. Shouldn't trust come with love? DOes lack of trust mean I do not really love.)