It’s Been Busy

Not much to report, really—everything’s been very busy but it’s the kind of busy where even though you’re doing lots of stuff there isn’t really a way to write about it.

I mean, what are you supposed to write? You have a friend in town and there are parties and dinners and cups of hot chocolate that are actually just melted candy bars and you and she watch your boyfriend Benedict Cumberbatch on the laptop screen and then Saturday night you put on your sluttiest outfit that no one else thinks is slutty and go to your bandmate’s super-excellent gig to launch his new single that you personally sang backup vocals on, whoooaaa ohh whoooaaa aaahhh whooooaaaaa ahhh ooohhh ohhhh, and the next day you finish the shooting for the video to your song, and the next day you go to Kilbirnie and try speak Italian and eat the spring’s first fresh strawberries, and then it’s a Tuesday night when your friend is about to go back to Australia and so you have fifteen people—including an acquaintance you dragged in off the street on your way back from the dairy–in your teeny little house eating broccoli pasta and entire chickens and it’s almost enough to distract you from missing her and wishing she still lived in Wellington.

You crash on the following day, you don’t even make it to yoga, you are in bed by 9:00 on a Wednesday night and that feels like some huge exhausted triumph, and you feel so so old because of that. You go to work and just sort of sit there, all week, but Thursday you have in-home acupuncture from your gorgeous and talented friend who sits on the couch and eats leftover corn chips and talks about dudes with you before sticking needles into your well-padded thigh meat and running light electrical current through them as you gossip about all your friends and discuss what you’re going to do for New Year’s Eve. There’s Freaks and Geeks to watch (again) on another friend’s giant tv after she makes you eggs and mushrooms on toast for dinner, and her flatmate’s dating life to analyse (“Wait, she canceled? Let me see the text.”) and his t-shirt choices to direct in the most loving and kind manner possible (“Do you want this date to go well? Then DO LIKE I TELL YOU and put that shirt on”).

There’s drinks after work on Friday, walking through the sudden springtime hail because that’s how Wellington does; and you drink a fancy cinnamon spicy ginger beer while everyone else has pinot noir and absinthe champagne and artisan beer and you all trundle through drippy Manners Mall to a very patient Indian restaurant where you steal someone’s garlic naan and all the boys talk to each other passionately about video games and bass guitars and you send a mass booty text to the entire table and actually tell your dear lady friend, who is the only other lady at the table, that you want to go to the bathroom with her like you’re fourteen years old, and then she texts you something dirty in response to the aforementioned mass table booty text and then you talk about octopuses and her birthday party and make plans for the Sunday morning chat show you and she will one day have where you can share the accumulated wisdom from your daily email threads at your 9-to-5s with the adoring masses. You sort out when you’re going to have your next band practice with your bandmate and you promise him you’ll have the new song ready to sing by then and he promises you that even if he doesn’t ever become a real live rock star he’s still committed to collaborating creatively with you and you all go off in your different directions, into the washed-clean Wellington night.

You wake up Saturday morning, pretty early, and use your new expensive shower gel you have decided to splurge upon because you just want to smell like oranges and olive oil, and you are thirty-six years old and you have so few pleasures, is that so wrong? and make breakfast and check the internet to make sure nothing interesting is happening (it kind of is and kind of isn’t) and put on leggings and think about folding your laundry and wonder where you left your gray tights that you want to wear to a wedding this afternoon that’s being held where they filmed Rivendell eleven or whatever years ago. You realize that you have a lot of pleasures in life, aside from your shower gel, and then you feel gross because the word ‘pleasures’ always reminds you of all the sex scenes in The Valley Of Horses which has, by some strange coincidence, come into your life again through a friend’s getting rid of all her stuff, and there it sits, on your bookshelf, daring you to read about cavepeople having lushly detailed cave sex…or, you know: “Pleasures.” That’s not even what you meant! You meant, like, you know: bunnies and puppies and rainbows and good times with good friends, those sorts of things. Tell yourself that you can just have fancy shower gel if you feel like it, no explanation required. You think about the headband you’ll wear to this wedding because your hair is getting long enough to put up and how you really should vacuum, just quickly, and that there’s probably time for another cup of tea before you have to get dressed.

If you were trying to describe your morning, your week, your life—you could tell every story and embellish every detail. You could try to explain it all, you could try to make everyone understand. Instead you type, just before you hop up to wash your breakfast dishes and put product in your hair: “It’s been busy.” I’m so full, you think, putting the kettle on. I’m so full right now, I am so right in the middle of where I am.