Of the motion.

S. Mclachlan
Sep 5, 2018 · 11 min read

‘You walked into the cafe 78 times that day. Every face was you. Your blonde hair brushed back from your forehead. Your blue eyes widening as the corners of your lips reach for your ears. Walking only to me, to give me your hand over the counter covered in chocolate dust and dirty cloths, just for a moment of touch, our fingers only slightly stirring together. I burnt my hand on the rusty steam wand three times. Not one of those faces were you... Not one’.


I began to write in my journal as if I were talking to him. I could tell him what was going through my head. Which, at times, was complete and agonising silence. I didn’t know these things truly happened. You know, the whole “spend time apart and see what happens” bullshit. I know I am not the only one still with a daft belief that love is true, and its all you need. Surely…. Am I? I mean, how can you beat that feeling? That strong, crazy, uncomfortable, beautiful, painful, endless, disgusting feeling of being IN love. What could possibly be stronger than that? I question myself everyday. Am I just naive? I took his pictures down 6 days later. It was one thing to be sad and alone eating a mixture of Pringles AND chocolate, yes, both at the same time (don’t knock it ‘til you try it), but to wake up with the evidence of this on the floor beside your bed, and then after that short moment of forgetting you’d broken up, you look over to see his beautiful blue eyes just judging you as you pick Pringle crumbs out of your hair. I put them all in a box in my top drawer, which was also full other random photos and pieces of writing I’d decided to take off display in my bedroom. Everyone knows there’s a limit of time you have to wait before you burn the fuckers. You know, in case you get back together…. There were valid reasons we decided to part. But once you process everything, eat your feelings, flirt with a few random drunk dudes who tell you your amazing even after you ramble on about your sob story and use it as an excuse to be drunk, you come to a conclusion. As previously stated, but in other words, I am a hopeless romantic, and I am here to share my sob story, in hopes you will hold your belief in true love just like I do. You may not be as interested as the drunk dudes in the seedy bar who probably just listened to me in hopes to get into my pants, but you might just feel that little bit of warmth in reading about someone else’s issues and not thinking about your own.


‘ I miss kissing every inch of our face. I miss the scented oil you used to out into your beard on our date nights. I miss that look on your face when we would find ourselves on the dance floor after 10 tequilas. I miss your hair. I miss having you stick your finger in my cappuccino in the morning. I miss your laugh. I miss your voice. I miss your utterly annoying need to be so damn organised ALL the time. I miss making up our own words. I miss my best friend…. I miss YOU.’


It’s always the same isn’t it? Wake up, sad. Work, sad. Go home, eat dinner alone, sad. Go to bed, insomnia, sad. Wake up, have a glass of wine, SAD. It’s a huge adjustment, I mean, you now have to drink wine for breakfast alone. This time around for me, though, as I’ve been through probably way too many break ups for my age, it’s a bit different. I feel numb, and more so that I have lost myself and not my love. Which is what brings me here, writing into absolute thin air about my feelings. At first I thought it was because I’d matured, and experienced things like this before, and that I’d become this super woman that couldn’t feel any emotion but happiness and positivity and lollipops and rainbows. I was on a mission to be me, as prior to this relationship, I hadn’t spent too much time on my own in quite a while. I made travel plans, I got a new job, I re entered my girl squad no longer labelled as ‘the lost one’ AKA the only one with the boyfriend. But in a slow, drip feed style realisation, I lost myself, completely. I’d always heard people say things like, “be with someone who brings the best out in you” or “be with someone who makes you want to be a better person”, but I’d never actually experienced what that feels like. Let me be honest here. I’m fucking lazy, well I was anyway. I had no goals, no desire, no drive. I had dreams, but I didn’t believe in myself. I didn’t believe I could achieve any of them. This is who I thought I was. Where I live, people will always tell you that being on your own is the best way to find yourself. And I believe that, but I also believe that with the help of the beautiful humans that were placed around you for a reason, you can reveal parts of yourself you never knew you had. Well, thats when…. lets call him… Mr. positive, (mr. P for short) came along. The person I am now, apart from feeling like one of those empty crustacean shells you find on the beach, is completely different to who I was before him. It was quite interesting when we got together, I was constantly noticing things about myself that desperately needed improvement. Even small things, like having a clean bedroom, not being late to work, eating healthier, keeping my fuel tank full, yeah, all those general adult things that everyone else is good at. At the time I felt like I’d realised how shitty I was, like I wasn’t good enough. Not to mention having Casey Chambers stuck in my head every day, yeah you know the one… “am I not pretty enough, is my heart too broken”. Rubbish. It’s now going to be stuck in your head for the rest of the week, you’re welcome….. I began to feel like I wanted to be someone, or something. Someone Mr. P could be proud of. I wanted to actually achieve my ridiculous goals, and yes, joining the circus is genuinely my dream. Someone I had never met before came out of me. I started writing my dreams down and setting short term goals and appreciating all the steps I was taking to make things happen, no matter how small they were. “It all counts, its all a step forward, you should be proud of yourself” he would say. He taught me this whole new way of thinking and being positive. I became someone I loved. Someone I never thought I could be. My laziness was still present, like a miniature annoying fuzzy cat on my shoulder that kept telling me I couldn’t do it. I suppose he was more comparable to fear rather than laziness. Still, I did not finish anything I started. I gave up on a lot of things, but Mr. P never stopped believing in me, not once. So I never gave up, I never stopped trying new things even if I wasn’t going to see them through. Not only did his luscious shoulder length blonde hair, blue eyes that were like windows to the sky, his warm and bubbly presence that I could never get enough of have me fall hard for him, his belief in me mastered all 10 levels of my heart.


‘I don’t remember my goals. I don’t feel motivated. Was it all for you? This hurts. I wanted these things for myself, didn’t I? Where is it? Maybe I’m just grieving. I will find that girl again. That girl with drive, a lust for life. A fire burning to be someone anyone could look up to. A desire so thick for flashing lights and a roaring crowd. Where did she go? Did you take her with you? Who is this?’


I began to wonder whether that girl was a hoax. Someone I’d become to try and impress Mr. P. I had a full routine. Morning coffee, soy cappuccino with half a sugar, which he would ALWAYS stick his finger in, a run up the 10 thousand stairs of the lighthouse trail, meditation, yoga, healthy diet. I was a super star. I felt incredible, and I had this amazing viking like man just loving the shit out of me the whole time. Yet, I still gave myself a hard time. I never stopped to look at how far I’d come compared to the mashed potato sandwich eating couch mess I was a year prior. “I think you’re doing great” He’d say to me, almost teary eyed because he hated how often I criticised myself. I didn’t understand that now I had actually started to live my life and make something of myself, I was harder on myself. Maybe I had just embraced that couch life, just removing myself from the game so I could never be exposed to failure, and now that I had room for failure I was more pushy. It was the strangest feeling of exhaustion and motivation mixed together. It is only now, now that I am without him, and have re visited some old habits, that I realised how amazing I became when I had someone who made me want to be better. That is who I am, and thanks to Mr. P I am able to be that someone I love to be. Now, though, probably due to sadness and heartache, I have whipped up some mashed potato sandwiches and jumped straight onto that cushy couch next to my cat who is probably the most annoying thing in the world, just like the one on my shoulder. But I’m here, writing, which was another box I’d always struggled to tick, writing about probably the most boring, sobby, love story anyone has ever read. Which reminds me, how do you know what love wants?


‘ Are you really going to risk losing us? Thats not love. You don’t risk losing someone you love. You just don’t. I’m so angry at you. I’m so angry at myself. My belief of love is diminished. We can do anything we want. When did we stop knowing that? When did we stop being a team? Why are you gone?’


I often laugh at myself when I have certain thoughts. For instance, when I remember that everything happens for a reason, but whilst I’m thinking this, I’m standing on the corner of Byron and Jonson at 2 am after going to the 24 hour bakery eating not one, not two, but three meat pies whilst waiting for my uber to take my drunk ass home, and I cant help but giggle and say to myself “is this the reason it happened, am I destined for meat pies and late nights”? Cracks me up. I’ve stopped waiting for the reason. Only in hopes the reason is that we find each other again. No one ever believes you when you tell them that. “Yeah we broke up, but we hope to one day find each other again”. It does sound ridiculous doesn’t it. Time grows distance. But this is where I have found myself stuck. What does love want? “Lets focus on ourselves, and if we find each other again great, if not, we will be happy in ourselves anyway and it won’t matter” we said. This is true, and anyone who knows me, knows very well I need to spend a little time with my bad self and get some ‘self love’ happening. But where is the true, endless, crazy blah blah, disgusting love in all of this? I am not ashamed of how truly I believe in love. So what does it want? Is it indeed that we WILL find each other and that will be the epic miracle that this ridiculous situation has brought and we’ll live happily ever after? Or will we forget? Will he forget my nickname? Will I forget what his scented ‘only for date night’ beard oil smells like? Will we forget what it feels like to love each other? I constantly imagine going above and beyond and making some sort of prodigious gesture of love. Like from all those movies that have probably brainwashed me into my agonising belief of ‘love conquers all’. I did already play our song over the local radio and asked him to listen. Yeah I know…. cheese bag; The soft moist creamy centre of a double cream Brie. We still talk, often, and we still occasionally tell each other how much we love each other. This is where we have to leave it to hope.… Will hope be enough? Do you choose option A: Move on, let it be, focus on yourself and know that you will be okay; or option B: Fuck the time apart bullshit and go get your teammate back, life is too short for this rubbish. What if I die? What if the world ends? What if some alien troll robot actually makes it into this dimension through my never ending sleep paralysis episodes and takes me to an unknown planet to use me for cross breeding? The one thing I would want is to be with the person I love. Has our generation weakened true love?


‘ I found her this morning. That girl. Just for a moment. The fire came back. burning bright and red! I wanted to conquer the world in that second. I remembered what it felt like to be proud of myself. Then, within a few short breaths she was gone. I remembered you were gone. I want to be her again, and I will, soon. But none of it is the same without you. It just doesn’t feel the same…’


Here I am, trying my best to be super fit girl and go to the gym and go for runs again and eat healthier. Trying to make those changes I always wanted to make. Pushing forward and focusing on me. I put his picture back up. Just one. The feeling of appreciation is taking over my uncontrollable anger. I feel her, that girl. She’s coming through. We’ve cut down to 2 wine bottles a week as apposed to 6, and because of this, we can afford the fancy ones and not the $5 unlabelled bottles that are probably just goon sacks distributed into used bottles. That would explain the cracked seal…. I still think of him everyday, wondering if he’s thinking of me too. After a long time of trying to drink long black coffees instead of my regular choice, (because heartbreak makes you hate every day objects and habits if they have even the slightest relation to your ex lover), I’ve gone back to drinking my soy cappuccino with half a sugar. Still isn’t the same without the massive finger dent in the foam but hey, these things take time…. maybe I’ll try sticking my own finger in there to see what all the fuss was about.


‘I see your smile. I hope you are feeding it with the joys of life. I appreciate you, you are my best friend. I love you for all you have taught me, I love you for loving me. I love you for revealing my inner beauty and my true shine. I will see you in our future, whether its standing hand in hand saying ‘I do’, or at the pub as mates, sharing a beer or two. Thank you, for you.’


A happy ending, full of love, laughter, tequila, dancing, fingers in coffees, mushed together words that no one else would understand, the slight stirring together of our hands over the coffee machine at the cafe in the morning; a future? Or, an alternate happy ending, just me, doing my thing with a whole new look on life and a reason for all of this that isn’t standing on the corner of Byron and Jonson at 2 am eating 2 too many meat pies... We will see..

To be continued….

Written by

Taking life really seriously.

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