Went to Uluru yesterday on a tour bus. I don't think I'm meant for tour groups.
I want to do everything at my own pace, which is neither consistently fast nor slow, but it's a lot of fast with moments of quiet stillness, and tour groups kill that spirit in me.
On the way up, I was reading Jeanette McCurdy's first novel, Half His Age, which probably set the tone to some extent, got me stuck in my head thinking about how much I don't fit in with most people because most of my existence has been something that makes other people squirm and as a result, I make myself smaller.... this isn't a new finding by any means, but it was weird to read a story about a girl describing her life as a 17-year-old born from white trash, someone who confuses sexuality with love, someone who eats and buys emotionally... someone who doesn't trust other people who have it easier because she knows they won't really, truly understand her situation, and why should they?
It reminded me of how I read Lolita for the fun of it when I was 14 after watching the movie... also for the fun of it. Made me question what kind of 14-year-old watches a movie like Lolita for the fun of it and then reads the book for the fun of it.
And it should have made me think about me at 14, 15, 16, 17... but instead my brain went straight to my ex Chris, because that's the socially palpable version of the same feelings. about sex.. the feeling of being addicted to being chosen in a way where sex is the prominent bartering tool, to the extent that I abandon everything else about myself... not because I really feel like I'm "abandoning" everything else about myself, but because those other things feel so weak and lame and boring in comparison to the excitement, to the nervy tension of being chosen conditionally, for feeling perfect in a brief moment, only to have it taken away at the slightest fault, to crash and feel like nothing is real, nothing matters.
And now I couple this reading with Uluru.
And it's weird, because Uluru is not similar to that. Uluru is a place where the Anangu people had their land taken from them, who then had their land returned, who then shared their land... but it's all in the framing... you stop at these road stops, and you see graffiti on the toilet stall walls to give us back our land. But the nice little pamphlet at the cultural center lets you believe that the Anangu people are at peace with colonization. And yet I don't know the Anangu people, I don't speak their languages, I barely feel a closeness with other white people... so I'm wary of their interpretation of just about anything... and yet I am white, so I am naturally grouped with the whites by the indigenous.... and I feel a murkiness about my place in all of it... I don't belong anywhere, and yet all I want to do is to have a translator that lets me truly pick the brains of everyone to get to the root of the questions I want answered.
After we left Uluru, we had a sunset barbecue. I tried to do some writing, but I feel like I keep trying to force writing a book linearly when the ambience I'm in doesn't want me writing about the part I'm currently on, doesn't give a fuck about Sasha asking me if I knew what a merkin was in 2013... I can't force that. Nearby, a lady in my group was doing a watercolor painting of Uluru. Everyone crowded to her in admiration of her talent... and I felt the sting of knowing that whatever I was doing was, value-prop-wise, as tawdry as the merkin I was trying to write about.
I concluded, who even is a merkin--a pussy wig--made for? Why was it funny to Sasha? Why was it a question aimed at me, the person who he assumed was supposed to know the answer to all of the supposedly vulgar eccentricities of the world?
I got up and wandered off, the rain clouds blocking the sun cast a fully arced double rainbow directly over Uluru. It felt rare, stunning.
I got back on the bus before the sun even set, not needing to see the gentle shift of color on the rock from red to purple.
And the tour operator, some hot Italian guy, came on the bus asking me if I was okay... since I was the only person on the bus, and why, and I didn't have an answer... I'd seen what I wanted and I wasn't about to explain my defiance to make meaning out of a shift of colors on a rock in the presence of 50+ tourists who were brought together to find specific meaning in that shift.
I didn't say those words. I couldn't say those words.
He just said, "Fair enough."
I keep thinking all of this murkiness is going to neatly compact itself into something meaningful for a book, but what if it never does, what if this is what happens to every brain like mine... maybe that's the basis of Pandora's box, that once you open it, all the miseries flow freely forever, never reconciled, never neatly captured... never oohed and ahhed at like the nice lady from Spain with her watercolors.
What if that's the curse?
Anyway.
I got back to my hotel after midnight and had a dream that I was writing my book... a whole section about Chris, about Barcelona, just brief, pithy, almost clinical notes about the things he'd done wrong.
And as I wrote them, I kept accidentally selecting phrases, deleting them, adding new, deleting them... and it was to a point where I couldn't get back to the writing I wanted in the way I wanted it with cmd + z alone.... I grew irritated.... I'd found a way to explain the harm in a way that landed... and then it was overexplained, overwritten, in my own mind clear that it would not land with an audience... and that people around me would stop and ask, "It's been over a decade... who cares?" But it wasn't about him. It wasn't about whatever he did. It was about me.... about how the bad things that people do to me continue on their own timeline.... and how I can't ask people to fix it.... because it's already happened.
