Category: anecdotes

Lady mechanic

I would like the status of being a mechanic. Specifically a car mechanic, although I’m sure any kind would scratch my ego quite nicely.

There have been times in the past that I have bragged about replacing my motorbike’s exhaust, or casually worked changing my car’s battery into conversation hoping for implicit kudos. I liked it that time I was putting in a new air filter and a couple of guys went past and were all ‘woah, hey, a lady mechanic!’ and, even though it was maybe pretty sexist, and also I was literally just pulling out a cuboid and putting in a fresh cuboid, I decided to take it.

The thing is, though, I have always been acutely aware that I am skating by the skin of my arse with most of these endeavours. The point at which I’m in over my head is somewhere very close in front of me, obscured by the murky veil of ignorance. I haven’t irrevocably fucked anything yet, but there was that time I couldn’t get the carburettor back in. So, in more recent years, I’ve found myself actively trying to discourage any notion that I know how vehicles work, despite the fact I seem to want to talk about them to the extent that I fear people form…an impression.

I never even find time, these days (nor, if I’m honest, inclination), to indulge my amateur ratchet-handler, so I’ve had to accept it’s a dream that will likely never be realised. It sounds like too much fucking trouble at this point, anyway. I know it’s a long life. Things might change. But let’s be realistic. It might be kind of fun to take up the hobby when I’m like seventy, though. Just for shock value more than anything. I think I have to admit that part of what I like about the idea of becoming a mechanic is defying expectations – though I’m not sure whose, exactly – and becoming an elderly lady mechanic just feels entirely satisfying. Except all of the combustion engines will have been shipped to the colonies by then, so…

Sometimes I think wistfully of the time I randomly got offered an admin job at a garage because the owner liked my demeanour, and he couldn’t match my current salary so offered to pay me under the table, and I thought about requesting some kind of training instead, but then I just never got back to him. Other times I think about how, carried away in a romantic reverie, I nearly convinced my ex we should buy a Volvo 850 together, in my head thinking I could just do any work on it myself, because we sure as fuck couldn’t afford to pay someone. Maybe I should have gone through with it – we’d have broken up a lot quicker.

No one in my family even had a car until I was a teenager, and there was really no-one in my life at all who knew anything about cars, so I guess maybe that created some kind of mystique that lured me in. But it also created a barrier – cars seemed inaccessible to me, so I never even considered that I could learn about them. Which is kind of weird and disappointing. Looking back on the thought processes of my younger self is often fucking weird and disappointing. Irrational limitations juxtaposed against overexuberant ambitions, leading to a circle jerk of drama and wasted energetic capability. It was such a weird place to live, but I just didn’t know it at the time. How reality has changed.

Anyway. I’m not a mechanic. Which is a shame, because I need one.

Posted on by Yve 0

Unavoidable things

Does Yve shit in the woods?

Just fucking barely.

After I dropped Makaloo off at school this morning, I returned to my car and was immediately met with a disturbing sensation. My bowels required evacuation. And urgently. I was planning to head over to the cafe at a nearby country park to do a bit of typy-typy. Could I make it there? Well, it was either that or shit all over my fucking heated seat, so I guessed I’d have to.

It was an eight minute drive of putting more faith in sphincter muscles than I was remotely comfortable with and, even once I parked, I wasn’t convinced I could make the thirty or so metres I would be required to perambulate to reach the toilet .

I made it to the main doors, but then…crisis struck. The building was closed. There was only one option left. I dashed back to the car, grabbed a packet of baby wipes, then doubled back so I could slip round the side of the closed visitor centre, the situation in my GI tract growing ever more desperate. There were dog walkers to one side and the car park to the other. I was surrounded. I stalked further and further into the nettles and brambles, hoping to reach a sanctuary far from where any sane people would dare to tread. There was no time to think. No time to strategise. I was running on instinct, adrenaline and primal necessity.

Finally I reached a ditch, hidden from the passers-by the best I could tell, and far enough from the beaten track that the discovery of my deposit wouldn’t be inevitable. It was over in seconds, but I remained in my squatted position, hind-quarters exposed, for a minute or two at least, awash with the kind of relief that reminds you how trivial most of your worries are. During that time my gaze landed serenely upon the long, dark windows of the visitor centre. A clear line of sight. Anyone in there could have witnessed the entire thing. And to my back, I realised, the car park still but metres away, the tree cover sparser than I had imagined. A driver pulling into any one of those bays would have come by a harrowing eyeful.

I didn’t care. I could have been encircled by a mob of jeering spectators at that point. This was bigger than pride or self-respect. This was a matter of simple biology.

Once I’d dealt with the aftermath as best I could, I bushwhacked my way back out of the greenery, not back the way I’d come but pressing on until I emerged further along the mainstream route. I’d simply been taking a detour, nothing suspicious about it. And then I kept walking, wanting to put both spacial and temporal distance between myself and recent events.

While I was walking, I found myself repeatedly amused by the idea of a dog unearthing the poorly concealed prize, and returning to its owners smeared in my disgrace. Under many other circumstances this kind of thought would have me feeling terribly ashamed for being such a disgusting inconvenience. How dare I be so irresponsible? But in this instance, there was just nothing that could have been done. I did my very best with the situation I was presented with. If events had unsavoury implications for other parties in the future, well, shit happens.

Forty-five minutes later, I was returning to my car when I heard a couple on the other side of the trees trying to call their dog out of the undergrowth…

Posted on by Yve 0

Impossible possibilities

One day, in the autumn of 2017, I was sitting in the cafe of the local library with my boyfriend and our few month old son. My coffee was too hot, we didn’t have much to say to each other, and I was scrolling through Facebook.

The world around me went quiet as I lighted upon a post from someone I’d stayed with in Texas, back in another life. I went still and silent for long enough that my boyfriend asked me what was up.

“Adam died.” I said, quietly confused and surprised by the words coming out of my mouth.

“Who’s Adam?”

Who’s Adam? Who is Adam? Who is Adam to me? Who am I to Adam? How do I categorise Adam? How do I answer this truthfully? How do I answer this accurately?

“You know, the guy I was…kind of…seeing for a bit in Austin.” I came up with.

“Well you weren’t really seeing him, were you?” he scoffed with a note of condescension and maybe defensiveness. He was right, though. I was not seeing him. That wasn’t remotely the right word. In reality I had probably spent less than a week staying with Adam and his housemates. Was I supposed to say the guy I had a fling with? The fucking holiday romance? Was I supposed to bypass that entirely and just say one of the people I stayed with? Someone I used to know? That all felt ridiculous. I needed something to portray the level of intimacy we’d shared; the multi-layered nature of our connection; the importance of our encounters on the trajectory of my life. And, honestly, in that moment, now that he was gone, I needed to feel like I had, in some way, at some time, mattered to him as much as he mattered to me. There wasn’t an adequate explanation for who Adam was.

Adam was the person I stayed up watching documentaries with until 5am the first night we met. Who I wordlessly exchanged dirty foot massages with long past 2am the night after that. Whose bedroom felt like the safest place I’d ever been. Who surprised, disarmed and utterly baffled me with the understated sincerity of his kindness toward me. Who shone a light on the absurd depths of my sense of unworthiness, and simultaneously made me feel worthy by association. Who pushed my boundaries in really uncomfortable, wholesome ways, with such expert grace and gentleness that the experience was enchanting. Who showed me what love could really be like, even though we were both in love with other people at the time. Adam was probably the best person I’d ever met. Adam was the person I most wanted to be like.

Over the next few days I quietly pondered how the news impacted my life in no tangible way whatsoever, yet gently rocked me at my core. How, if I ever returned to Austin, it would now be distinctly lacking. How there was no longer any place in the world I could go to find him. How his absence made the world worse, not just for me, but for so many people who knew and loved him. How, of all the people I knew, in a very objective sense, he was very close to the top of the list of people I would least want to die. How it didn’t change any of the memories I’d made with him. How, in many ways, he didn’t feel any more gone to me than he had been for the past two years, and that had never really bothered me. How, actually, I felt free to feel closer to him now. How, actually, he didn’t feel gone at all.

I also battled with my ‘right’ to grieve for him. And, even moreso, my ‘right’ to feel close to him. My ‘right’ to talk to the air around me as if he was there. My ‘right’ to feel guided by his non-corporeal energy.

And then I wandered through thoughts of destiny and fate. What if I hadn’t left Austin? What if I’d gone back? We wouldn’t have had a successful long term relationship, I was pretty sure of that, but what if I could have altered events just enough that he wouldn’t end up on that road in that car at the exact moment a drunk driver came along? Is that how much of a knife-edge we all live on? Or did all roads lead there for him?

Adam was an extraordinary human and, for that, he was blessed with the love and admiration of many people. To me, he was a full-spectral oasis of radiance in a desolate wasteland of disconnection and missed opportunity. To him, I have no doubt, I was just another person he chose to share some time with. It didn’t mean I didn’t matter to him, but the relative importance of me to his full, open-hearted life could never match his impact on my own.

For years now, I’ve sat with that understanding, and I’ve continued to feel close to him, and guided by him, and I’ve made sure to consciously allow that for myself despite the ever-creeping guilt when I think about the people who really lost him.

And he’s made my life better. Sometimes he plain made it bearable. Remembering him, and imagining him with me, imagining what he might say to me, drew me forward through a lot of tumult. And I doubt I would have given myself permission to do that if he’d been alive. And so the world’s loss has, in some ways, been my gain, which feels perverse. Then again, had he been alive, perhaps I could have heard what he’d actually say to me, and that would have been better. Perhaps this is just a story I tell myself to make it okay.

Last night, for the first time in a very long time, I felt drawn to find the video of a song he recorded the week I arrived in Austin. And, as I watched it, I sobbed. And I let myself feel true fucking brutal loss. Because I’d been there, with him, in that room, and he’d pulled that mattress down from the wall while I stood in the doorway. And he played me that song, and I was relieved to honestly say that I liked it. That was the version of him I knew. That was the version of him I touched. That was the version of him I kissed. That physical body, those exact human cells, immortalised in moving pixels. But he’s gone, and I miss him, and how can someone like that just be gone?

And, even more selfishly, I sobbed because I’m at a place in my life now where I’m so much more ready for a man like Adam to grace me with his presence. I couldn’t make the most of the time I had with him when I had it. If he were alive, at least I could fantasise about the possibility of reconnecting.

Maybe that was always the heart of it. I always knew what he was, and I knew I was on the way to it. And, regardless of what form it took, I wanted to be able to stand face to face with him when I got there. But he doesn’t have a face anymore. He’s not a man anymore. So I can’t.

Posted on by Yve 0

Just own it

I used to find it impossible to admit to my mistakes and failings.

I’d drag myself over hot coals for the slightest misdemeanour, but outing myself to somebody else? Not a fucking chance. I think I thought everyone else was a whole lot closer to perfect than I was, and the only way I could ever be remotely accepted by anyone was to at least pretend that I was too.

When I was younger, this resulted in me snaring myself in kneejerk denials that led to bizarre, convoluted, improv lie-trains that surely weren’t fooling anyone. As I grew up, I calmed my powerful instinct to deny, and instead developed a more sophisticated tactic of mitigating my blame. I also learned to skirt around the lie; to say true but misleading or distracting things that let me avoid disclosing the dirt.

I always felt guilty about trying to shirk the guilt, so I was always struggling to change my behaviour. But the shame within me was just so crippling that I was never wholly successful. I could never fully own my shortcomings.

A few years ago, I was working for board at a family homestead in Northern California and one of my hosts took me into San Francisco to meet her friend who was flying in. We were meeting in a jazz bar, and after we found parking, there was a short walk up a decently inclined street. I hadn’t given it a thought, and started walking at my usual pace when my host had to stop me. She was very overweight and couldn’t keep up.

She told me about how she could barely walk a block these days, and hills got her out of breath in a few steps, as we made our slow and staggered ascent. What she described, and what I could see, was a reality I couldn’t imagine, and had my mind reeling at the countless implications it must have for every moment of her life.

But then, more strikingly, she very matter-of-factly told me how deeply it bothered her, how it was a very real, very big problem in her life that she was very aware of, and how simultaneously she was very aware of the fact she was doing absolutely nothing about it. No excuses, no complaining, no sugarcoating, no joking, no agenda – just a plain, simple describing of the very personal facts in a totally casual, unloaded way.

This was a quality of hers that I saw displayed a number of times while I stayed there. She just owned herself and her flaws entirely. Fucking wow. I want that level of bravery. I think that was the first time I’d really seen true authenticity modelled to me in the real world. It was inspiring, and it stayed with me.

There are still certain areas of my life that I find it difficult to own up to, but damn have I come a long way. Finding a metric to aspire to instead of a metric to fear made all the difference.

Posted on by Yve 0