So soft

on ink and kelp and moving forward, full late-summer moon above.

Trigger warning! Mentions of assault. Not graphic, but still - I’d want to know, so here I am, letting you know in return x

I remember waking up, in my own bed, with someone ontop of me that I admired hugely.

He was staying over, in the lounge room of my share house - and now, at some early hour, here he was. I was young. I was very confused. What was this person that I admired so much doing in my bed, in the middle of the night? Did he need something? Was he upset? Could I help somehow? Oh.

I'd recently broken up with my long-term partner, and had moved back into my old share house, my heart a bit bruised and battered, but welcomed with open arms. Back in with my crew. Which is why I was in the least-good bedroom now - the one under the stairs, with only a small window. The one next to the lounge room.

I remember just focussing on the tattoos on his inner upper arm, where it looked so soft, so soft. Until he was done. And then he let me go, and he left. I don't remember speaking a word the whole time.

But one of my housemates saw him leaving my room in the hazy pre-dawn light, and before the day was done, everyone knew. He had a partner, he was really talented, and he was going places. How dare I? Ew, Kirsten, as if you would. And I still didn't say a word.

Shortly after that, I moved out - we all did, the share house was being sold. This falling-down-but-awesome place, called Trumpet Week because of some urban Newtown myth from long ago, had been the hub of our wider friendship group for many years. All the good parties happened here. All the massive potlucks.

A big lounge room with an endless wrap-around couch - you could stay over, if you needed to. That house was the centre of my little community. And then it was gone.

Everyone else moved in with their partners or went off to teach english in Taiwan or moved in with other friends, in other houses. But not me.

I was frozen, and I crept off to sleep in a musty storage partition in the old flour mills. Down by the trainline, where I'd stashed all my stuff just 'until I found a house'.

It was a frightening place to be at night. The crusty old managers, who lived in some part of the mill buildings somewhere, soon figured out I was sleeping there, and banged on my rickety partition door in the middle of the night, jangling the many padlocks I’d added to the inside of my door, trying to catch me out. But I didn’t say a word.

I learned to keep the lights off at night. And through that winter I learned to curl up on the floor, deeper into my friend's swag, which she's lent to me to go camping at some point, and I hadn't given back, quite yet.

My own inner arms have recalled that night to me ever since. I sometimes dreamed of his tattoos, that inner arm above my face. So soft, so soft. Surely at least part of the fault was mine? I didn't kick. Or scream. Or even say anything at all.

I just waited it out. Same as when I was little. And then, once it was done, gathered up the blame from a whole friendship group who all thought this guy was golden.

I curled around that black ball of shame in my borrowed swag, on the floor in the echoing dark, like it was a precious thing. A familiar thing. My body remembered this feeling, from long, long ago. Hold it all. Don’t let it out. You don’t remember it correctly. To speak would shatter lives. Then you would be even more to blame.

All that long winter.

And I still didn't say a word, even to a dear friend who would have gladly housed me, if they'd known where I was sleeping. I folded it all up inside, and away, with all the rest of it. I disappeared from the wider friendship group. I stopped singing. I stopped performing. I sold all my music gear. I bought a video mixer, and a projector. I cut off all my hair.

And then I spent the next year talking my way into new situations and learning fast, until I wasn't faking it, but actually doing it. Quite well, as it turned out. Touring with trip-hop bands, doing live video performances at both massive festivals and small pubs, hanging with a whole new crew of folks - some of them wonderful, lots of them interesting.

But then the tour would end, and I would return to the old Mill, to curl up in my swag, in the dark. At one point, I bled a strange black sludge for weeks. Apparently it was an STD. I took the drugs the doctor gave me, and promised to be more careful in the future.

I don't remember having a forward plan. I was busy trying to be someone else. I didn’t want a home, anyway.

Many things have happened since then, and many of those things have been good.

But the tendrils of that time and its aftermath have been long, and many. And it turns out that beginning to process trauma that has been so-well-folded-up-inside that you can barely find it, and which was a confirmation and repeat of even older trauma, which you haven't even touched yet, takes a long time to unfold.

But yesterday i finally inked my body, after many decades of wanting to but never being able to decide, to settle, on what it should be… weedy sea dragon, or a twisting line of morse code that wraps around my body, containing the names of all the rivers I have loved?

Or the shape of the coastline where I grew up, that held me so well during those childhood years?

But finally, and suddenly, it happened. Giant kelp, one of my favourite locals, found it’s way to me and started curling its way up my arm. Fine lines by an artist whose work I've adored for years. A push from a friend, who seems to know many things, without needing to be told.

The self-permission to spend a chunk of money on myself, on art, on my body, for no other reason than I love seaweed so much - and I don't want to live in this body for the second half of my life without it.

And curls of giant kelp fronds, swaying in the swell, curling around and around my left inner arm - holding me in their gentle tangle, so soft yet so strong, for as long as this skin is mine.

Re-writing deeply held stories.

Replacing them with swaying kelp and ocean. I belong to me - and I always did, though I didn’t know it. Plus, I'm still here, somehow. And I can continue. Even though. Even with.

So soft, so soft.