“When you find yourself pondering into the fearless past. It’s a necessity to use it as awareness; that this moment, riddled with emotions, will also be nothing but a beautiful memory you wish to relive.” – Riley Dyson
“Cut!” yells the director of my life.
“I forgot it was only a movie,” I say to Ayelen.
“So did I, I have to go now.”
“Goodbye, I love you.”
“I love you too” she replies.
“I am sorry,” I say.
“You don’t have to be.”
“But I am.”
“Then I forgive you.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“You are welcome.”
“When you find yourself pondering into the fearless past. It’s a necessity to use it as awareness; that this moment, riddled with emotions, will also be nothing but a beautiful memory you wish to relive.” – Riley Dyson
Now I go back to my room, the trailer of the movie set, pack my bags, sit in reality that can not live up to the hype. The body requires patience. It cant resolve things like the mind can. It keeps the score, the score alcohol can wipe clear from your thoughts. I write to capture the inspiration and soon watch the memories turn to memories, solidified in stone, yet unable to steal from anymore. Today, I surrender. Moving rooms, forgiving myself for not wanting to do anything good. Nothing worth writing. Sit and watch half a movie. Close my eyes and have half a sleep. Smoke the last of the weed and get half a hit. Masturbate and get half the pleasure. Everything is half of what it was, and I still look at the grey in the sunset that was orange when she was here and I am okay. Mature of you, Riley Dyson.
I look around, see if I can catch my demons watching. Smiling at them, they smile back, and I realise they are only the definition I give them, they are only playing a role and I'm casting the scene. Quite abstract, you're every person at the movie set and it all comes with you. I started getting headaches and the motivation to be a human and interact within this game just does not seem to make sense. Fine, it wont then.
I watched a quarter of an old football game I played in 2015 on YouTube. Watching it, it is almost comical, surreal. To hear all the anger and desperation in the voices yelling at the players. Watching me and seeing all the weight I was carrying inside that head. Twenty-two years old, the life of:
Wake up at 5:30am. The room is dark and miserable. I didn’t sleep because of the anxiety from drinking Saturday night. Message the girlfriend, try and find some form of comfort in her. Drive to work in my 1998 holden commodore. Windscreen fogged over, it is 2 degrees and I turn the air conditioner on to clear it. The radio does not work because you snapped your aerial with a ball 6 months ago. Kanye West – Yeezus is the only cd you have, and it never gets old. Almost die driving in the dark on the highway peering through a 5cm hole of vision. You cant wait, if you are a few minutes late, well, its just not worth it.
Park the car, walk to the boss’s car. Same boss who replied to an eighteen year old at the start of his apprenticeship, on his first day, “Who do you follow in the footy?” “Don’t follow footy,” he says. “Love work too much.”
5:30 amWell, we are fucked then cause I don’t follow work because I love footy too much. He was a cocksucker but I can extend the gesture of empathy to him too.
At work, going around, changing over exit lights at a school. Then crawling through a roof. This man, who is just a kid as well, emotionally manipulating me with his status. Well, he did pay me, enough for a Saturday night.
From my car, drive to the pools for recovery of football. Swim laps. Hot, sweaty, into my car, long drive home, same cd. Mum didn’t know I was coming home tonight, no dinner.
“Well, I didn’t fucking know,” she says from the couch.
Have toast. Go to bed, set the alarm for seven hours time.
Same, but after work, do 140km an hour on the backroads to get to football training by 6 p.m.. Rush, train, yell “C’mon boys! that’s not good enough!”
Shower, speak with the boys and talk about Saturday night, “How did you pull up?”
“How did you pull up?” everyone asks.
“Fucking sore on Sunday.”
And if anyone had fucked up on the piss, it wasn’t mentioned, not to their face anyway. More anxiety, I feel like I did something? Or I know what I did, they just might as well.
Home late, mum has cooked dinner, sits on the kitchen bench, microwave it, eat it on my lap on the couch as dad watches The Sopranos. Cold Pepsi max, the fire is going, I let ralph inside. After dinner, sit on the carpet with him. Finally now, the heart slows, that’s where home is.
Tits come on the tv.
“Do you watch anything without fucking in it?” Mum asks dad.
“Here, you pick something then,” he says, putting the remote in the air.
She doesn’t take it, she just wants to complain, its part of the homely feeling.
Dad sits in his big chair.
“Let Riley pick something,” Mum says.
“I'm going to bed soon,” I say, with the constant dread of falling asleep because it’s a portal to having to go back to work.
Work, it is just something so fucking boring. So you spend most the time just trying to make time go faster and you soul is broken because you are rushing towards death, but it feels as if you have already died, everything happened too quick, and now you are just here… Forever?
After work I go see the girlfriend. Pick one, they all played a similar role; be there for someone who cant be there for himself. Spend time with them, and for just a brief moment in a life that seems to be dedicated to everyone else, you hold them and you see in the eyes of another, that you can be loved. But at that age, its hard to believe them, so you prove them wrong, and then they leave.
Work and dinner at the club! they pick the teams and we all feel very special. Walk into the rooms after having a shower and you feel like you are someone. Sit with your brothers and eat, stay up late. Cum every night before sleep, either into the girlfriend or on to your stomach.
The excitement of football gets you through. Carb load! Watch the football on Friday night and all the pain and angst from work relieves itself that you don’t have to go back for two more days.`
Put monumental pressure on something designed to release it. Convince your mind you are willing to die today! Summon any emotion required to be fearless, which is mostly fear. Play. Cant even fucking remember it now. But watching the footage, I felt like a war veteran watching the battle of Normandy. An artist couldn’t construct it, couldn’t get people to take it that serious. I don’t know how I feel about it, it is all a bit funny now, but taught me whatever heartbreak didn’t. Now, I take my new role seriously, the character of the writer. I was not very good at football, but at the time I thought I was, could it be that its all happening again?
Well, I am getting better and don’t have to bring the body along as much. So give it time, we will get there one day.
With the excitement of a win or the anger at a loss, you drink. You didn’t die, you, for four thirty-minute quarters were like a roman gladiator out with the lions, playing with them, and you watch people fall around you, but today, it was not you. Everything the body held from living a life that is not yours, releases into the primal clash of another, falls into the grass I can still taste today. The beer is to keep the party going. You cant expect to have all that masculine energy, with angry men yelling at you and then praising you, where men can show all the emotions they have to hide during the week, that little voice inside their head can now, for some reason, yell. It is a bit comical, and I was a good sergeant myself.
Whenever I laugh about it with my friends they always say the same thing, “You used to take it too serious!!!!!”
Yes, I know you dumb cunts, that’s my point.
And gosh it felt good, to not know there's a separation between body and mind, to have it all so stuck together you didn’t know it wasn’t. Soon, you lose the sweetness of the illusions. Suffering washes them away, and you have to go on a large journey to feel the same but from a deeper place. On Saturday night we would drink somewhere, then get in a cab and go somewhere. I would drink to hide any fear. To be who I was! A fucking champion.
Wake in the girlfriend’s bed with scratches all over my face and in my mouth. I spent the night in the police station. I was kicked out of a nightclub for letting a friend in through the side door. My girlfriend was in there so I climbed on to the roof off a house and jumped on to the beer garden, over a six-metre drop. I did this three times, kept getting kicked out.
The last I confessed to going home, “I'm done.”
They grab me and hold me down, put me onto the kitchen floor. One Indian, with long nails has his hand in my mouth. I bite him. As I bite him his nails dig deeper into my gums. I have to step back into my soul and stop biting him, for the pain to stop. How metaphorical.
I spoke the ears off the policemen at the station. In the end they thought I was in the right, that he shouldn’t have grabbed me, but I shouldn’t have sneaked in.
“I know, I admit that, I had just started seeing this girl and I felt worried. I know my emotions come from a negative place, but with the drink and just my own head lately, I made a poor decision.”
“We still have to file a report.”
“That is completely fine.”
They let me leave.
I told my girlfriends parents I got pushed into a bush. All the scratches in my mouth ulcered. Dirty Indian nails.
Charged with drunk in a public place, trespassing and assault. The judge was good, he just gave me a fine.
“Gee, you really wanted to get on to that dance floor didn’t you?” he laughed, and I smiled, just enough to say yes, but I am sorry.
back to work.
So I guess the mind starts time travelling when you are feeling a bit grey. I don’t regret those days. I love them, but they finished. Getting lost in a role, that’s what life is all about. Laughter is a reminder that its great, and sometimes the comedian needs to hear the laugh more than the audience needs to laugh. Back then, and still now, you couldn’t complain.
“You could have it a lot worse!” everyone says.
“How? There's no time for it,” I would reply, if I had retrospect in presence.
It is okay to be sad, it is okay, to think that this could be better. I have felt pain and misery so strong, I have felt so restricted and lost, I have felt so much joy and elation, I have felt… and because I continue to, change ensues, for better or worse, but there's a trust, and an obvious feeling of things falling off of you. After all that time of trying to put things on. I would not change anything, but I did and I am not rushing back. Forgive me for painting it all in a negative way, if I have; I am just the paintbrush, I rarely get to choose the colours. But its nice to speak to the soul, even when your body is disagreeing with it.
