Sarahribu

Oh! Emancipation of the body does not equal that of the mind. I may have a salary and pay my way in the world but a Sunday is a Sunday is a Sunday, and I wake nervous my Mother will yell and tut for my deadly sinful habit of gluttonous sleep. But my mother isn’t here, I’m a modern girl with a house and bills and housemates who would never violate the sacred space. Privacy is the main currency of shared living, something I have never been very good at. At school everyone knew of my gossiping tendencies, and I used to follow any thread that sounded interesting with a ‘what-what-what-what?’ badgering poor girls until I knew their crushes and secrets, which I could then attempt to sell on the open market for a modicum of cool. I’m older now, sneakier, but sometimes the gossip hound resurfaces, crass and awful and greedy for illicit knowledge.

I have a childish craving for pancakes. I made them a lot as a young teenager, my party piece for making parents proud, breakfast in bed on a sleepy Sunday, tropical sunlight and lush greenery against good old-fashioned crepes Francais, mais oui, c’est delicious. I shouldn’t have them for the sake of thighs, but this is what emancipation is about, doing the things that are bad for you with no one to answer to but you.

They are gelatinous in the middle, and my tea is cold by the time I’m done, but I can only eat them with relish, or at least with syrup and lemon. Defeated, I retreat to the whirlwind. My housemates dominate the rest of the house, but this is my corner. With each iteration phase of my life the space I occupy gets smaller as my dreams become grander. It is as if the space around me contracts as I aspire, so will I live in a singularity once I am truly successful? The cleanliness I practice outside of it; carefully clean plates and neatly stacked game boxes, shoes squared by the toes next to the door, makes the horror behind it all the more distressing, I live like a chaos junkie, everything askew, piles everywhere atrocious and distressing. It makes me tired, but facilitates useless sleep, fetid dreams of quiet fiction lives and broken electronics taunt me before I wake, stepping on things that go crack in the night, slamming the door behind me to hide my shame and trap the chaos within.

But it is Sunday, and that is the habitual day of cleaning that maybe later in life will become traditional, folding and hiding and smoothing away my possessions so I can ruin it all again during the week when my head is mad with tiredness and I throw things into piles past caring. There are plastic cartons in plastic bags I have been meaning to recycle and expropriate from the trash, but today I feel failed by my ambitions and I lose a few hours in a book and new feather pillows, calming the anxiety by turning my face away and into a swamp world. When I arise later, the girl in the mirror has her girlishness disguised as a column, patterned cotton extending the swell of my hips to the floor. The writhing of my near-sleep have taken my hair and whipped it to a red crumpled storm, as per usual. My friends and lovers who have shared my bed tell of nights where I by turn mumble and enunciate unspoken desires, working my head into frenzy in the cheap softness of my pillow. I wake to find again an impression of Einstein staring back at me, eliciting laughs when I stumble onto the cold tiles of the kitchen for the morning’s infusion and satiation.

For all of this I am a pretender to the art of the sleepy weekend. I boast loudly when questioned about it, claiming a past of hedonism and obscene lumps of mouth-watering meats and cocktails prepared in the tradition of the Empire. In fact, I am a pale pretender to the crown my Father will never relinquish, for he is a man with a ruined liver whose main love in life has always been making people happy through the application of spirits and bawdy jokes. It was years before I realised his childhood stories about ghosts were really about alcohol, because children are inherently more open to speaking of the spirit world than adults, who are wise to wordplay. A sign of the loss of innocence is the sudden understanding of puns. I fail to cook properly, manage a few seconds of blissful relaxation with the paper before something in my head whirrs into action and I clamber for a pen and paper, a line stray in my mind that maybe might be the key to my eventual salvation, but by the time it has evaporated and I cannot relax again.

Instead my weekends left to myself are like dreams in themselves, unstructured parries of neurosis and accomplishment that ultimately are for naught by the time the alarm sounds Monday morning, and I drag my feet from their warm cocoon into the real world. I force oxygen to push down the anxiety that bubbles, cauldron-like behind my lungs. I pound away the worries with water pressure and floral suds. I slip my now-cool feet into plastic dreamboats and drag a brush through Einstein, banishing him for a day.

What are you doing for your birthday? I am genuinely interested, because I’m so torn at the moment whether to be prudent or to do something so that in the future I can use it as an anecdote at dinner parties.
While we’re sitting around, let me tell you about my fantasies. Not sexual, most of my sexual fantasies are uninspired and laconic. You could probably even call them brusque, functional. No, my sexuality is not the interesting part of my brain. It’s the holidays’ part that is the fantasies you want to hear about.

When I was twenty-one I almost blew my entire savings on a trip to Korea after exams. I was tired, my body felt like a worn out husk, a maize of ennui, if you will. The mixture of a final project about collapsing economies of the 90s, plus downtime habits of soap operas and a life long love story based on the potentiality of a life in a country I don’t know. I checked out, a stubby finger with a dissertation induced screen-tan hovering over the booking page and chickened out. Instead I got drunk and bought a jacket I never wearr. My vigour dwindled into rigor, exams and graduation passed as a blur. In retrospect the money came to use during the obligatory unemployable graduate period, where I flitted between family members to thoroughly wear out my welcome as the useless sponger only a bachelors degree can make a girl.

I was gifted with the storybook event that my graduation, the moment I had dreamed since I was a little girl detesting graphics and steaming in her sexual tension, coincided with my 22nd birthday. It’s the stuff epilogues of films are made of. I escaped the grasp of education, my seductive mistress, back to my adopted hometown, twisting from her grip, no longer special, mentally complete in accordance with state guidelines. My friends and I got drunk for two days and abused a DSLR camera in the summer sunshine, popping fresh cherries between our teeth. It was a beautiful birthday.
It should have been a turning point in my life, but I find it hard to reinvent myself in late June. The sunshine is so beautifully dappled; everyone joyous and half nude, the freckles on cute girls’ faces out to play. I’ve always been someone to reinvent herself when the seasons wane to coolness and the social skin sheds a little easier.
(The year before it, uncharacteristically for my birthday but par for the course for this damp isle, rained. We camped in a humid marquee in my back garden as the country flooded. Bouncy castles cancelled due to electrocution risk, which could possibly be ironic. Boys kissed, pizzas were made in awkwardness and couples who were not me fucked in the rain. I turned 21 under two feet of water.

All I remember from my 6th birthday was I was a pirate and fell in the courgette patch. I learnt that supermarkets lie to us, those fuckers are spiky.

My 10th birthday involved both the top floor and the lower basement of the world’s tallest hotel, and my best friend at the time forcing me to buy her a present with my birthday money. Three months later I confronted her, screaming histrionics outside of the year 6 classroom. I remain effortlessly classy and tediously belated.)

Since I became old enough to insist that my parents leave me alone on my most special of days I have stuck to the tried and true equation that Sexually Ambiguous Teens + Alcohol + Bouncy Castle = Unparalleled awesomeness not even Barney Stinson could aspire to.
I turn 23 in just under three months. Without the protective cocoon of my parents’ money and expansive garden I fear my bouncy castle dreams are gone, and so it comes back to holidays, and indulging. I like the idea of flying off to some tiny island somewhere, a bit of non-conventional fluff, wearing an indecent swimming costume and frolicking with non-venomous wildlife. How about a week on a half-forgotten Malaysian island eating more durian than any human could theoretically eat and getting ridiculously sunburnt, followed by a week drinking sugarcane juice in the monolithic shadow of my childhood? When I think of the Asia I grew up in the first thing I think of is fruit, because it bookends it nicely. When I was a pasty child I was unenthusiastic about our move until I was given a travel book, nothing sophisticated, I think it might have been a Rough Guide. I never could be bothered to read books if I could fake out of it through being cunning but I fixated on one picture of a smorgasbord of tropical fruit, the real stuff, mangosteen, jackfruit, rambutan and the queen, the sexually aggressive owner of my social decadence, the durian. This new life was no longer something I refused to think about, instead my eye-enlarged stomach focused on the orgy of tastes to explore and delight in.
(For my first birthday my parents love to tell me that they bought punnets of squashy-delicious summer fruit and watched with delight as I gorged myself stupid on it.)

I teeter on the seesaw of indecision over whether to have an empire themed party, because while the idea of a late Victorian themed party (where there can be cross dressing and gin) appeals, especially since I can make all the Raffles jokes I like and no one can stop me, the whole concept teeters on the edge of racist, which makes me have frothy bubbles of distaste. When it comes down to it, I could do all manner of sensible or outrageous things, not only with my personal public holiday but with my life en generalé, because the only thing that has the potential for stopping me is my own brain, spending habits and social conventions. Perhaps for once, the 27th of June will finally be the day to make a big change.