volume one hundred and nineteen

hey, don’t i know you?

📍Written from a cafe patio in a small country town, the server has asked me three times if I am ready to order and I am not because they offer too many good veg options here. A good problem to have.

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I have dressed myself in a way that makes me feel something unfamiliar: gorgeous. My pants hug my waist and my hips to show them off as they scream at me “We cannot breathe! Where are your tracksuit pants?”. My crop top reveals my mid-drift and the shape accentuates my chest which has been contained in jumpers and oversized t-shirts for far too long.

I have applied eyeshadow, highlighter and lipstick to my face and fluffed my hair because someone is going to see me in the flesh. Not just anyone, but a room of people. A room of people will see me and they won’t even realise they will. Not that they will be surprised by my presence, just that they won’t care that I am out and about. But I care.

After exiting the overpriced Uber, and walking up the stairs into the theatre, I see I am, as usual, the only one solo in the lobby. Even the pictures on the wall are in company. When I spy some folks wearing masks, I feel relieved because I am not ready to be bare yet either. I join the line without stopping at the bar first. It feels like I missed a step.

The door staff sit me in the rows in front of the stage. As usual, I know the tables and booths that surround the rest of the room are given to couples and groups. Some small talk teaches me that the two people next to me are also solo and got the single-person seats too. Thank goodness.

My nerves kick in as the room starts to fill and I need a moment, so I ask them to save my seat while I go to the bathroom. “Of course!” they reply. “We’re friends now!”.

With my head down and arm clinging to the faux fur handbag on my shoulder, wishing it would grow big enough that I could jump into it, I make my way through the couples in search of a room to peel the these far-too-warm-for-la-weather pleather pants from my thighs to pee.

“Lauren?” I hear from my right. Not me, of course, I don’t live here or know anyone here but instinct makes me glance anyway.

I look down at the couple sitting where the voice came from and see, above a mask, two eyes smiling that I would recognise anywhere. This is the woman who changed my life. She is the one I have met with on Zoom every week for two years as we have worked through barriers and trauma and encouraged play and creativity and new sources of income that fulfil me and setting boundaries and exploring my hopes and dreams and bringing in spiritual practice to my life and the rocky early days of sobriety and the rocky not-so-early days of sobriety.

We hug and I feel her hand brush my back the way someone who loves you does. We have an in-person meeting planned next week, our first, and we discuss how we are both looking forward to it. We discuss what we are both doing at the show, and discover we both know the same person, one of the podcast hosts.

“It’s such a small world!”

I didn’t know it at that moment, but a power bigger than me did, that our in-person meeting wouldn’t happen. This was our in-person meeting and powers greater than us delivered it. They delivered this whole night to me.

The lights dim, the crowd erupts and the show begins.

As soon as he — the one I know, the one whose Instagram post alerted me to $20 tickets for a fun night out — steps on stage, my sober mind understands something it had never acknowledged until this moment: I have been on dates with this man. 

After he opened for his friend who headlined the venue I ran, we went to group dinners and he lingered afterwards with me and we exchanged numbers so that we could stay in touch to fly him out to headline himself. Comedians generally do not make a lot of money until they are famous so the ask to stay with me when that happened, to me made perfect sense.

Then there were months of cheeky replies to almost every story I posted on social media. There were texts sometimes when he woke, and texts sometimes before bed. Suddenly I had someone who gave me encouragement of my creativity and constant compliments. These memories all hit me at once in a montage of guilt.

The last time I visited LA with friends that he also had known pops into my head, when he asked to take me out and did not invite them. His insistence on making it work with my vacation schedule, so much so that he suggested a hangout of just an hour or two, before driving me to the comedy show I was heading to afterwards when folks in LA do not offer to drive anyone anywhere. The night he paid for my wine while he sipped on sparkling water in the fancier-than-me wine bar he chose even though he doesn’t drink suddenly became so obvious. His asking me lots about myself and not about comedy as I expected and wanting to know if we could hang out again felt like details I had never noticed until now.

His seeming hurt when LA traffic stopped me from making our next planned hangout and I didn’t offer to reschedule, assuming he would be relieved he didn’t have to schmooze to get booked.

The compliments and replies stopped then. He never asked about coming to perform at the club again and I never thought more about it because I didn’t see it for what it was.

At the show, I laugh uncontrollably until tears pour into my mask and soak it, making the polka dot print stick to my face. 

Maybe in sobriety, I will be less oblivious.

I applaud until my hands hurt and my body experiences physical sensations it had forgotten about for a long time. Safely from the third row where I hope he doesn’t see me.

Maybe in sobriety my demisexuality will be better understood by me and therefore others.

Like getting a massage and not realising that part of my body existed until they find a knot — I rediscover my tummy muscles and my face muscles and the nerves in my hands and tears that don’t have to come from thinking it is the end.

Maybe in sobriety, I won’t hurt anyone else, like the trailer of all the other hims that suddenly run through my head.

I love LA. It is never short of magical. My idea of magic has grown —  just like me.

Lovely reader, tell me about a time you realised something in the most unexpected of places.

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here are three things I struggled with this week:

🌀 Everywhere I go, there I am.

🤚 Accepting when I need to step back.

📅 Getting frustrated that I am not completely set and settled and calm and awesome here in Australia yet then looking at the calendar and seeing I had only been here 1 week and 5 days… patience. 

here are three blessings from this week:

📚 Cried in the unlikeliest of places: a used book store, browsing children’s books I forgot about. It’s good to be home.

☎️ When I got a text this week that my nephew had gotten Vice School Captain, I could ask if he was free to call, and FaceTimed him to congratulate him. Same timezones means being the Aunty I want to be.

📻 Triple J.

here are three goals for the coming week:

😌 Trust my body to tell me what my brain or heart cannot, yet.

🛝 Let it take the time it needs to take.

✏️ Fall in love (again) with the process.

pics or it didn’t happen:

when the internet goes down nationwide, we go outside

I love you. Now I am off to attend the Central Coast Garage Sale Trail which means more garage sales than we have time for, looking at things I cannot fit in my already 23kg suitcase. But, maybe Christmas gifts will be found?

🧡, LD (lauren deborah | she/they)