📍Written while sitting outdoors at an Italian cafe in Fremantle, with a large pastry slowly disappearing from the plate beside me.
🎤 Upcoming Shows:
Sunday Slouchers Comedy at Quetzal Cocktail Cafe, December 10th
The Traffic Light Game at The Leederville Comedy Club, December 14th
“Have we already passed it?” I ask as we approach the place I expected it to be and it is not. “Louis Vuitton might have taken its place. I thought they were both here, though. Oh, wait… No! I think this happened last time. It’s the next block!”
It’s the next block. It is said with excitement and relief. Please let it still be there. Please don’t let it be a different shop now.
“There it is! Burberry!”
Burberry. A shop I have never entered in the fifteen years I have known this street, learned of its existence, studied this location and found out it used to be a bank before eventually becoming one stop in this expensive retail hub.
It was a winter night the first time I discovered it. I was walking in the same direction down this street, headed towards the same location, showing a different friend the same city via the same route but in a different decade.
My thin hair flapped in the wind, not knowing where to go as much as I didn’t know what to do with it. Long. Girls have long hair. At least the ones that boys pay attention to. That is why I had grown it back out. That’s as far as I got.
I was wearing a knitted baby blue dress. I think my Mum made it for my cousin. Or did my aunty make it for my sister? Its sleeves came down to halfway between my elbows and wrists and were complete with white trim. The neck was the same, with a clear plastic button to secure it in place that I was never sure was the front or the back. Along the chest, the blue was broken up with a rainbow of colours I can only recall two of: strawberry pink and lemon yellow.
Black nylon stockings clung to my legs and scuffed-toed ankle boots wrapped around my feet. I was freezing and like a child, had no idea how to dress myself for the cold.
We were heading from one bar to another, cocktails that each cost more than an hour’s work in our bellies and that were starting to dictate our conversation. My friend was visiting from our small hometown, absorbing the lights, sounds and the urgency of people being out and about after work to do something.
Two other people were with us. They are shadows in the story now, two friends who existed in this time and place that I thought would be my friends forever just as I thought every friend would be back then. Friends forever now genderless, heightless, nameless, faceless, voiceless additions to my memory. They are merely shapes that appear when I picture us stumbling down the street, laughing amongst ourselves in candlelit rooms over the hum of bar chatter, gasping at the magician hired to perform at the tables, and pulling out their wallets when it was their shout.
The four of us shivered and picked up our pace, trying to let the movement warm us. Roughly halfway between the last bar we were at, and the next destination — where our intention was to dance to live music — is Burberry.
It was late and as we got closer I noticed the shop looked open which didn’t seem correct. I saw that three people stood out the front of its closed glass doors. Through them was a lit-up store as if regular trading hours were the same as drinking hours. My eyes adjusted and I recognised that one person was a security guard — standing on the stairs as a barricade between us and inside — with his hands in the pockets of his shin-length peacoat pulling it in tighter around him. The two others were huddled close to each other, trying to hold in any heat they might be able to produce from beneath their party clothes.
“It must be a grand opening or something?” I asked.
“It might be the launch of a new line,” my hometown friend and soon-to-be-renowned-designer replied.
Our destination was still several blocks away and our curiosity was leading all of our eyes inside as we not-so-casually-a-little-too-slowly passed by. Everyone else’s eyes remained on trying to see what we were missing, necks turning to gain perspective. Mine turned to the two people out front. Then to one of them.
Her right hand was tucked under her left armpit for warmth. Her left hand was kept free to hold the cigarette she delicately brought to her lips, leaving behind red lipstick stains. I was in the midst of one of my yet again quitting smoking periods and I wished I was those lips. Then I realised something else. I wished, too, to be the cigarette, to be between her lips.
I knew who she was. Her albums had been on repeat for years in my home, in my best friend’s home, remixed terribly in shitty nightclubs and played often on Triple J. I had come close to sending her lyrics to a boy before Googling “What not to do when you get dumped” and that being the first thing on the list. Thank God. That album and its lyrics got me well and truly over that boy. That boy was the same one I left inside with my friends he had just met the first time I saw her. Before the albums and the remixes, she opened for others and her voice took over me so much that I missed the act I paid to see, happily neglecting my date to instead spend time talking to her outside the venue after her set.
But that was when I was nineteen and I was almost twenty-one now. It had been far too long and she was now far too famous to remember any of that silly chatter.
Once we were out of earshot, I asked my friend a question that could have been translated to “Help me”. It was a wish.
“Do you know who that was?”
“Let’s go back,” is what they had all told me. “Say hello! Ask her if she remembers you!”
“What would I even say? I wish I still smoked so I could ask for a light. I wouldn’t dare ask her for a smoke.”
Maybe I could tell her what her short hair meant to me. Maybe I could tell her the night we first met, I told my boyfriend I loved him and I didn’t mean it. What I really loved was the feeling I had discovered that night when he wasn’t even there. It felt like love was possible. Maybe that was the ecstasy. Or maybe it was the truth. It felt like I had uncovered something everyone else had been talking about when they spoke about excitement, desire, pleasure, and delight at the thought of someone else’s existence in their lives. It felt like something clicked and I could see myself loving someone, someday, if it meant it was as easy as talking to her was. Not that it was him that I loved and not that it was her, either. But just that it could be real.
Three times I walked past her in the time it took for her to finish that cigarette. Every time I walked by she looked at me with kindness in her eyes which said “If you say hello, I will say hello back”.
Lovely reader, is there a place you walk by that will always make you think of a certain memory?
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here are three things I struggled with this week:
🐾 Already miss the dog I am hanging out with and I am not even close to leaving her yet.
📖 Browsing bookshops, holding all the stories in my hands, flipping through the pages already dreading putting them back in their place on the shelf. The struggle is accepting that the only thing I struggle with being a digital nomad, is that I do not have a bookshelf.
🚣 Relieving myself of unnecessary guilt in saying “No”.
here are three blessings from this week:
🌌 The sky looks further away here. It is expansive in a way the grey buildings in my previous home rarely allowed.
🍦 Knowing they do not remember me, but I remember them scooping my vegan banana delights several times a week on my last visit and enjoying the nostalgia.
🖍️ New highlighters. Simple and yet so much joy in the crispiness that they won’t stay new for long.
here are three goals for the coming week:
🍃 Lean into the path I have chosen a little more every day.
🎪 Get to all the Perth markets I possibly can.
📞 Quit playing phone tag and finally get on the phone with my best pal.
pics or it didn’t happen:
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd5b13a43-d3cd-4cd8-b178-edba879ddb0b_4032x3024.jpeg)
I love you. Now I am off to enjoy The Christmas Spectacular. Which is exactly what it sounds like.
We've only lived here 3yrs, so I don't have a wealth of memory to draw upon - but they do all involve Cuddles which is nice.
I've lived in a fair few different locations, and I do wander past places in my head occasionally, sometimes to tell out loud and sometimes just cos. When it's winter I often like to remember living in LA. Lovely warmth. The smell (and taste) of honeysuckle at the bottom of the street.
And these days, I can then remember our honeymoon where I showed Cuddles the honeysuckle one day, and how to taste it.
Warm memories of warmth 🫠