(Warning: What you’re reading is a first draft. I do not like to edit my blog posts – something about them being honest and real. Whatever.)

ACT 1: When I was 17, I got drunk for the first time along Melbourne’s Yarra River. It’s where all students went at the end of the year to forget their high-school woes and to cut loose.

Someone threw up on a cop car (LEGEND!) and I pashed a lot of boys.

The thing is, a lot of us Catholic school girls, especially us wogs, grew up in tortuous communities where EVERY SINGLE step was measured by our parents, neighbours, people we met at a wedding one time, and people who knew our mother and father but we had not seen since we were ten. And either despite this, or in spite of this, we Rebelled with a capital R. I knew lots of Aussie girls who rebelled against being a teenager, but us wog kids, well we rebelled against so much more.

What is incredibly sad is that, at 45, I’m still rebelling.

Against what, you say?

How could someone in her middle age give a shit about what her folks or family think, or even someone they met at a wedding one time?

Well let me tell you: Guilt and Fear do not stop just because you get older. My parents still don’t know about my tattoos (and there are a lot of them), they don’t know that my husband of 20 years and I once separated for 6 months, they know (but don’t want to know) that I have clinical depression and take meds every day (“can’t you just stop taking them?” my mother asks).

I am jealous of those who don’t believe that telling the truth is harder than lying.

How can telling the truth be better than telling a lie to make things easier?

ACT 2: Being high is better than, well, not being high.

You know how some people hold onto their youth by listening to the same music or wearing the same clothes or even holding onto the same hairstyles as that time when they were most happy in their lives (this is the stuff of the best Oprah episodes)? Well, for some reason, I’ve decided to hold onto the most negative times of my life.

When I drank a lot.

Being high makes me think I’m a better writer, a victim, funny, a great friend and wife, more interesting, just more…

And because of this…

Sometimes it feels like I have no past (or just no weekend).

ACT 3: We didn’t have digital cameras in the 80s and I had no money while I was at uni, so that means I have no photographic proof of my memories, my most important memories that explain who I am, whether good or bad.

I don’t have proof of:

– My first acid trip where I saw a cicada that was the MOST GIANT FLY I’d ever seen.
– The time Maree and I made a 4-Season diorama in a shoe box (based on the children’s book, The trip).
– The time, in 1987, when a bunch of us chucked a bunch of dishwashing liquid in the Deaking Uni moat.
– The hitch-hiking posts at Deakin
– The house on Packington Street in Geelong with walls covered in graffiti.
– My “tomato” plants in Geelong.
– Anorexia
– Bulimia
– Passing out in public phone booths from not eating.
– Sit ins against HECS in 1986-88
(pause)
– My purple plastic and flannel-lined raincoat that I picked up in that place on 13th Street near Uni in Eugene.
– The glittery blue bike I bought for a gram of weed in Eugene.
– The first time I met Jeff (although I have a t-shirt from the place where we met)…/

I also don’t see anyone from that time (late 80s). So is the person I remember actually real? Or is she made up? I have no photographic evidence, and a very romantic memory.

My memories of that time are hilarious, though, and it feels like I’m holding on REALLY TIGHT  to a time that wasn’t real, a time that was so fleeting, a time that has no proof. No photos. No friends that still exist (despite Facebook).

I remember a song called “Medication Time” that my friend Maree and I wrote with our voices and a couple of wooden spoons and pots.

I remember breaking into buildings.

I try to hold on.

I look at the white pages for familiar names. I look at Google and see the people who may be related to the things I recall from time to time. I want to contact them to say: “Hey, you really do exist. Did I?”

Did we ever? Did that second-hand (nee vintage) clothing shop really exist? What about Alex and the bikies? What about Michael Head, my first love who laid me down in a bed of roses (actually a field of dry grass)?

I hold onto those memories as though they are the greatest in the whole world, better than cream and sausage rolls.

These memories only have first names.

Only first names, because we were not meant to live this long, let along worry about last names.

I knew a fruitarian who walked around naked;
Mars, a guitarist with a heavy hand who became a chemist;
His fat girlfriend, Robyn;
A dealer called Alex and all her bikie friends
A black lesbian called Maree, who was neither black nor a lesbian (but we spent every second together and we wore black)

Where the hell are these people? How could they have changed my life eternally but also have no presence. Why the fuck aren’t they on Facebook?