maylands - michael's house
i lived here with mike between the winters of 2020 and 2021. it was a damp, hot and low ceilinged house which would have been outright depressing if mike hadn't cheered it up with plants, pastel colours and unicorn paintings. the people who lived in the house also made it a good place to live: pip, laura, ryan and desmond. although i spent a good chunk of time here being depressed and insane, the time i spent with mike and these people were good.
me and mike spent a lot of time playing his ps1. speed freaks and tekeen and worms. i even wrote a banjo song about this:
mike, you had me at worms.
when you said lets play worms.
.
mike go easy im down to one,
you been whippin my ass with the bazooka gun.
worms came out in 2001
and i'd still be playn it in 2021
.
evie, get out of my house
me and mike are tryn to play worms.
evie was mikes good friend who would always come over and be unpleasant to me.
mike left to taiwan at the end of 2020 and i was living for the first time with people who didn't want to hang out. i was hating doing highschool relief teaching, and covid had severed the weekly routines of gigs, board game nights and house parties. restrictions had eased up, but it seemed that everyone had gotten too used to the comforts of video games and "quiet nights in" and "practicing self care". the idea of fomo was gone, and now it was socially acceptable, if not encouraged, to bail on any plan at the last minute. i gave up trying to organise people together and slowly became more and more isolated. then one night, a flash of insight told me that we had reached the era of post-friendship.
what i accept with grace now i couldn't accept then. i drank a bottle of gin and a bottle of fireball and smashed them on the road. then i laid down in the glass. i only cut up a bit of my forehead and a bit of my hands. i probably would have kept making wounds but i remembered that i had said yes to teach at a private catholic highschool the next morning. i stumbled back inside, texted my sick note, and passed out. when i woke, it was night again. the next couple months i spent with my family, trying to organise a future. i enrolled back into art school and also, as a more sensible option, enrolled to do a certificate of english language teaching. but still, after this mental break, i never felt quite at home in the world again.