If you were to ask every person I have ever met for their opinion of me and create an illustration from their descriptions, you would end up with a portrait of a storm. Using black charcoal, you sketch a perverse face in a murky rain cloud. If you are especially dramatic, you would adorn me in symbols of the occult; inverted pentagrams and Lucifer’s crosses, knife-edged and silver.
It is on this principle that I rarely consider others' impressions of me. I instead view myself as a tree. You can see me from afar, gaze upon the weeping tendrils of leaves sweeping the grass below. Few are allowed closer, under the canopy to survey my body and drink the sap. No one sees the network of roots stretching underground but I know they are there, connecting me. You can try to prune me, or even cut me down if you wish. I will remain grounded in the earth below.
Every summer I would pick mangoes. Scaling the prolific tree in the paddock, leaning daringly from limb to limb, plucking ripe, yellow mangoes. With an old digital camera, my mother took a photo of me; sequined and smiling, juice oozing from the tops of the fruits cradled in my hands. I was eleven years old, radiating the innocence and naivety of someone without a TFN or debit card. Up my shirt, I had popped another two mangoes as fake boobs. One pointed to the east, the other to the west as I struck a pose like a lactating Paris Hilton.
It was around this time I started getting catcalled. Uncomfortable but reassured by older people, it’s when the calling stops that you should be worried! It wasn’t just old men or construction workers either; it was boys in their early twenties, older women too. As I aged and grew more accustomed to the attention, I began to understand. I learnt to never show an older man a photo of myself in a bikini. I knew why Pornhub has a teens category - so men can visualise fucking the youngest person they legally can. I understood why men referred to their cars as women, loyal girlfriends purring along freeways. Similar to why old ships were always women, vessels for nurturing seamen across stormy waters.
Unless you count the boy I pashed under the school’s Marriage Tree when I was nine years old, I had my first proper relationship when I was sixteen. To put it rather bluntly, Jesse was a modern-day misogynist. It wasn’t that he believed women should not have the right to vote - he even had a picture of himself at the International Women's Day March as his Facebook cover photo to serve as proof of his progressiveness. No, Jesse was the type of misogynist who believed that hitting women is totally scat, but why should I pay a woman the same as a man if she can’t lift as much? Essentially, Jesse was about as bright as a dead firefly.
When Jesse saw the Paris Hilton-esque photo of me as a child, he commented how he wished my tits had actually grown that big. Instead, I had two mozzie bites on each side of my chest. Despite this, Jesse said he didn’t mind. Jesse would take his own photos of me.
~
I am a creature of habit. Each day I take an exact thirty-minute lunch break, perched on the steps of the old General Post Office; a grand building transformed into the Southern Hemisphere’s largest H&M store. A red neon sign hangs from the front of the facade, its tackiness at odds with the sumptuous architecture. The cigarettes I indulge in daily are beginning to tint the sides of my fingers a cheerful, gangrene yellow.
The coolness of the concrete presses through the fibres of my pants, soothing my thigh muscles. It has been a productive day of work; lately, customers do not seem to feel the urge to abuse retail staff with such gusto. Perhaps there is something in the city water doping the public.
I had my first cigarette at a party when I was seventeen. I also smoked weed for the first time. It was a mundane Friday evening in rural Australia, sitting around a spitting campfire at a weatherboard house with a treacherous driveway and no reception. Typically, the first time you smoke weed you won’t get high as it takes a while to build up the brain’s cannabinoid receptors. Unaware of this, the first time I smoked weed I became convinced that I had the God-given ability to be the next Snoop Dogg. A boy I had not interacted with since primary school, Lenny, would pack and light cone after cone for me, holding his finger over the little air hole while I inhaled and exhaled clouds of grey smoke. Feeding my ego, Lenny acted impressed, cheering at each shaky pull of his Bob Marley themed bong.
In primary school, I had been considered a gifted child with an exceptionally high reading level. I was also incurably shy and desperate to please. Words like angel and innocent were commonly used to describe me. I was moulding into a very respectful young lady. As I aged, I began to despise these words and their connotations. Neighbours would ask me to babysit their children and I would oblige despite possessing no motherly instincts whatsoever. I hated the way women were expected to be either self-sacrificial nurturers, so I opted to be a self-serving hussie. I was desperate to alter my image.
Sitting on the concrete H&M steps, I don’t look so virtuous. The tears in my leather jacket compliment the blossoming crinkles around my lips from the over-consumption of nicotine. Behind me, a newlywed couple are having their photographs taken by a professional photographer. Flashes of white dance behind my back as I stare down at my phone.
A young man wordlessly approaches me. Looking to be around my age, in his early twenties, he has a black camera swaying from a sling around his neck. Silently he squats in front of me, positioning the camera low. Out of a blend of habit and instinct, I freeze my face into an expression of resolute unfriendliness, avoiding the camera’s gaze. I hear the click of the shutter. I wait for the boy to speak, to acknowledge his act of taking from me. He turns his back and breezes away.
~
Jesse detested the kind of woman I had become. I was too similar to him. No longer was I the meek sixteen-year-old, daintily coughing on his second-hand smoke. Instead, I took the liberty to roll directly from his pouch of cheap, black-market tobacco. I had been staying at his house in the part of town my parents ironically dubbed suburbia; a cluster of squat, brick family homes separated by cul-de-sacs and jacarandas.
Collapsed on the lounge together, with Jesse’s overgrown toenails digging painfully into my thigh, I blurted it out.
‘You know, from the fifties and until the late seventies in America, there was a policy where they only named hurricanes after women?’
‘Hmmph.’
‘Yeah. And they would describe them in all these fucked up ways, like saying they wailed like a woman in labour.’
‘Don’t swear. You know I hate that.’
‘You swear all the time.’
Jesse stood up, the television remote skittering across the floor.
‘You’re fucking kidding.’
Pacing back and forth, he continued, ‘Do you have any idea how insufferable you have become? What it is like to be around you now? I bet you secretly like all that feminist, women-are-storms shit.’
‘No, Jesse. That’s the exact opposite-’
Jesse halted. He had his back turned to me, rigid spine tensing up to meaty shoulders. Crack, one knuckle. Crack, another.
‘I’m fucking done.’
I did not feel affected when Jesse broke up with me. It was a relief and an expected one at that. Whilst I had grown, Jesse had remained stagnant. His departure from my life left me with a satisfying emptiness.
~
In hindsight, I do not regret the choices I have made and the places they have taken me. This may change once the emphysema sets in.
Slipping out of my work pants, bum stained with city grime, I desperately crave a glass of red wine. The leather squeaks below me as I sink into the red, lip-shaped lounge. On pulling out my phone, I have seven missed messages.
I open the first; my mother, wishing me a good day of work. I send back a heart emoji, too tired for texting actual words. Next, a message from my best friend, all in capitals, with a link to an unknown blog.
I sit up straight, wine slopping over the edge of the glass and dribbling down the stem. In high-contrast black and white, a small woman is pictured huddled on concrete steps. A cigarette choked between her fingers, she scowls at her phone. Her square jacket cuts across her shoulders, parallel to a harsh, acne-scarred jaw. Behind her are two young lovers captured mid-laugh, cheeks balled like cherries. The result is pitiful.
Underneath the photograph, comments have slowly trickled in over the day. One describes the photograph as haunting, portraying the risks of loving and hating. Another views it as a critique on solitude. A new comment bursts to the top of the list.
Don’t be a feminist kids! Talk about a crazy storm.
- Jesse.
Giuseppina Taverna is a writer in Naarm/Melbourne. Existing only in spontaneously published autofictions, she haunts sad bars across the city and the odd library or two. Her writing features unlikeable protagonists who interact with equally unlikeable antagonists. Giuseppina is regretfully looking to publish more of her work to further impose her writing upon the unsuspecting general public.