Dear Rudy,
I’m not going to see Dee for a few days, not until we have our English exam, so I’ve got plenty of time for overthinking things. I sent a heart back to her text about the chocolate, and I’m waiting until I see her again to talk about it properly. Nothing can be mended over texts, and it’s likely I’d find a way to make things worse if I tried. The limbo is agonising, but it feels like pain I should be going through for what I said. I deserve a bit of suffering.
A thought popped into my head today, something that hasn’t occurred to me before. I was just thinking about death and how it happened by accident for you, and it probably happens that way for a lot of people. There are car crashes and house fires and heart attacks all the time. Even if someone dies of cancer because they smoked all their life, it’s not like they really saw it coming. They just forgot to think about the consequences of inhaling toxic smoke for most of their lives, you know? So, if it’s likely I’ll die by some accident that’s out of my control, do I really want to live my life by accident as well? Because that’s what it feels like I’ve been doing for the last seventeen years. I’ve been going along with things, not making choices, worrying and living inside my own head so much that everything that seems to happen to me is an accident. And I want to start living my life with a little more purpose. I have a feeling if you were around, you’d feel the same.
I had a four-hour shift at Robins today and my stomach hurts from laughing so much. I laughed at least once every five minutes for four straight hours, which is like fifty laughs. I didn’t think of my cringe skin, or my grief, or what I said at Byron once. A tiny sliver of self-esteem broke through the murky haze I’ve been walking around in like a light beam and I feel as though I can breathe again.
Aggie and I were rostered on together and we had to move the sale items from one side of the shop to the other. Sundays can be really quiet, so it’s a good time to get stuff like this done. The sale rack is where designers’ mistakes go to die. It’s where the hideous, ill-fitting, bad-patterned, horrible, itchy things take their last gasping breaths before they get shipped back to the warehouse and probably become landfill or couch stuffing. Every time the Robins designers try something new or trendy it ends up here. Everything asymmetrical, anything with a peplum and pretty much every horrible thing with a cut-out side or back is sent to the sale rack eventually.
Aggie turned around from the accessories wall wearing a pair of sunglasses with the lenses pushed out. Her hair was in a top knot and she was wearing a scarf as a shawl.
She put on a quivery voice and said: ‘Good morning Dolores, how is your cat Peggy going?’ It took me a moment to realise she was in character. I grabbed a scarf and tied it around my head. I did my best old-woman voice and replied something about Peggy going on medication for being a flat-earther. It didn’t make any sense, but that was kind of the point. Aggie snorted and had an equally ridiculous reply: ‘I’ve just discovered my Daisy is a climate-change denier so I think she’s going to have to be put up for adoption.’
Maybe it all sounds a bit ridiculous, but I think laughing like that and being silly with a friend who doesn’t think I am weird is really good for me. I didn’t add one thing to my cringe list for the whole shift, and I felt light in a way I haven’t for a long time. I do sometimes laugh and feel light with Dee, but lately I’ve been feeling more heavy than light because I think I’m not a good friend to her. I’ve only ever bought her favourite treat for her once. With Aggie it feels like our talks make me a good friend to her, because she can ask me questions and take my answers on board. We can be silly together because we’re not surrounded by Bens and Jessicas like I am at school. Aggie isn’t just silly though, she’s also really smart and gives good advice. I told her about how I think that now looking back, my relationship with Mitch wasn’t a good one, and she agreed. She called him toxic. I know that’s something you tried to tell me, and I’m sorry it took a new friend to make me see it.
I explained how Mitch didn’t ever have the words to cheer me up, or take the time to try and understand me. I told her how I know now Mitch never intentionally hurt me— he was just lacking something…intrinsic. And Aggie said something that was a little thing to her but a big thing for me. She said I need to take the time to work out ‘what Erin is worth’ before I try to find someone worthy of me, or who I might be worthy of.
We didn’t laugh about that, and we didn’t laugh when a customer came in looking for pyjamas for her mother. Aggie asked if she could help and the woman said no. She gave Aggie a rude look and then she came to ask me where the pyjamas were. I told her Aggie has worked here longer, and that she had a better eye for these things, but instead of listening the lady just kind of threw her hands in the air and left. It was odd and Aggie was quiet. It took me a little while to figure out what had happened, because I naively didn’t think that kind of racism existed anymore. Aggie says she encounters it everywhere, and I told her the lady was probably the kind of person to write lengthy posts on Facebook complaining about the plastic-bag ban, as if that is the worst thing happening in the world right now. Aggie snort-laughed and things felt okay again. You would have realised what was going on sooner than I did, and you would have probably said something awesome to shut down that old bigot. I’m going to try and figure that stuff out sooner in future.
Love, Erin