Kat George

There we were, on the face of the moon—a foreign landscape of preternatural beauty, and so captivated were we that our balance from time to time would fail us, and we’d fall, breathy and flushed, into our awe. I guess in all the heady romance and misty magic of the rolling Swiss mountains and turquoise lakes that interspersed them, I fell into a lobotomized dream state—and decided it would be a great idea to jump off a mountain.

My older man crushes have always been somewhat… controversial. While my friends make emphatic ‘ewwwww’-ing noises and my mother cries and says things like “where did I go wrong?” and “don’t you EVER bring a man my age home (unless it’s Brad Pitt)”, I swoon over some impossibly inappropriate older man crushes…

I kick off my shoes—so it begins. Off come my pants (I’d call it a guilty pleasure but there’s no shame in going pantsless) and now I’m standing in the middle of the room in a t-shirt and my daggy undies looking at myself in the mirror like it’s some kind of science experiment. I turn to the side, arch my back, trying to make my ass look bigger and rounder.

When the boys at school would call me things like “hairy” and “gorilla” and ask to stand under my nose verandah when it rained, I’d unapologetically start resenting my Greek heritage. But as one very wise Greek once said (they were a nation of philosophers, you know) “celebrate the love of the one you’re with.” And so I came to love the Greek in me.

I was so desperate not to lose him then. And I did love him. Wildly and passionately, as one loves a best friend—but never as one loves a lover. So when he gave me an ultimatum—be my girlfriend or be nothing more—what could I do? I fell into his arms with a sense of foreboding, but I kept talking myself out of it.

Some day, I’m going to be a mamma. Did you gasp? Are you horrified? No? What about if I said I can’t wait to push a brood of screaming, shitting, demanding, mini-humans out of the tiny hole between my legs? I want to be a mamma more than anything else in the world. Here’s why.

I really do love surrounding myself with boys, and I’ve always had a lot of close straight male friends. And my boys—the boys I’ve climbed trees with, played video games with, burped the alphabet with—have given all the other boys a lot to live up to. This is what those wonderful, disgusting, can’t-live-with-em-can’t-live-without-em fellas have taught me about boys.

The almond tree stood up against the rotting fence palings at the bottom of the garden at my grandparents house, right behind the orange and green plastic swing set they erected for me, later to be inherited by my baby cousin. The garden is different now, but the tree is still there, completely unmoved, still yielding it’s fruit, season after season. Almost as though you never went away.

Dad is the loveable head of the family that provides protection, guidance and laughter. Dad can show you how to do really neat stuff that, when you’re a kid, makes you suspicious that maybe he’s actually magic, and that when you’re 18 he’ll finally reveal to you that you’re half vampire, from his side.

I’m going to take a punt on this and say that first and most importantly, Jesus would probably use his brain and the power of deductive foresight to not crucify the one person that could offer humanity all the answers to life and living. But seeing as it’s far too late to even go there, all I can do is offer vague speculations as to what the main man would do if he were still around today.

Music has always been a very important part of my life, enduring the comings and goings of boyfriends, but I never realised how important it is to keep good music out of relationships until recently. Sure, I’ve had boyfriends and meaning riddled songs and breakups since I was in high school, but somehow Bon Jovi power ballads and the Dawson’s Creek soundtrack were much easier to give up than the songs I love now.

We’d all crowd into the bathroom and look at the poop glaring up at us from the tiled floor. If it was in the open we’d crowd around it and scream and point. If it was in a cubicle we’d take turns looking at it through the door or stand on the toilets in the adjoining cubicles peering over the top of the cubicle wall, screaming and pointing.