Jess Meskell

Sometimes I write things, and then I believe them…

January

You remind me of somebody that I always wanted to know, but didn’t. I get around to wondering if I look just as weary as I’ve grown accustomed to feeling or if I come off composed, mysterious, beautiful. I’m wondering about futures, and how to change things so that I no longer feel like my best days were back at 18 with my first time hearing transatlanticism, and the chaotic way my heart used to jump between loves… People, things, hobbies ideas, sunsets, oceans, mountains. Manic but all condensed, so it was all the highs and then All the low. Still everytime I end up back in this airport now, I get to feeling like I never even left. Like I was really here, in limbo and in transit this whole time. And the other parts of my life were interludes to this one constant. There’s a grace period between Christmas and new years, when it’s okay to be directionless. For a few days the emphasis is on thinking about the future rather than acting for it. Maybe that’s even true of summers. At least that’s how it feels to me. I love the idea of a life divided by summers. I think partially that stems from reading too many stories or watching them in films, but that’s how I make decisions. That’s how I live my life. Asking myself of I could look back and like this story. If its a movie that I would want to watch and would it tell the truth about what’s important and real and worth holding onto in life. I keep thinking over song lyrics in my head, like a question, like a challenge: this is your life, are you who you want to be? And this is it, no more waiting for life to begin.

I finished the Great Gatsby.  F. Scott Fitzgerald, take a bow.  It finished in a great cloud of dust as all the romance and idealism met with gritty reality.  There were some moments of such beautiful prose in this book that I had to stop and read them twice.  Like I couldn’t take it all in the first time.  And from my vantage point of free time and not having to study I had the luxury of taking moments - because I was reading just for myself - with no other agenda than to feel like reading was worthwhile and that classic literature makes some commentary about the world that is relevant still.  

I found there was something about the story in the first few chapters that was stoic.  Like observing a curiosity from a distance.  Unmovable.  And strange, because I felt like the first line was the most brilliant thing I’d ever read before in my life, and I got beyond excited about it.   

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’  He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. 

 That grabbed me right there.  Can’t even explain how.  I think maybe that it was just the kind of statement I expect from a classic.  But then after being absorbed in prose and paragraphs for a few pages I started to lose touch and get bored and that is the precise reason that it was only on my third try that I managed to get beyond the first chapter, and that only because too many good people had urged me to believe that it got better.  And it did.  Slowly, meanderingly, a love story emerged – one of great consequence and also tragedy.  Idyllic and heartbreaking where that romance met with reality.  

I finished the book feeling like I learned something about myself, and with resolve to hold onto reality firmly with one hand, and romance in the other.  The characters in this book frustrated me in many ways.  Many of my expectations were defied.  I wasn’t sure who’s side I should be on.  By the end I felt like all the characters deserved each other.  I think Gatsby was my most personable. 

Gatsby initially seemed to be this mountain of a man.  He was lost (and found) among stars, steeped in mystery.  Reminding me of someone I know.  Flamboyant, or at least giving that appearance, but actually just wanting to be noticed by somebody who is or at least could be significant.  Actually chasing after unattainable ideas of perfection that threaten to ruin the best of us.  Seriously.  Ruined with expectation and limitation until there’s nothing you can do but hold onto the past and keep your hands there groping for something elusive that you think you once had, or tasted or thought could possibly exist, that was never actually within your grasp.  And also you are here – now – but never really present, because you are constantly grating against the most genuine efforts of those around you.  That’s what defines Gatsby to me.  

I can understand how he got lost in romance.  I’ve done my share of losing reality by falling into whimsy to the point of crazy and exhausted and not quite believing you will ever reach the ecstasy you imagine, at which point being so weary that you would give up on it all for a moments comfort or peace.  I’m constantly trying to balance the excess.  I can’t sustain emotion.  I’m an addict for euphoria, for being giddy, for romance – for feelings.  That’s how I read Gatsby, anyway.  The moment I feel like defines him, and the essence of what I found to be both the romance and the tragedy of the story is summed up at the end of Chapter 6, page 106.

 He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy.  His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was… One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. 

They stopped here and turned toward each other.  Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year.  The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars.  Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees – he could climb to it, if he climbed alone and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. 

His heart beat a little faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own.  He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.  So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star.  Then he kissed her.  At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something – an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago.  For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air.  But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.

Uncommunicable forever.  Like I said, ruined.  But not by Daisy - by expectation.  To me Daisy seems such a lost soul.  For a minute I felt for her, having lost her great love, and meanwhile her husband is behaving like she is irrelevant and simple.  For a moment I am on her side, until I start to feel like  she doesn’t have it in her to saturate her life in something like a humble love.  Nor does Gatsby, as it turns out.  Or at least, it doesn’t feel like it.  It’s like he is all and she is nothing.  She is blown by the slightest breeze, while he is steadfast to the point of doing all he can to defy time and its rhythms.  They are both so callous.  So careless.  So disrespectful of the idea that you can build a life that is bright, colourful and might last.  So willing to disregard important things, simpler things, for their captivation with one another.  Daisy gets caught up.  So I guess she is an addict too.  For society and money and attention and recklessness, and Gatsby.  So attention, I guess (maybe?).  And it turns out I’m not really willing to sympathize, and I can’t help thinking what a mess they are all living in, with no effort to undo the tangles, but only justify them as necessary or inevitable or unavoidable or some other kind of cop out answer that is kind of like giving up. 

I think maybe I can just relate too much (because of times when I was kidding myself, too), and that’s why I’m so quick to damn them all.  I do like Nick though.  I like him as a narrator.  I like his secret suspicions of himself.  I like how he considers his one real virtue to be an unwavering affinity for honesty.  I can relate to that too.  I like the way he see’s clearly.  He paints a good picture, tells a true story.  But by the end they even break him too.  The debacle that ends Gatsby, also ends Nick’s commitment to the truth.  Maybe… maybe he’s kidding himself too.  It seems we all are, for a time, in our own ways.  And truthfully, at this point, honesty could maybe have only destroyed Tom and Daisy and whatever peace they found in running away together.  And like I said, I’m pretty sure they deserve each other. 

Sparing the melodrama though, the story left me a bit heartbroken.  I don’t want to say things like ‘they deserve each other’.  I want them to find peace.  But that’s probably part of the statement that the novel makes.  We do just have to keep going, and aiming for something good.  And also keep ridding ourselves of the things in our lives that complicate them in a way that we can’t learn from, can only get lost in..  I can’t help but feel like the message and the lesson is to learn how to walk a line between romance and reality.  I don’t want to meet the same tragic end as Mister J. Gatsby.  Not the death, really.  But the person he is when he dies.  It’s a tragedy.  He created a new persona for himself that could not be filled by any amount of love or attention (seemingly), it could only be deflated, and he could not be known and he lived as an abstract figure of curiosity and he died all but alone.  No one wants that fate.  

I want to be somebody who can be known.  I positively long to be understood.  Like, the other night at Wig and Pen when I sat down, bumping the table and spilled my drink, and Hannah announced that it was ‘classic Jess’, and I said ‘I love that you know me that well’ because it was, and I did.  I had a bit of a moment (I’ve been having a lot of those lately).  And I’m thinking – keep one foot on the ground, and an eye on what’s happening in the skies.  Aim for something that is good.  Find what is beautiful in reality.  Live now.  And read more books, and have more conversations.  People need to be known.  And I know myself better by knowing other people, too.  It’s no good having your head in the clouds - no matter what pretty ideas you find there - if you lose grip on the real world down here on the muddy, imperfect, currently littered-with-autumn-leaves, streets of earth.  This is where life happens.

I wish that Sunday could be like Switzerland.  A neutral place where people go to ski and take vacations.  Vacate.  Vacant. 

Instead Sunday’ s have turned into days when I’m haunted by ghosts of Saturday nights and a certain sadness.  It should be simple, but it’s not.  It should be that Sunday’s make up for stolen moments and some boys hand on some girl’s knee, or fingers intertwined with mine or a hand resting above the curve of a hip, just for a moment on Friday night.  It should be nostalgic and sweet and all about growing courage for a new week.  That’s not how my Sunday’s have been going though. 

I keep listening to this one song on repeat right now.  It’s called San Francisco and it’s the most recent release by Stu Larsen.  I’m not sure what it is about this song that keeps grabbing me so captivatingly.

  ‘I won’t know where I’m going til I get there, you know I wish you felt the same. Maybe I’ll find love in San Francisco, I can hear her calling out my name’.  There’s something nostalgic about that. 

My heart has been for so long now torn between too many places.  Too many to call home.  Too many to feel lost.  Too transient and too much of a gypsy.  But also not enough of any of those things.  Something about wanting to see myself clearly.  Maybe some part of my heart longs not to be so heavy all of the time.  Not to care so quickly.  Not to feel the consequence of every smile and breath and word.  I’m so purposeful with words sometimes.  I feel their weight.  Maybe they mean something more to me than most people.  I remember them and repeat them and wonder about their worth.  I hold them in my hands, and head and heart for years.

Years.

It’s been probably five years now that I can remember wondering these same things, and trying to figure out the same thoughts and questions and yes we are evolving and the world is changing and it’s something of a screwed up place, sometimes.  But it also sparkles, and I see that and I share it and I wish you all the best.  And I mean it too.

I thought and I thought and I thought today trying to get to the bottom of it all.  I had conversations and shared things and ranted and wrote and my hands went numb from sitting outside Mocan trying to get my head clear enough to start writing actual song lyrics that might explain this time and this terrible curse of caring for other people who might feel the same.  What was it that Jamie wrote that one time?  ‘I’d rather write her a song, because songs don’t wait for resolve’.  Something like that.

I’m all over the place.  God, I can hardly get the words out.

And I know it comes back to having a little faith in who I am and the idea that being honest to that person is enough.  I don’t want to type calmly about it.  I want to do something reckless.  And I want to play my guitar.  I want the comfort of playing a piano for hours on end.  I want something that will change what is to come or at least help me feel like there is something new and something different and ultimately something to look forward to and that I’m not the damn fool that I feel like on so many days. 

I overcompensate.  All the time I do it.  And I don’t know what it’s about. 

 Then when it’s not Sunday anymore, like last Wednesday when I was feeling weary (but not to the bone - just a surface kind of tired) and I was listening to demos of Elisha Bones, with is Michael Bones’ band, and boy are they good.  Singing things like “I’m losing my heart to every pretty girl I meet”.  God, I hear that.  It’s exciting to learn that you love the things that new friends do.  It’s intimidating too, only because I’d love if they saw my music like genius too.  So much.  That’s why I look for chances to share it, to play it to live it all the time.   I had this great conversation with Matt yesterday, via via text message, all about romance and meeting people on the train, or in coffee shops or in bars, and how rare it is to find somebody to carry a conversation with.  Soph and I went busking last night, Dad sent significant news via an email.  Mum’s not answering the home phone today, but hopefully that means she’s off living her life.  So that’s a good thing.  It’s all pretty messy.  Friends, family, feelings.

 There’s a whole ocean.  Ocean of hurt in some girls eyes.  Ocean of doubt in some boys heart.  Ocean of possibility.  Oceans of wonder.  I still think back to a day spent at Green’s Beach, four summers ago, or rather, near greens beach down a pebbled path through gorse and grass to a rocky outcrop where the sun beat down like new life and I caught a fish off of the rocks, and I leaned my head on some significant boy’s shoulder and read excerpts from On the Road, because that was his favourite book and I wanted to be his favourite too.  And we lived this whole story, and now it’s a memory, and that’s just how it should be.  And I’m living new stories now, making new memories and waiting to see who will also be significant.

 I’m so bipolar sometimes.  And I don’t mean to use a real medical term callously, but I can go through the full spectrum of emotions in the space of a couple hours.  Maybe it’s just that I really can’t stand the dating game, and the distaste that I feel for having to play things cool, or not ask someone to hang out when you want to – all that waiting and analysing and reading between the lines sends me to a crazy girl place and I really can’t help it.  I feel like I can’t win.  Because if you are too casual maybe they’ll think you aren’t interested, but if you’re too keen then you’ll scare them away.  Seriously.  It’s the worst, and not at all honest to who I am.  I’ve been known to overwhelm strangers with compliments and letters and I regularly cup my hand around people elbows to show solidarity and support.  And okay, maybe that doesn’t help me to sound any less crazy – but it’s me.

 And maybe I can fall too fast and whatever, sometimes.  But I am just like that.  I’m so clear at knowing what looks like something good in my life, and what just doesn’t.  And I’m so keen for new people and experiences, especially when my heart gets involved.  So maybe I’m manic.  I just want a big disclaimer to any new boy I might meet: that I like things that are romantic, like traffic lights reflected in collections of rainwater on the asphalt, and talking about literature, and picking out a soundtrack to suit your mood and thunderstorms, maps, snowflakes, holding hands, glitter, letters through the mail.  Letters at all really.  Coffee shops.  Even though I work in one now, its still magical to me, and mysterious and full of possibilities.  I spend all my time in coffee shops.  I need the disclaimer to somehow get across that I am not good at the game.  And how when I’m in, I’m all in.  Or a least, I’m all in about wanting to see how it goes.  I’m not going to play you hot and cold to make you more interested or whatever.  I’m just me.  And I like who I am.

And just be you.  Seriously.  Because if we our ourselves, perfectly.  In our imperfect way maybe things will work out okay.

I can’t stand to play games.  But I trip myself up so easily.  I don’t know how to be casual, not really.  But it’s maybe something I could learn.  At least in the sense of getting to know somebody new.  Sometimes I think about trying to disconnect my head and my heart, or my heart and my body – but I can’t help but think that as a result I would wind up feeling ashamed and like that wasn’t a story I would want to end up telling to the person who agrees to fight it out with me till the end.  So I’ll wait.  Though sometimes I think the opposite would make me more human.  And I’m so damn tired of waiting.  It’s all I’ve been doing for the longest time.  Though I know thats not really the truth, either.  A lot of time I’ve spent learning and dealing and getting over things.  Some time was spent feeling crazy.  A bunch of time actually.  And I just look people in the eye all the time lately, but it doesn’t seem to help me any. 

And then I get to thinking that people must look at me like someone who is obtuse, or adrift, or too intense or strange or pathetic or something like that where I keep glass walls between me and the world.   Sometimes I feel obtuse.  But I know who I am.  I do (I think), but I’m protecting my heart a lot, telling it what to think, what to feel, what to hold onto.  And so, relatedly, I’ve probably read more about Hemmingway’s life than I’ve read of his work.  But I told Hugh that at the pub last week and it earned me a “me too”.  And I remember being real honest with Em one time and her pointing out that sometimes when things are at the hardest that’s all you need from somebody to know you aren’t alone.  And things are far from their hardest right now, so I must be doing pretty good.  

After dinner tonight Tenzin and I talked about how sometimes things working out seem like they come down so much to timing.  And I don’t know how I feel about that, but the whole business of dating and whatever is seriously a mess.  

Like I’ve been wondering – I keep asking myself what’s more honest – to say that you care and will be disappointed or act like it didn’t even matter to you in the first place – and I actually know what’s more honest and by my general philosophy that’s what I should be aiming for, but pride gets in the way and so it’s a fine balance.

And then I think maybe this will make me a better songwriter.  The flip-side of that is how I have real trouble putting things into words without getting crazy angsty.  Also, the last time I did this dating game thing was with Peter – and as imperfect as that turned out to be, he always (mostly? often?) as I remember it, anyway, ended up coming through when I put myself on the line and asked him to hang out spontaneously.  Like, late night summer-time walks.  Talking about books and music and creativity and marveling at the sky and dew on spiders webs.  Things like that.  

People here seem to be less inclined towards both those things.  Spontaneity, and finding beauty in the world around us.  I mean, I’m constantly pointing out clouds and the sky and sunsets, sunrises (though those mostly to myself) and people are constantly not getting it.  And maybe I’ve been spoiled growing up in the lovely place I did.  Launceston is a fantastic place to feel like the world is beautiful.  Full of hills and houses built into them, and the river and the gorge and everything is green green green, and the tops of the buildings in town speak of another time before neon signs and before we knew what Google was.  There’s history there.  And not even that long a history.  Just long enough to paint intrigue and another world, before this one.  Just far back enough to dream about and imagine that we both came from, and are headed somewhere.   

I miss that about Tasmania.  The way that you can just be in a place like that.  You can call someone up on a Wednesday night and ask them to the movies, or to take a walk, or have a drink.  It’s not unusual.  My life there was so different to here though.  I can’t imagine living like I do here, there.  It’s a different world, different way.  I’m a different girl there.  And it comes back to leaving.  And like Donald Miller wrote in his introduction to Through Painted Deserts – that sometimes you just have to leave.  And sometimes you need mountains and sometimes you need oceans – and that comparison has stuck with my through years since before the first time I moved out of home, and flew to a different continent for a holiday, then another continent again to build a life in Ottawa for nine months.  And that was my first experience of leaving.  And I was lost.  I didn’t just leave my town, or my house, or my family or my then-boyfriend, though I did leave all of those things.  I left myself, and I did it on purpose, with the thought that whatever I hung onto in that new world was the real me.                                                                

It’s different for everyone, I’m sure.  I wonder if that southern island of mine is actually a kind of never-land, where I could never really get to ‘grown up’.  Realistically, a part of my heart is probably still back there at 17.  It’s been five years now, and I don’t know what to do with that knowledge.  Soon enough I’ll be able to measure things in decades.  And then what? Time keeps marching on.  I like who I’ve found here though – the part of me, I mean.  I never quite got there in Canada.  I was too torn.  But here – and maybe it was just a matter of giving it enough time – but here I’m finally feeling at home.  Feeling like this is a life worth building.  I’m shaping something of my own.  I’m a far cry from when I wrote the lyrics to You Can’t Test Courage Cautiously, which is all about being brave enough to dive into real life head first – and feeling like in looking for a certain kind of life you are constantly leaving your best friends behind, not knowing if you’ll ever find one again.  Chasing a feeling.  Because people here are brilliant.  And I don’t feel like I’ll never meet a best friend again.  I also don’t feel like I need to be leaving, which is a new idea for me.  So maybe I’m growing up some.  Maybe we aren’t in Kansas any more.  Maybe there’s more than I imagined for me in this new world.

I’ve been hiding my writing away for a while.   But I’ve been putting words on pages.  At least every Sunday.  Sunday has become my writing day.  And I’ve stuck with the same journal since the start of the year.  That’s something that I’ve been terribly bad at for a few years.  For some reason it hasn’t been a struggle to keep the same one book to write in this year.  Maybe it has something to do with feeling at home, and living in the same place for the second year in a row. 

I started decorating my room today, and it is so surprising to me that it has taken this long to get around to it.  I guess though, it is probably because I feel settled in other, more important ways, and as a result making my room my own hasn’t felt like a priority.  This is a good thing.

More soon.  Promise. 

Here are some spoilers:

I’m tumbling through the days. I’m a girl. Out of a box, in a box, did I walk in here or did i get put here ? It’s too small, it’s not enough its too too much I don’t know what to say or how to feel or where to be or what to even call it but I’m pretty sure that we’re doing okay and there are more good things coming and reasons to look forward and lovegodwinterflowerscoffeeearlymornings
peoplenewlovedatesbutterflies
whatamisupposedtofeel yet already
idontknowhowtoplayitcool
i
am
on
both
sides
imissedyou
ohboy

what even is this world?