It was only brief.

I just missed the green arrow at traffic lights. I was running very late, and here I was waiting for some smoke-spluttering Korean van to putt-putt its way across the intersection.

So I took a deep breath and looked up.

And there it was.

A few years back I used to work in a vet clinic in a daggy rural town. It used to be the old meatworks building, and so was on the opposite side of the tracks to the main drag. Every lunchtime (and I use the term very loosely, it was usually 10 minutes snuck in between surgeries) when it was my turn to buy food, I'd pop out of the front door and go through the level crossing to the hamburger shop to get however many chicken caesar salads as there were nurses rostered on. On the way to the shop, just before you had to cross the main street, there was a run-down cottage. It had a white picket fence with the odd picket broken in half and paint peeling off the edges of most others, and a lawn of dry spindly grass like you would find on the back oval of a school. Up against the fence there were 5 rather straggly looking rose bushes that looked in desperate need of a good hair cut and something to drink.

I never stopped there.

I never even looked.

This one day though, I came out of the front door of the clinic after a particularly bad morning, and there was a little butterfly madly flitting about in front of me, all the way from the tree that hung over the side fence of the clinic and as I went through the level crossing gates. It was so irratic that I started grinning and asking it questions and following it's path with a little jump in my step. It landed on a rose in the front of the beat-up old cottage. It wasn't much of a rose mind you, it looked little more than a scarlet dishmop on a very underproportioned handle, but there it was, poking itself through the pickets and resting on the rail.

I smelled the rose.

Cliched I know, but it just seemed fitting. As a rule, I find roses fairly ordinary, and a much to ugly and prickly way to produce a pretty flower, but if this one didn't just fill my head with the most gorgeous mellow honey scent. One flower, that was all it managed that year, but geez what a stunner it was. The stalk was weak, and the bush itself scarcely had a bit of green on it, but that flower, it had every right to be proud as punch.

I looked around for he butterfly, but it had danced on it's merry way. I don't know what made me do it, and I'm not sure what it making me admit it now, but I looked at that rose bush and said thanks. It probably made little difference to the rose bush, but it just seemed right. A very cliched end to the utterly storybook scenario.

I sometimes forget about that rose, and the days that month where I would stop on my way to buy lunch and compliment it on its petals, or pour a cup of water on it's dry roots. It would always make me smile. Even when the petals fell to the ground and all that was left was a crumbly little nub, I still smiled and said hello.

Today, while I was sitting at the traffic lights willing them to turn green, it all came flooding back to me. It had been a lousy morning and I was not expecting much better from the rest of the day, but then something caught my eye. I thought it was one of those pressed polystyrene glider planes that a child had thrown out of a nearby townhouse window, but on it's second pass I recognised it to be a little honey-eater. Sitting right across from a filthy dirty intersection, and stuck between soundproof barriers and tall boring townhouses, it was frolicking. It did two passes, a double somersault, swooped down and shook the tips of the bush, and swung back around to hang under a large yellow grevillea bloom that was easily twice it's size.

It was ever so brief, but my heart just sang. A moment or two, and memories of that one single rose just rushed back. I could almost smell it. How long had it been since I'd stopped to smell a rose? When was the last time I danced barefoot in the rain with the grass squelshing between my toes? Had it really been that long since I'd sat in the back garden at school lunchtime and listened to them play?
When did I stop looking for the small joys in life that used to make me so happy?

I don't really know, but it ends now. One small joy a day cannot be that hard to find.

Today, it was a happy bird hanging upside down on a flower.

Shhhh!

Be very very quiet.

I'm hiding.

No really, I am.

I haven't charged my phone in two weeks.

I've been wearing the same pair of jeans and ugg boots.

I don't want to leave the house.

I'm just sitting here thinking teeny tiny thoughts and trying to be invisible for a while.

Is it working?

It was just a man on the radio. I'm not sure what it is about Victoria, but heavens above they breed some loopy Premiers! I mean, it isn't like ours are brilliant, but they are far less interesting. This latest version seems to fancy himself a minor deity.

"It [the pipeline] will transform the region and it will create new water."

Now I'm fairly certain on this, my year 7 science teacher was surprisingly good, but I do believe that simply piping water from one region to another is just relocation, not creation. Of course I'm happy to be corrected,  perhaps he has smelted some water elves or something and popped them into the pipe construction...

It does sound good though, doesn't it?

Ahh, the age of networking and signing up to as many lousy sites as possible in order to know who it is thatyou aren't bothering to call, and who is not bothering to call you... or something like that.

Add me, don't add me. My care factor is ohhh, pretty close to a trodden-on snail. :) My attention to updating the pages is remarkably similar. Myspace has become aware of this fact and has gone so far as changing the locks on me. I've never been dumped by a website before, it is quite annoying. Noting the above relationship dramas, don't be shocked if I'm unable to add you.

Find me on Myspace

Find me on Facebook

Find me on Twitter

Find me on del.icio.us

Find me on Photobucket (The magic word is fish)

Find me on Flickr

Sink my pirate ship on Walk My Plank

It would have been nice if I had forgotten it. I'd have been happy enough to let it slip by without any fuss at all. Of course, that just isn't the way of things. The world has a way of picking the scabs off of old wounds and making certain that you remember things you'd much rather were left alone.

Ten years.

I wish I could do more than grieve. I wish I could stand up and hold on to the positives, to look upon this whole experience as one big blessing. There is always someone worse off. I know that, but it never seems to make my problems any smaller. If anything, it just makes my heart weep for a world with so much pain.

This last week has just been a pile of tissues. I've been trying to think of everything I've gained over the years but for every small victory, every little blessing, I keep coming back to the countless things I've lost.

I feel like I died ten years ago. I remember my knees giving way underneath me as I pulled out yet another pair of cutesy flannel pyjamas from my dresser. I remember the gentle thud as my bodyweight came to rest on my tingling legs. I remember the tears that just wouldn't come. I sat there silently screaming at the world to make it all stop. I wanted to make it stop.

Everything I was, all those little defining things that made me the person that I used to be, they were just gone.

Losing someone you love is hard, but losing yourself is just like nothing and everything all at once. There is nowhere to turn, no comfort to be found. Every kindness offered seems hollow and cold, and every sorrowful glance drives another nail into the coffin. There is a certain cruelty about the lack of a stone cold body to mourn, for you have to use the next best thing. Watching people say goodbye to all you used to be, and knowing that you have to soldier on, it is one of the most merciless things I have ever experienced.
One foot in front of the other took over from really going places. I don't think I have ever really stopped, but I don't think I've ever really gotten anywhere either. It has been an awfully long time just plodding along, just keeping my head above water. Somewhere along the way I lost my compass, or at least my will to use it. It is a pretty useless tool when you can't rely on north to stay put from one moment to the next.

I wish I had been brave (or foolish) enough to let it all go. I wish I could have just wiped the slate clean and started afresh. Instead, I salvaged what I could and cobbled together a patchwork self, and it is times like this that I really notice the seams.

I say that I don't mind. When anyone asks, I say that it has changed my life for the better and that I'm grateful. It is completely true. I wouldn't change anything. Somewhere though, amongst the remnants of that little girl that could not be saved, I feel like I'm lying through my teeth.

So, here I am.

Still.

Or rather, you've got MY mail.

I can honestly say that if I find out who did this, they will be very, very sorry.

When we moved here, we knew what we were getting into. We knew we'd have late night parties across the way, and we knew that there would be schoolkids running amok at bell times, and we even knew that the police would regularly patrol the street, hunting for anyone who may have crept those few kilometres over the speed limit.

What we didn't know was that primary school kids are just a bunch of short uniformed vandals.

It all started small. My subscription to a gourmet cooking magazine mysteriously vanished twice in a row. I was puzzled, but I thought that perhaps some parent had swiped it out of the letterbox on their way past, and just changed the delivery address to the business post office box. Simple enough, and the magazine company generously resent the missing issues. Problem solved!

Um... well I solved the problem of missing magazines at least.

Shortly afterwards, a shrub was stolen. Now I'm not really sure what sort of image this is conjuring up for you, but whenever I've thought of someone stealing vegetation, I've imagined a bloke coming past in a ute and hefting a few convenient potted plants on the back, or some little old lady in a protected vegetation area huddled down amongst the ferns with a trowel in one hand and a little box for hauling away the loot in the other. What I didn't imagine was some brazen so-and-so tromping up to the front of our house, grabbing a freshly planted geisha girl by the base of it's stem, reefing the flipping thing out of the garden bed and leaving clumps of soil all down our driveway as they left. They left the row of 6 that go all the way down to the road, deciding instead to take the one that was flowering, the one closest to the house.Those little plants aren't cheap, so PSWC walked around like a man on a mission until it got dark, checking neighbouring gardens for any signs of recent plantings, but came up empty handed. We still have a sodding great hole in the garden where our poor little shrub was so unceremoniously evicted.

For quite a while, that was the end of it.

In the last month though, things have started again. A few weeks back I found a letter laying on the front lawn that had been torn half open. It was addressed to PSWC. I thought it was a little odd, but seeing as it was not a terribly important letter and the contents appeared undisturbed, I just put it down to 'one of those things'.

Upon checking for mail the following week, I discovered that some clever person had decided that the inside of my mailbox could do with some landscaping, and had half filled it with dirt and woodchips. Now I'm not unreasonable, a few 'posted' woodchips from time to time is perfectly fine. I know how utterly boring it can be when mothers get chatting after school, but there are limits. If you don't see that your kid is shovelling half a garden into someone's mailbox then there is something a bit lax about your supervision.

I had a bit of a whinge about this to my girl friends, and after I'd cooled off I came back thinking that perhaps I'd gotten worked into a tizz over nothing.

And then today happened.

PSWC came in after work and presented me with the lower half of the front flap of our mailbox! Now the full gravity of this situation took a while to sink in, but when it did I was livid! Our mailbox is set in brick, and is a one piece unit. There is no way that the front flap can be repaired, so it has to be replaced, and in order for it to be replaced we have to get the old one out. Yes, this latest bit of fun and games now means that we have to take a sledgehammer to our mailbox. I adore our mailbox! It was the one feature on the face of this house that gave it an ounce of character and now I have to destroy it and replace it with some soul sucking dime-a-dozen-powder-coated-onna-stick thing in order to receive my mail. (And yes, we did consider the possibility that it just fell off by itself, but even given that the metal was somewhat fatigued, it would be pretty damn unlikely for both pieces to break to evenly at exactly the same time. I'm sure that age and wear played a role, but I'm fairly convinced it had some help.)

The most annoying thing about all of this is that I have no idea who is responsible, or if it is the same person/s doing the damage the whole way through. Unless someone has a major attack of the guilts, I doubt we'll ever know.

And so this blog post is your fair warning, you thieving destructive little cretin (or cretins as the case may be). Not only am I going to invest some time in going to chat to your deputy principal tomorrow, but I am setting up my stake-out in the spare bedroom and, armed with my compact camera, complete with 11x optical zoom, I'm gunna catch you! And I don't really give a flying fruitbat if you do turn out to be 10, you are damn well going to apologise for permanently ruining the aesthetics of my front yard. And return my magazines dammit!

*sigh*

So I suppose now I'm on the hunt for a new mailbox. A tall one. With a good lock. And maybe some lasers...