On New Year’s Day 2012, I woke up on Ramsgate Beach with the sun in my eyes and a head full of acid. I had pink skin to match my newly dyed hair. For a second I thought I was somewhere in the Mediterranean. I’m not sure why I thought that; I’d never even been there.
It had been my first New Year’s Eve in Sydney alone after my parents moved overseas. Twenty-four hours earlier, I’d crashed a party nearby. I saw him in the carpark smoking, watching the fireworks with giant pupils.
He was five years older than me, with a glovebox full of colorful pills and tabs adorned with cartoon characters. I pictured Healthy Harold shaking his little sock puppet head as they softened on my tongue like bitter communion wafers.
I told him I was studying to be a journalist but I wasn’t sure it was for me; I wasn’t very good at being objective. We stayed up all night driving around, alternating between acid and pills, talking about our favorite writers—Sylvia Plath, Hunter S. Thompson, William Burroughs. We wandered onto the beach and he kissed me as the sun rose. The last thing I remember is Googling ‘Lady Lazarus’ on my phone so I could dramatically recite it into the wind: “out of the ash, I rise with my red hair, and I eat men like air…”
I’m still amazed I trusted him as quickly as I did. When you’re a child of overprotective parents, you feel pressure to make the most of every night out because you might not be allowed out again for months. It took me a while to distinguish between real danger and confected terror designed to keep me in the house. I’d been living on my own for nearly a year, but I hadn’t quite shaken the go hard or go home mentality.
Things get a little hazy here. I must have freaked out and ditched him, because the last thing I remember is wandering around in circles for hours looking for the train station before giving up and getting a taxi home. When I turned my phone back on, it blew up with concerned texts from him asking where I was.
I saw him again a few weeks later. He picked me up and we drove out to his place in Campbelltown. He had tabs with little Cheshire Cats on them, grinning at me like they knew they’d be coming to life later on.
This time, we were somewhere around Bringelly when the drugs began to take hold. I remember the road signs seemed to be getting more and more ominous.
ARE YOU GOING TOO FAST?
ARE YOU OVER THE LIMIT?
WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN A CAR WITH A STRANGE MAN THIS LATE AT NIGHT?
Finally, we pulled up in a caravan park. It felt like a different country out there. The night sky went on forever and the ants were the size of cockroaches.
“I can’t believe you’re a journalist and you haven’t seen Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” he said as we got out of the car. “We have to watch that later.”
I’m not sure I’d be the same person if he’d suggested a different movie that night. He turned on his computer, and an eerie, slowed-down version of ‘My Favorite Things’ echoed across space and time. Blood spattered across the screen and landed on his wardrobe, which appeared to be breathing. I was nothing more than a vibration, a squirming pile of sheets. Whenever I got out my notebook to try and document it all, the ink would slide off the page and evaporate. The absence of boundaries extended to each other as well, as we exchanged smoky kisses while sharing a joint. Suddenly my body knew exactly what it needed to do, and made it happen over and over again until I was trembling.
By the time Johnny Depp was in the Cadillac, speeding through the desert with the stars and stripes billowing and ‘Jumping Jack Flash’ playing over the credits, any doubts I’d had about journalism were gone. All I wanted to do with my life was write, go on adventures and strike fear into the hearts of those in power.
Six years later those experiences bleed together in my memory, like tear-stained journal pages. Driving around the outskirts of Western Sydney in a beat-up old car blaring techno music. Reaching for my notebook and my tape recorder when the drugs kicked in. His smirk. His morbid sense of humor. His boxers with the skulls on them. His pet spiders, and the fish that I was convinced hated me because he hid whenever I came over. Talking about life, death, sex, family, science, literature, politics, art, poetry and drugs until the sun came up. Waking up drenched in sweat, my hair stuck to his chest. Raspberry Calippos at the servo on the way home.
“There’s no place for me in a perfect world,” he told me once, paraphrasing a Firefly quote. I wondered if he truly believed that, or if he was just trying to sound edgy. I knew he got a bit intense after too much meth, but I never felt like I was in danger. Was I being completely reckless and far too casual about the prospect of possibly getting murdered? Of course.
In the months we were together I had to keep reminding myself that there was still a person with a name, a job and a body that people expected things from, like physical presence at agreed-upon times and replies to texts. I ignored them until I could type without the words sliding off the screen. He’d roll me joints to take with me sometimes. I’d light them up with matches and smoke them in my room with the windows open, feeling like Rihanna in the ‘We Found Love’ video, or a love interest in some indie rom-com, all dyed hair and self-destructive habits.
It was over by September. He met someone else, and it hit me harder than I expected. I wasn’t in love but, in a strange way, he gave me exactly what I needed. He was the first person to see the dark, prickly, intense parts of me I had spent my whole life trying to run from. Not only did he accept them, he nurtured them. The traits I used to think were personal failings started to feel more like reasons to stay alive and find my voice.
Two weeks later, I was sitting in a tattoo parlor in Newtown, digging my nails into my jeans.
“You okay?” asked the girl dragging the needle across my back. I nodded.
“Don’t worry, we’re almost done.”
It wasn’t as bad as my first tattoo—a colorful sugar skull on my left thigh that had taken about three hours. This one was on my left shoulder, and I wished I’d got them done in the opposite order. There was something weirdly comforting about the pain, like self-harm but more socially acceptable.
Finally, the buzzing stopped. She held up a mirror, and I smiled as I read the words, etched in black ink and outlined in blood:
Too weird to live, too rare to die.
