Anger in Avondale!

Anger is a funny old spider isn't it?

Today I bumped into Andrew's ex Leaseholder in the Op Shop and we did that thing where you're painfully nice and polite to each other. I could barely stand to look at her corpse-like grin, her heavily penciled eyebrows, the wound up repression emanating from her pores.

I suppose I could have confronted her, but instead I chatted with her nicely, as if she'd never written a nasty letter to Andrew in which she refrerred to me with disgust and rage because (in her words) we'd had 'sexy times' in the shower. Oh for fuck's sake. We never had 'sexy times' in the shower. If we had SEXY TIMES in the shower, we would've been longer than 5 minutes (and I always knew she was probably timing us). You would have KNOWN about it for sure.

She definitely has an anger problem, and even though she might have made a couple of relevant points in her letter to Andrew, it was all undermined by her paranoid, festering rage.

I stayed there for one week when I was homeless and noticed what a control freak she was. Her boyfriend seemed really nice, I don't know why she didn't just have some 'sexy times' with him instead of worrying what someone else is or isn't doing in the shower. She used the word DISGUSTING in capitals a lot in her letter. She probably rinses her vagina with dettol after her boyfriend comes.

So I got angry after I saw her. I started muttering things under my breath as I walked through Avondale, the huge 'Avondale Spider' feature looming high above. I started to imagine what I could have said. Then, since I'm on a roll, I think of someone else I still feel some anger towards and feed more poison into that particular wound. My favourite old wound is an ex friend, a cold Snow Queen sort. I really need to get right over that. I'm lucky she's no longer my friend, she was often jealous, super uptight, snobby and mentally cruel. I guess I always put up with it because she was also funny and strange, and I liked that. As her snobbishness increased, her humour dropped away, the maggots of self consciousness nibbling at her heart.

I saw her drive past looking like New Market's ash blonde answer to Cruella De Ville the other day. Weird, because I'd dreamt of her a few weeks before and in the dream I wondered if I should try to connect with her again.

Her face appeared as in a fairy tale before me looking walled in and cold, and I knew there was no going back. Some people aren't meant to be in your life forever, and that's ok. As people keep saying to me 'a reason, a season, a lifetime', and the Snow Queen was for a season. A fifteen year season, but just a season nonetheless.

It's been seven years since she was my friend. Seven years seems a long time to still be angry. I think it's grand though, it's shown me how far I've come, that I could have been so close to someone who didn't actually respect me, someone who was always looking down on me. That's only possible when you don't respect yourself, when somewhere inside you feel inferior. It shows up in different ways for different people.

Now that I do respect myself and I know I'm neither superior or inferior, I just don't seem to be attracting the kind of friends who'll throw you away when you no longer match the rest of their lives. I know it should have been enough the time we met for wine and I asked her

"shall we catch up more when I make more money?" and her brow knitted in consideration as she responded

"yeahhh that's a really good idea."

I now look around and I don't have a million friends, but the ones I do have are fucking great! Loyal, kind, honest, sweet, supportive, funny, generous ... and best of all ... unconditional in their love, and now that I'll be making more money, not a snobby bitch in sight. I'll drink to that.

xxx