[Kaimee]: 5.Random Essays.Peppercorn

I wish I knew which day marked the end of your fucking peppercorn existence. It wasn’t yesterday, it wasn’t last night. No way. I can trace it back way longer than that. Maybe if you were here to argue you’d say “That isn’t me, that person died a long time ago” or “Everyone has to grow up Kate, fuck’s sake” and then look at me like I’m cracked, like I think I’m Peter Pan. But I’m not, and I’m right. You started dying a long time ago.

My biggest memory of you – not best, not funniest – is looking down at you and dizzily watching the world spin around. Hearing this earnest little voice telling me If you don’t do it now you’ll be scared forever, you have to do it. If it weren’t for you being braver than I am, I might have taken the emo child way out and cut up my arms and hated the world, and hid behind curtains when it got dark out. But if I’m scared I grit my teeth and do it anyway, because somewhere in me there’s something saying If you don’t do it now Kate, it’ll cripple you. You were probably only 2 metres away, but it felt like a hundred, and I felt like I was too high up. That was why you’d given me the mission. What if someday you need to climb a cliff? The problem with being too high, you’d told me, wasn’t that I might fall, it was that if your parents came outside I might not have time to climb down the telephone pole again. But neither of us realised that when you’re an adult you don’t look up at the sky for the unexpected. Maybe in that sense I still am Peter Pan.

You weren’t the only one. There was Mel, Shannon, and Sarah stepped in there somewhere. When Sarah came is when I’ve always marked the very first stirrings of your end, but who knows, I could just be laying blame there because I can’t face that you grew up and away, without me. I think I noticed it first when you stopped writing in the notebook. When our Missions became games instead of sheer and utter bravery and importance, and when one day I hunted for you everywhere and actually spent all afternoon waiting at the window, afraid the mission had gone wrong, and it turned out you’d gone to Woden Plaza with Sarah.

A couple years ago I had a crisis. You had already moved to Sydney, Sarah had already subtlety followed you, you were already living together. You’re all grown up, remember? Left school and holding down a job, living with your older brother and – more quietly – your girlfriend. But I had a crisis and found myself faced with backing away, or facing that bit of my life down, and so I did what we had always done and devised a mission.

With you in mind, the man who at seven had maps and strategies and always won wars, I set up something big. Details can go fuck themselves because we all already know them. But when I, at 16, show up on your crappy ugly doorstep in another state and it turned out that I was all alone and glowing at how successful all my planning was and that no one had a clue where I was, you yelled and me and then refused to talk to me.
And Sarah “Really, Kate..”ed me, and your fucking brother treated me like a child and then hit on me because he thought I wouldn’t know better.
And that’s probably when I realised you’d committed suicide, and traded in your brave little soul for some crappy chain café and a girlfriend to fuck lonelily twice weekly, and workman’s boots to pretend you were older than that little man I remember charging up with a cap gun.

This isn’t a eulogy, and if I cried it wasn’t for you, it wasn’t because of the bewildered fucking face I image you making, looking back at us, or down, or whatever the fuck your religion thinks you’re doing now.
If I sobbed and fell back against the wall, and moaned my hands to my eyes as strings of pearls clashed to the floor, that wasn’t for you, and I can image the hurt eyes you’re making as I say this.
If you think I folded up there in a deserted art gallery corridor and ruined a fur coat and my knees on a empty bathroom floor, if you think I reapplied my mascara and shook like that for you, if you think I fucking screamed and tried to pull the basin of the wall for you, if I clawed at the porcelain and sank to the ground, well, fuck you. Fuck you, you fucking fraud, you fucking bastard, you fucking thief.
If you don’t do this now Kate, it’ll cripple you, you fucking traitor.
This isn’t your eulogy. I just needed to tell you that you shouldn’t be so fucking shocked and pitiful; if you’d asked I’d have told you. You were dead a long fucking time ago.