“Well I was thinking… I’ve got two weeks to kill in London and I haven’t arranged anywhere to stay yet. Do you think it would be too weird to ask Dan if I could stay on his couch?” She turned to me abruptly, whisk in hand, dripping water on the lino. “Kat you’re single now, you can do whatever the hell you like,” she said seriously.
Ever wanted to bang a cartoon character? It’s OK—there’s no shame in it. We’ve all fantasized from time-to-time about some expertly penned hands expertly penning us. There’s a sense of mystery entirely devoid from human crushes—the sort that makes you wonder exactly what is it that would confront you should you find yourself pulling Aladdin’s pants off (with your teeth, you dirty thing!) or unhooking Ariel’s clam bra.
There we were, on the face of the moon—a foreign landscape of preternatural beauty, and so captivated were we that our balance from time to time would fail us, and we’d fall, breathy and flushed, into our awe. I guess in all the heady romance and misty magic of the rolling Swiss mountains and turquoise lakes that interspersed them, I fell into a lobotomized dream state—and decided it would be a great idea to jump off a mountain.
My older man crushes have always been somewhat… controversial. While my friends make emphatic ‘ewwwww’-ing noises and my mother cries and says things like “where did I go wrong?” and “don’t you EVER bring a man my age home (unless it’s Brad Pitt)”, I swoon over some impossibly inappropriate older man crushes…
I kick off my shoes—so it begins. Off come my pants (I’d call it a guilty pleasure but there’s no shame in going pantsless) and now I’m standing in the middle of the room in a t-shirt and my daggy undies looking at myself in the mirror like it’s some kind of science experiment. I turn to the side, arch my back, trying to make my ass look bigger and rounder.
When the boys at school would call me things like “hairy” and “gorilla” and ask to stand under my nose verandah when it rained, I’d unapologetically start resenting my Greek heritage. But as one very wise Greek once said (they were a nation of philosophers, you know) “celebrate the love of the one you’re with.” And so I came to love the Greek in me.
I was so desperate not to lose him then. And I did love him. Wildly and passionately, as one loves a best friend—but never as one loves a lover. So when he gave me an ultimatum—be my girlfriend or be nothing more—what could I do? I fell into his arms with a sense of foreboding, but I kept talking myself out of it.
Some day, I’m going to be a mamma. Did you gasp? Are you horrified? No? What about if I said I can’t wait to push a brood of screaming, shitting, demanding, mini-humans out of the tiny hole between my legs? I want to be a mamma more than anything else in the world. Here’s why.
The almond tree stood up against the rotting fence palings at the bottom of the garden at my grandparents house, right behind the orange and green plastic swing set they erected for me, later to be inherited by my baby cousin. The garden is different now, but the tree is still there, completely unmoved, still yielding it’s fruit, season after season. Almost as though you never went away.
Dad is the loveable head of the family that provides protection, guidance and laughter. Dad can show you how to do really neat stuff that, when you’re a kid, makes you suspicious that maybe he’s actually magic, and that when you’re 18 he’ll finally reveal to you that you’re half vampire, from his side.