escort diary® of Jolie: On turning a year older (and a birthday list for those who asked)
Rilke wrote: "Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final."
I think about this every birthday... really if you heard my stories you know that's just my motto. Not because birthdays are terrifying, although I have a clear relationship with my own mortality that is a little too aware, but because a birthday is the one day a year where you are forced to look at time directly instead of pretending it isn't happening.
I love that I'm aging. I say this without irony and without the performance of graceful acceptance that women are expected to deliver when they admit out loud that they are not twenty-three anymore. I am not being brave about it. I am not making peace with it, I genuinely, sincerely love it: the way my face has started to hold the evidence of the years I've survived, the way my body knows things now that it didn't know at twenty-five, the way I have stopped apologising for taking up space and started furnishing it instead.
Rilke again: "Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage."
I have met a lot of dragons. Some of them were people, some of them were years, some of them were entire countries and visa systems and financial catastrophes and people who should have been gentler and a fate who should have been kinder and a body that should have been allowed to rest more than it was. And here I am, a year older, still here, still writing, still feeding the currawongs, lorikeets and noisy miners from my balcony every morning, still swimming, still baking things that ruin diets and break hearts, still genuinely delighted by the fact that I get to exist on this strange, beautiful, indifferent, miraculous planet for another year.
Life is so short. I know this is a cliché, I know it is stitched onto cushions and printed on mugs and whispered by people who have never been forced to actually mean it.
But I mean it.
I mean it because I have had years that almost didn't happen, I have had nights where I wasn't sure I'd make it to morning and mornings where I wasn't sure I wanted to... and somehow (luckily and very surprisingly) I am still here, and the winter's rain is delightful from my apartment, and yesterday a lorikeet landed on my head while I was having my morning matcha, and I thought: yes, another year, give me another one, I am far from done, and I am so lucky I get to see time passing.
So.
It's my birthday very soon. And because several people have asked what I'd like, and because I have never in my life been shy about wanting things, here is the list. It is long. It is specific. It is me.
For the one who wants to make my balcony beautiful:
Cascading succulents, the kind that spill over terracotta edges like they've decided to make a break for it, with succulent soil, with coco coir.
Or climbing plants like Wisteria, star Jasmine, Climbing Fig or Passionflowers with a good pot and some soil.
Not just because I want my balcony to look like a tiny untamed garden in the south of France, Italy or Greece (although that's a factor), but because the currawongs, miners and lorikeets who come to feed every morning deserve to land somewhere that looks like someone gives a damn. They've kept me company through years when I've studied or worked from home and have made me endlessly laugh or melt. The least I can do is give them a nice backdrop.
For the one who wants me to finally look rested:
Money toward facial treatments, or vouchers. My face has earned them, and this French would prefer doing gentle but effective treatments instead of something that would change the structure of my identity. It has survived ten years of Sydney sun, several years of poor sleep, and an amount of stress that would have aged a lesser bone structure into retirement (thankfully my culture is made for that, so there's my uncanny luck again). I would like to give it some professional attention so it can continue doing its job, which is: looking like a woman who has lived without looking like a woman who has been through it. There is a difference and it costs about three hundred dollars in lasers and someone else's trained hands.
For the one who wants me to see the world again:
Money toward a trip to Europe. I have not left Australia in seven years. Seven. I have watched friends go to Italy, to Greece, to France, to places I used to go when my life allowed it, and I have smiled and liked their photos and had to cancel two of my trips because apparently I'm one of God's "strongest soldiers" and the universe keeps sending me its "toughest battles" (I don't remember signing any papers to join a cosmic draft, so fuck that). I want to sit in a café in a city where nobody knows me and eat until I explode, visit cathedrals and archeological sites and every museum I find, feel the particular freedom of being a stranger again, get lost in streets that are thousands of years old and fill my head with culture. I miss the old continent.
For the one who wants me strong and bendy:
A brown yoga mat. Not black, not grey, not the sad mauve that every store seems to think women want, brown, dark green, burgundy. Like something a person who takes herself seriously but not too seriously would unroll on her floor at 7am and keep unrolled until she does her evening stretches (my back hurts from carrying my massive brain, what can I say). And ankle weights, because I am thirty-something and gravity is beginning to have opinions and I would like to stubornly continue winning the argument.
For the one who knows I read in French:
Georges Bataille, Le Bleu du Ciel, hardcove, in French, in the 1970s edition if you can find it. There is a particular smell to French books from that decade, slightly sweet, slightly chemical, like the paper was made by someone who smoked while they worked, and holding one feels like visiting a country I left a long time ago. Bataille wrote about excess and transgression and the sacred and the erotic with the seriousness of a man who understood that these things are not separate. I want his words in the edition that was printed when the ink still felt dangerous.
In the same breath, any old harcover work of Marquis de Sade works too. I don't think I need to explain that one.
For the one who understands skincare is a philosophy:
SkinCeuticals C E Ferulic serum. Yes, it costs a fortune, yes, it is worth it. It is the only product I have ever used that does exactly what it claims to do, which in the skincare industry is roughly as rare as a lorikeet who doesn't shit on my poor plants. One bottle. My skin will thank you silently every morning by continuing to look like it belongs on a woman who sleeps eight hours a night, which I do not, but we keep that between us.
For the one who wants to protect the 90cm of healthy hair:
A silk bonnet, some heatless curlers (silk too) in beige or a Dyson supersonic hairdryer with accessories, some kerastase products (the overnight serum or some hydrating masks). For the long, dark, absurd hair that I have been growing for years and that I refuse to cut because it is one of the few things in my life that has only gotten better with time. A silk bonnet keeps it from tangling while I sleep and makes me look like a Renaissance painting having a nap, the dryer may help with the wildness of it, the products keep it together because it's basically another life I have to take care of.
For the one who decides to go all out:
A MacBook Air or pro M5. My current laptop is six years old, it takes longer to open a document than it took me to write the document, it makes sounds. Not helpful sounds...ominous sounds, like a small animal that knows its time is near. I have nursed it through software updates the way you'd walk an elderly dog up a hill: slowly, with encouragement, knowing that one day it simply won't make it to the top. That day is approaching. If you are the kind of person who likes to be remembered as the one who made a woman's entire creative life materially easier, this is your moment. I am desperately trying to start learning graphic design and to use Blender for 3D art and BOY does the 2020 Macbook Air struggle.
For the one who is practical and kind:
A food processor, not a cute one... a real one. Powerful enough to turn almonds into paste without sounding like it's filing a noise complaint with the building. I bake constantly and I am tired of pretending that a hand blender and determination are substitutes for actual horsepower. They are not, and the hand blender I fried trying to make praline is the living proof of that. The sweets I make deserve better equipment and so do I.
For the one who wants to help in the simplest way:
A small contribution toward the endless, unglamorous, relentless bills that constitute a life. Electricity, internet, the registration for the thing I need to remain housed, paying back the self-funded advanced MBA I just finished, my unfortunate taste for quality and good fabric, the fact that breathing is taxed now, a wesbite I want to build. A life is expensive, especially at my level of independence. Not in the dramatic, cinematic way... in the boring, grinding, Tuesday-afternoon way. A little help with the Tuesdays is sometimes the kindest gift there is.
I don't EXPECT any of this. But I have learned, over years of being alive, that it is better to want things openly than to pretend you don't want anything and then feel unwitnessed when nobody reads your mind (shocker, I know). i have also learned that if you send an open invitation for the people who care to... well care for you in small or big ways, it deepens the reciprocal bond.
Rilke, one final time: "The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things."
I am ready for the next defeat.
Bring truffle pecorino with a candle on it.
