archive: City Girl

City Girl was first performed as a short play by the Riverina Theatre Company in 2005. It has since been read as a poem at various poetry readings, including the Travel reading at Mart130 Cafe.

City Girl Being Morose in a Rural Landscape

In this place they always assume that I want a middy instead of a schooner, and the people act like it's something to be proud of, or something odd, to be a girl who drinks beer.

In this place the bands are so talented that the covers they play sound exactly like the CD.
And the pubs are full of people who seem to be satisfied with handshake friendships.
Are full of people who seem to think that this dancing's fun.
Are full of people who look like people from back home.
And I'm that creepy new chick who keeps staring.

In this place my mum's cooking makes me fart more and shit less.
I know no one but old acquaintances, who send me back to high school depression. Whose faces I remember, but whose laughs I've forgotten. Who I recognise through hair colour, not by the way they walk.

In this place the sky is a different colour. A greyer, dust laden, shade of blue. And the horizon is longer and thinner. A bony thin landscape. Lethargic and dazed.
Not like my voluptuous flamenco dancer of a city back home.
In this place it's too dry for mould to grow on the walls, and the snot flakes from the sides of my nose like paint in too much sun.
Because the sun is everywhere, even up there, and I think I know how the brits felt, coming here to this prying heat.

In this place that calls the river a beach, but where people can die without seeing the sea, can die without seeing my singing smoggy coast, in this place friends are an e-mail, and a battle with a modem-stealing sibling, away.
And the beauty I've become used to is even further.

In this place I need to learn again that the ants will bite your feet as you peg if you don't dance around the clothesline, and that grass has to be watered to be green. And I need to learn to drive to live a life.

This place that I left because a conversation about theatre might turn into a debate about whether those two girls should have kissed on stage.
And there's a risk of enjoying being a checkout chick, and a risk of being a sullen one.

This place where suddenly supermarkets are lonely places.
Where I'll take up moshing again, even though I left it when I left this town of a city.
Because it's only here, in this place, that I need it to beat out my frustrations.
This place where change collects on my bookshelves and I can't walk in my room for the childhood souvenirs. Where I have Billy Holiday and twenty-eight hats and a clothes dummy and family.

In this place where leaving is the only thing to do, sometimes I feel at home.

© Laura Smith 2005