tall tales ~ issue 27

The curious case of the marketplace ghost

do you??????

Hello! And welcome back. I wish all of my loyal subscribers, as well as my sworn enemies (Adobe Inc., the PayStay parking application, and my own lower back), a lovely late March. I hope this month was kind to you. 

As far as I’m concerned there are only two kinds of people in this world: the ones who sell prolifically on Facebook Marketplace and the ones who will not touch that application with a ten foot pole. The latter knows that 379 ‘Is this available?’ messages will send them slowly insane, and that’s true self-knowledge. Your rising sign could never. Anyway, I’m the first kind. 

Recently, we’ve been clearing out the storage unit my partner and I have shared with my parents for over a year. When the two of us left for a trip to the US in 2022, we had both moved out of our rentals and my parents kindly offered to house our belongings until we worked out what we were doing. Well, it’s now 2024 and although we had a tentative plan in place throughout the intervening months, our US visas have only just been filed which means that to back out of an overseas move now would be financially irresponsible. As a result, we’ve undertaken the task of selling, gifting, or discarding the things we locked away in late 2022 and have not thought about since. It is thrilling to discover just how much shit one can own without knowing. As you read this, perhaps you can hear Karl Marx screaming somewhere in ghost German. 

As a Marketplace frequent flyer, I’ve learnt to weed out the spam from the human people, the time-wasters from the ‘can collect today’-ers. I’m a CAPTCHA for furniture and household goods, and sometimes clothes. Did you know that CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart? Who did the copyedit on this? 

Most of our belongings went without fanfare. Although I do want to give a shout-out to the twenty-something who, along with her elderly grandfather, managed to fit a queen-sized mattress inside a three-door Toyota Yaris. To be fair, the mattress did not have springs, but they stuffed and rolled that bad boy like a Kathmandu employee with a sleeping bag and it taught me a lot about dreaming big. 

At the time of writing, the one remaining item on my Marketplace profile is a solid oak 8-seater table that belongs to my parents. It’s a beautiful table! Do you want it? Let me know. But that’s not the point! The point is that last week I thought for about 48 hours that I had sold this table, and it’s the people I thought I’d sold it to that form the emotional core of today’s story. But to tell you this story, I must first rewind about sixteen years. 

My high school had a regional campus and a ‘city’ (read: deep suburban) campus. In year ten all of the kids from the regional campus had to move to the city campus or move to another school, which now that I think about it was a major inconvenience for their parents. Among the kids who moved from the regional campus was a group boys who were best friends, loved footy, and I can only assume kissed behind the sports centre on Thursday nights. Although they were ‘footy first’, a couple of them also played music, so I shared a music class with part of the group. One of the other boys also dated my close friend, so although we had next to nothing in common, we often shared a drunken personal joke or story about our doddery music teacher forgetting to come to class. I don’t think they actually kissed behind the sports centre but I wish they had. 

Why am I telling you this? Well. Last week I received a Facebook message from a woman with the same surname as one of these boys (men? Feels wrong, they had pubey facial hair the last time I saw them), and given that my partner and I are now living with my parents, in the same area as my high school, where women still take their husbands’ surnames on the reg, chances were high that she was his wife. I’ll be honest with you, I did ignore the message at first. Despite wanting to sell this table, the thought of explaining what my partner and I do, and why we’re living with my parents and, ‘No, not playing the Shrek The Musical cast recording on repeat anymore ha ha’ felt less desirable than listening to an entire episode of The Joe Rogan Experience and okay sure I’m being dramatic. I just……… couldn’t be bothered. So I ignored it. 

A day later, she sent a follow-up. ‘I’m really keen, my husband and I would love to come and take a look.’ Husband! A-ha! I was right. And I did want to sell the table. I told myself to grow up and get that proverbial bread for my parents. I apologised for the delay, and said that they were welcome to come and have a look. We made a plan, and after a few messages back and forth I decided to bite the bullet: ‘Is your husband Steve Buscemi (names may have been changed for privacy)? We went to school together!’ I figured this was the most normal way to approach things, given we were about to meet in-person. This particular footy boy and I had a decidedly neutral relationship — I’d never kissed him at a party, never wanted to kiss him at a party, never let him down easy by telling him I couldn’t be in a relationship because I was ‘focusing on my horse riding’. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The wife of Steve Buscemi asked if I’d known him from high school or primary school, and our conversation ended shortly thereafter when she said:

She didn’t really seem that interested in our prior connection, which was fine. She needed a table and my mum wanted $400. This was about commerce, not the mysterious workings of the universe. 

The next day, I let her know that my partner and I would be running about fifteen minutes late, because we were coming from Collingwood. And then, she sent me this:

Which I knew meant that they would not be getting back to me. There would be no new time. 

In 2019 I sent someone a text that said, ‘Hey, feel like you might be ghosting me?’ And ever since that moment I’ve tried to avoid feeling that feeling ever again. It has not worked, because guess what? There is just so much we will never know about other people, the space between us, and if what they say is what they mean. It’s a frustrating constant in this life, and I’ve circled this topic many times before. I have no idea what happened in the Buscemi household that night. But oh, I think, therefore I am (going to send myself mad with possible theories). 

When I was at drama school, we played a game where we would sit in a circle, and one-by-one we’d go around and share something we found interesting about every person in the room. The high was unparalleled: nineteen people pointing out something even you might not know about yourself? Heroin-level. We foamed at the mouth for this game, because we were young and so desperate to be understood. But I think most adults would get a similar kick out of this game, too. We will never be able to see ourselves clearly, not really, anyway. Even the most self-assured people can’t keep an eye on every inch of their personality, and we’re all obsessed with ourselves in one way or another. Do we even have set personalities? My voice gets a lot deeper, and my sentences a lot shorter, when I’m meeting people who have jobs I don’t understand for the first time. 

The space between who we think we are and who we actually are is so charged with possibility, to touch it would make your clothes cling to your skin in an uncomfortable way. We know so many things — I learnt last week that you can get a grease stain out of a t-shirt by using bicarb soda and dishwashing liquid — but we will never know what goes on in that space between. Very frustrating, very nice. On the whole, I would like to know less things (but explore the things I already know in more delicious detail). 

To Mr and Mrs Buscemi, I hope you find the table you’re looking for. And to myself I say, ‘Stop looking at so many websites.’ If you live in the Greater Melbourne area and are in need of an 8-seater oak table, please get in touch. Otherwise, I’ll leave you with this pearl of wisdom from Shrek the Musical: