Sometimes it feels like there’s an ocean crashing and storming away inside me and my skin is the only thing holding it in.
Only a few weeks left on the PhD. December 20. That’s the day.
Watch this space.
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We flew the budget airline. My father blithely strolled through customs, waving cheerfully at the guards who waved cheerfully back, took our fingerprints but asked us almost nothing. When we checked in at the hotel, he started pulling half-open packets of biscuits, chocolate, candy, piles of muesli bars—even a chicken wing—out of his bag. ‘In case I got hungry!’ he said. The fridge is now stuffed with food we’re struggling to eat.
In the car, we passed the hospital, a church, open gardens. A man sat on a park bench, asleep, head bowed, next to a shopping trolley full of plastic bags and a sign that read ‘SUNDAY WORSHIP: 9am. 11:30am. ALL WELCOME.’
The beach is bright but a heavy fug clings to the mountains. It rains so much in the hills that the Ala Wai Canal was built to drain the tourist district of Waikiki. The beachfront resorts cluster at the water’s edge, trying to elbow each other out of the way. A week in this hotel feels like an indulgence, but I heard people in the lift talking about how they’ve been here for months. Their skin, which I’m sure was once almost as white as mine, has turned a deep mahogany brown—one layer of sunburn over another.
I went walking. A homeless man was sleeping by the corner door of Tiffany’s. A dead mouse lay beside him. I walked past slowly, feeling off-kilter. A little further down the road, scrawled on a wall: ‘DEVELOPMENT IS GRAFFITI.’
Afternoon winds threaten a storm but don’t deliver. Emergency vehicles screaming sirens hurtle past at regular intervals. My jokes fall limp in the humidity. Our cocktails are poured on land that was once rice paddies. Before that, swamp.
In the Northern Territory, they always said the build-up turned the locals mad. On Oahu, madness is people in hibiscus-print shirts scrambling over each other for the chance to stuff their faces with deep-fried potatoes. Madness is men and women, towel-corner to towel-corner, lined up in rows along the hard sand, trying to change the colour of their skin. Madness is that oil slick formed by a sunken, corroded battleship tomb and the way we flock to pay money to see it. Madness is this food, which seems to be like this city: made only of excess. I’m afraid that if I’m not careful, if I stay too long, the grease will start to congeal on my skin.
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A golden autumn morning breaks through leafless branches. The chainlink fences that flank the railway tracks gleam as the sun rises behind them. The footpaths wear mantles of brown and red leaves. My fingers are cold and only seem to get colder as I type. I piece together a couple of paragraphs from the scraps I left for myself the last time I opened this file. It feels like sewing together sheets of rubber.
The last few weeks have been like this. My habits have taken a 180-degree turn. It used to be odd if I went to sleep before midnight. Now it feels strange if I wake after dawn. My old housemate maintains that the elements are the same, I’ve just swapped my alone-time to the very early morning. She’s probably right, but it feels like progress somehow, like it’s worlds away from how I used to live.
I find some notes in my journal: two years ago, a fragrant mid March evening. Cadie and I sat on the steps of the creaking verandah in our friends’ overgrown, bamboo-filled garden in Kangaroo Point. A few feet away, our friends sprawled around the kitchen table half-drunk, making bad jokes and cackling with laughter. The threads of their spiralling conversation had sunk so low beneath the beer bubbles we’d lost sight of them. A possum stalked across the verandah railing before taking a flying leap and landing on the tree that towered above us and canopied the entire garden. Cadie looked intently past her own (discarded) beer and confessed that sometimes she didn’t know who she was or what she was supposed to be doing. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘it feels like I’m living multiple lives.’
I muddle my way through a paragraph, the sentences flaccid, the cadences all wrong.
Later, a friend calls to vent about a mutual acquaintance in an unhappy marriage. The acquaintance: I stayed at her house for a night, a couple of years ago. I don’t remember why. I think I was trying to get to know her. She asked me what I was planning to do after my PhD. I wanted to publish, I said, and then perhaps travel. After that—who knew? I had as much as I needed to go on for the moment.
‘But what about getting married?’ she asked. ‘What about having children?’
‘I don’t want to do either of those things,’ I said.
‘But surely, at some point—?’
‘No.’
It curtailed our friendship: we saw each other as irrevocably different, constantly speaking at cross purposes. I was convinced by our conversation that night that those ideas were hardwired into her: that marriage and children were so much what she believed to be the natural objectives of her life that she didn’t understand—couldn’t understand, I think—why either of them might feel wrong to me.
She now has a one-year-old and is pregnant with twins. Her Facebook feed is flooded with discussion of babies and child-rearing, and status updates gushing about how much she loves her life. It’s a stark contrast to the bitterness that my friend relays to me on the phone, which is overlaid by our acquaintance’s insistence that because these things are right she must be happy, even if she doesn’t feel it.
I want to flog her with a copy of The Feminine Mystique and I don’t care if she hates me for it. My friend insists she has tried and there’s no helping some people. I suppose not, but what does it say about the world when the structure means more than that which is contained within it? That must be my idea of hell: a hollowed-out shell, perfunctory motion, conformity for the sake of the status quo.
I think, perhaps that’s why I gravitate towards the dark, lonely hours. It still feels like quiet rebellion. Off-kilter, out of sync. And the edges are where the cracks are.
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This is the worst thing. This dry mouth belly tumbling soul sucking can’t tell if I’m breathing.
People say the art of conversation is dead. That we don’t know how to connect any more. That our relationships have devolved into farce and fancy, as though the rules of engagement are tempered by deliberate pantomime and posing. As though in the past we all embraced like lovers at every occasion and bared our souls at the slightest prompting.
I didn’t always have so much trouble speaking. My father used to complain I spent too much time on the phone. ‘Why don’t you ask your friends over?’ he’d say. ‘What’s wrong with talking face-to-face?’ Then he complained that I never called, that the physical presence of people was trumped by faint blue light, by interrupting jangles and a split focus. By text on a screen.
Well, I’m sorry, Dad, but I know where I stand with type and carefully constructed sentences. It’s freefall conversation I lose myself in, spiralling, spinning, tumbling towards that inevitable uncomfortable end. And how could you say this life is disconnected? Because these lip flutterings and heart poundings and quick shallow breaths seem nothing but real, and I want to know why you think I should go through this, Dad? What life lesson is better learnt by embracing the corrosive paralysis of stress and unfamiliar society?
‘You’re going to learn the piano,’ he said when I was seven. ‘One day you’ll be glad. One day you’ll thank me.’ And Sister Loretta, who was old and stooped, came each week and smiled with her eyes and talked of crotchets, clefs and major chords, and gave me a prayer at the beginning of every lesson. Her fingers always shook upon the keys but her copperplate hand never failed to make me feel unworthy. Why can’t I write like that? I want to write like that.
We took a holiday to the High Country. When we got home I would remember the forest, the curling bark, the cold altitude air and the vast, aching distance. I tried to capture it, to curl my fingers around it. I tried to play what I saw into the piano. It was like trying to pluck tendrils of smoke from the air. Music slips out of my control and I can’t get it to look the way I want. Pianos are cool blue and lavendar. The bush is better served by a deep green bowed double bass or a guitar strummed in a minor key.
I once tried to explain to a friend how a song I liked had ripples of deep blue threaded with silver, ice and bursts of light. She stared at me, incredulous, and said, ‘I don’t think about music like that at all.’ And I thought, this isn’t what I think about it. This is how it is. And I try so desperately to get to that, to represent that, to make it tangible, to understand it, so that when you want to know what I think, I can tell you how I see. And I used believe I bumped mute through the universe, as though every fraught function of my mouth went unnoticed or unheard. But I’ve been speaking the whole time, just not with the right words. Sometimes I feel like my whole existence can be distilled down to one long lesson on learning to speak. And then you ask me how I am, and how is the writing going, and what can I say? A stutter, a stumble, an expulsion of meaninglessness. ‘It’s fine.’
This is the worst thing.
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