It’s 13 degrees outside, 4th of March. It’s late, a weeknight. I’m driving mostly empty roads alone. The car is filled with murmuring grey music and the traffic light pauses seem longer than usual. Night spills in the open windows―a cold wind on wet, sore lips.

Someone is firetwirling in Royal Park. The sharp kerosene smell jerks me back―five years, six years, seven. A flash of flame―‘Do you remember when?’―and I do, I do―I remember nights on the beach, drinking straight vodka, and learning to cut my own hair. I remember wishing you would speak to me, what it felt like to want to be ‘that girl’, and when I started calling myself a woman instead. I remember believing only in uncertainty, because every time I felt surefooted, the ground moved again and unsettled it all. And I remember letters from South Africa, a friend imploring me to say a prayer and ask for God’s love, and the first time I wrote it down on paper: ‘That’s not how it works for me.’

At the intersection of Blyth Street and Sydney Road, there is a Baptist church. On the front of it, a sign in flickering, lowercase, neon purple announces that this is indeed Brunswick. It jars with me. When I think of churches, I think of reverence, silence, stillness, and a sort of reflective, ethereal joy. Gaudy plastic and fluorescent lighting sell a flimsy aesthetic that is perhaps supposed to speak to the urgency and superficiality of my generation, but still: it jars. Perhaps it’s my Catholic heritage that does it, growing up in a world of carved ceilings, glittering stained-glass and a focus on the solemnity of ceremony and theatre of the Gospel. Selling religion feels like an oxymoron. One of the things I always liked about it was the sense of something running deep, something that didn’t need to be sold. A church was a place where you considered the way you lived your life, contemplated your choices, meditated on your morality―whether you agreed with the priest or not. It was a place where you couldn’t help but be confronted by the possibility of your own mortality and fallibility. It was place that said to me, Take something seriously. Think.

University philosophy is not quite the same. It requires you to remove your emotions and your instincts from your analysis in order to systematically, logically deconstruct and reconstruct the world. There is a place for that, a very important one, but it isn’t and will never be everything. Sister Loretta, Sister Verna, Sister Barbara, Sister Anne―they taught me this. Even when wracked by crises of faith, they still got up early and took vegetables to their neighbours, taught music and maths, visited the sick and elderly, consumed literature and science and philosophy, and tried to accomodate as many disadvantaged families in their cottages as they could possibly manage. Long after I decided that the church was not where I fit―too rebellious, too changeable, too interested in the soft mouths of my friends―I still went back to stay with them, to help them, because it was so obvious to me that faith was not what made a person good or bad. Good people are good because they choose to do generous, loving, kind things. The titles they work under mean far, far less than the work itself.

My lack of faith in religion hasn’t eaten away at the reflective hush I feel when I walk into a church. It’s not religion that is evil. Belief in God isn’t what hurts people. Bureaucracy, power abuse, prejudice and closedmindedness are not the exclusive domain of the church. And the frustrated, fed up agnostic in me wants to shriek that in the last few years I have met more closedminded, pigheaded atheists in this country―closedminded and pigheaded about their atheism―than I ever have closedminded, pigheaded Catholics. The institution, the individuals, the doctrine, the interpretation of doctrine and its practical application are all separate issues, as is the social context in which they are cultivated. Calling a theist ‘stupid’ for their faith is arrogant and presumptuous. Fear of being wrong is emotionally toxic and intellectually crippling, whether your doctrine stems from Jesus or the scientific method. And I can’t help but feel that people who bang on about the evils of religion and quote from the bible of Richard Dawkins are just as guilty of intolerance, ignorance and spite as their accusations would have others be. It’s far harder to be receptive to and welcoming of possibility—of any kind—than it is to be blockheaded and insistent that your own tiny corner of the universe can tell you everything there is to know.

Dear [ name omitted ]

It’s 12:25am and and and

and I’m replying to your letter. I’m sending it to your [——] address assuming you’re there, even though I have no idea where I’d send it if you weren’t.

I’m avoiding writing fiction, again. You know those days when it feels like your brain is smothered by cottonwool? When composing a single sentence is like wading through thigh-deep mud? That was me today. And I object to the suggestion that writing letters is grandmotheresque. Emails aren’t the same. You can’t hide an email in a box under your bed, or tear it up in frustration, or stick pretty pictures to it, or send a leaf in the envelope. And if you can do all of those things, then you’ve printed it out onto paper and it’s no longer an email: it’s a shadow of what you really want it to be—a written letter in the post. And in emails, you can’t do this—

[ fills the page with circles and scribbles ]

which sometimes feels like the most expressive and appropriate thing to say. You can’t properly translate that into type, or even into words, and get the same effect, although I reckon there are some sounds that might come close.

I am writing this on onion-skin airmail paper. My mother bought it for me when I was in high school and writing endless letters to my friend in Canada. So my writing letters isn’t anything new, although I haven’t written any for awhile, save to my ancient great-aunt who lives in Horsham, and who is apparently busier than I am because she rarely ever replies.

The truth is, I’m really writing for myself. The ‘you’ in this letter isn’t really you until you read it. It’s just scribbles on paper—words in a void. That’s what makes them easy. And lately my mind and my mouth don’t want to connect up. There is a tangle of thoughts knotting up my brain that I can’t speak to people, even when I want to. But I can communicate it here because this is silent, drawn out, and somehow more primal. Speaking was always second choice for me. Scribbling always came first—pictures, then words. My mind and my mouth might be at odds, but my mind and my pen—

Sometimes when I write letters I figure things out, and then I don’t want to send them. If I send this to you, are these words yours? Are you allowed to share them around, to hide them, to bury them or burn them, or do what you like with them? Part of me feels that, however haphazard, these words are a gift therefore I no longer have any claim over them. At the same time, another part of me is trying to claw them back, because they’re mine, they’re mine, they’re me.

I’m not writing in an art frame: I’m not considering how best to construct a timeline of events, or redrafting and reshaping, or setting a clear objective and layering my paragraphs with thematic nuance. But if I’m writing this for myself then why would I bother sending it? And if I send it but make a copy for myself, does that compromise the integrity of the words as a gift? Does it just make me narcissistic? And if I take it, type it out, reimagine it, shuffle pieces around and turn it into art and make it public, have I betrayed you? Have I betrayed myself?

If my words could say things the way this chord cadence does.

If my words could say things the way the wind through the trees at midnight, behind the streetlight, says them.

If my words could say things the way the rain dripping off my fingertip says them.

How close can I live to art before I can’t see the line anymore?
I am addressing this to you because:
I am writing rather than talking about it because:

Everything is something else, really.

(December 2008)

Every time I fly, I lose my grip on the world a little more. On Monday afternoon, I boarded a flight to Darwin. We took off facing the city before making a sweeping right-hand turn and pointing the nose towards Central Australia. I leaned my head against the window as we turned and searched for the places I knew between the matchbox skyscrapers and sewing-thread roads. I couldn’t see my house but I found the triangle made by the bridge, the commission flats and the tram lines, and I thought about how many days I’ve stayed in the same four rooms, just wearing lines in the flagstones from my bedroom to the bathroom to the kettle to my study, and how odd it is that such little things – a couple of dishes, the colour of curtains, the number of words on a computer screen – so incomprehensibly small! – could become so important, when there are clouds like cities and endless sky that we can lose ourselves in so easily.

In my dreams when I fly, it’s more like swimming. Getting off the ground is an effort and I’m held down by the weight of my own limbs. The air is heavy and stubborn, but if I kick hard and work my arms, eventually I make it above the buildings and the trees and the breeze picks me up and carries me along. I can go for awhile like that, weaving through flocks of birds and somersaulting over powerlines, as long as I don’t get too close to the concrete. Something about the city pulls me down again, thickens the air and makes my body sluggish. I wake up from flying dreams feeling like I ought to be exhausted.

10 minutes on an aeroplane, though, and I’m in the same place some philosophy classes failed to take me in 13 weeks. I think it’s being so close to the sky that does it – the realisation that simplicity and intricacy are the same paradoxical creature; that the world is enormous and tiny all at once; that in 20 hours you can be on the other side of the planet but that so much can happen in those flagstone-floored rooms – that the journey from nothing to everything can be covered in the space between a breath and a word spoken aloud. And every time I remember that there’s nothing to hold me up, the butterflies in my heart flutter a little.