I told myself I would refrain from writing about it, the predicament. Then I stopped writing altogether because it concerns everything, apparently. It’s the first thing I remember in the morning before I’ve even located what day I’m in.
There are moments in the middle of the predicament where I witness my mind working to comfort this body from the hurt it has endured.
Something like a hot-cross-bun succeeding breakfast. An evening of good alcohol. Cleaning my bike; crevices and all. A hearty bisque. An evening of no alcohol at all.
My sister and I walk the Yarra bend, again. My strides are so long this morning she shuffles to keep up as if my body is hurrying away from something. There are names, mostly couples, engraved into the bitumen on which we walk. In the moments of just breath, I get an appetite to read every book there ever was. My mind flutters over pages I will never clap eyes on. What follows is a kind of nausea for I know I can never be full. My sister points out the hundredth car whose manly driver eyes hold a manly gaze on our walking bodies. Fuck off, she yells. The Yarra bends us back home, eventually. She insists on buying my coffee.
The feeling of all this; the pandemic and the rest coming to its imminent end is dawning on me. At the supermarket I wonder if we are all on the same page, or is it just me feeling the weight of the tremendous shadows futurity is casting upon the present. I am in the middle:
of an aisle,
of a supermarket,
of a predicament.
Change is swinging its momentous pendulum swing. The half dozen carton of eggs I buy goes out of date on the twenty-seventh of May, on the day I turn twenty-three. How bout it.
Sicilian Nic dresses my wounds by way of a pistachio poppyseed cake. I think of a conversation I had on a twenty-five and sunny day with him, we were in a stranger’s garden, eating pippies like chips at the end of a bottle of dry white wine. In this conversation, he said how he does not desire a relationship, that he is able to gather what he needs from a female best friend of his who he has known all his life. She is there for him in a way a relationship is and can never be hurt, really, in the way our ship has hurt me. In bed this evening, I type pistachio cake recipe into a search engine.
I walk the botanical garden track with Bonnie, people are amused by her reptilian swagger. So many people turn over this Lilydale topping, most are couples. There are holes in the mesh of my runners where my big toes reach to the sky. Photos are being taken with phones; a young girl, 7 max, is filming her mother walking towards her. One more time, the young girl yells. And I want to know so badly why it is everyone is yearning to be witnessed? All the time.
I read distance creates distance and once you are gone it is easier to stay gone. I spend half the day hoping these idioms are empty words and the other half entertaining what true possibilities they might lean toward if I am to let them. My search engine says the pendulum is made out of osmium, two times the weight of lead.
I read Anne Boyer under dim light. I have to strain my eyes to comprehend the small convoluted font. Some sentences are brilliant, others speak directly to me: happiness is only the absence of some ailment. Or knowledge, I reply. Knowledge has infirmed this body more than any of the ailments I’ve ever known and I’ve broken two arms, sliced open a leg to the bone.
Boyer includes: the classic example of positive contrast is produced by hitting yourself on the head with a hammer. The pain produced is part of the ordered dimension and so the more of it the more you get adapted. Thus, when you stop you “feel great”. I wonder, in this bed, what is the hammer, was I living in an ordered dimension, did the hammer hit me with me hard with honest knowledge. When might I start to “feel great”?
I dream of a solitary life where I am content eating noodle soups from all over. I have a toddler, I do not know who helped me make it. I wake up and have forgotten the first half containing how to get there. It’s not yet light. There is the sound of a garbage truck collecting my wine bottles and cereal boxes. I don’t wish to see the sky turning toward the day. How long can you foster a thought?
Yellow Days 