My colleague, Lee, advises me against reading Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. I pluck The Year of Magical Thinking from a shelf just above my head height. People say I have grown – am still growing and I have to wonder if this is all part of it. Early on, Joan reveals she kept a word document titled Notes On Change. I put the book down and lift the lid of my laptop, typing the words out slowly.
Notes On Change:
I need a book for my thirteen-year-old son who doesn’t read much -something funny, the lady says to me. I walk around the bookshop pretending to be thinking about this when really I am thinking about how our apartment is going to look without all of his plants. The lady is right on my heals, I turn a corner around the cookbook section and this is when I start to feel the saltiness rolling down the inside of me.
Day two and I blister overnight. One on the inside of each ankle. Every step the blister rubs against the rim of my shoe. The internet warns against breaking the thin film. But nothing happens the way it’s supposed to and of course the thin film breaks and now my blister is exposed, and I am alone watching my skin erode my skin.
Wake up blue to the feeling of having had a fight and not knowing how it ended. I remember and then masturbate, and then cry: the vocal kind, which I have come to know feels like the pain-pleasure paradox of a hot hot sauna after a greedy night. Eat seven advent calendar chocolates knowing well I was ruining tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that…
Nobody explained it was going to be so thick and my body so weak feeling like can’t keep an orange juice in my body. Both so dull and too alive at once. Sleep’s hard. I turn on my left side and think that this is actually going to be great, get restless and flip over onto my right where it’s all black for as far as I can see.
Joan talks about The Vortex, which I find myself getting sucked into over and over. The Vortex concerns almost everything I take into gaze. They are unavoidable, she warns but I know this already. It’s the two-tiered curtains above my bed or the banh mi in my hands or the two-dollar scratchie I’m about to take a fifty-cent coin to. They are, to quote Joan, the webs of intact associations one leaves behind, however acrimonious.
It’s funny, I say to a friend, watching people’s faces. Something happens when I inform people of the situation. Their faces empty like dinner plates, like the extra large, extra white dinner plates we save for Christmas day lunch. It is as if they too feel dull and flat and full of shattered visions.
Take five on the leather couch at work. Are you alright, Geoff says. Geoff is whistling in perfect pitch. I consider telling Geoff that acute emotional stress, positive or negative, can cause the left ventricle of the heart to be ‘stunned’ or paralysed, causing heart attack-like symptoms including strong chest, arm or shoulder pains, shortness of breath, dizziness, loss of consciousness, nausea and vomiting.
I’m fine, I say. Just tired.
Is it just me feeling the weight of the tremendous shadows futurity is casting upon the present? I wrote last time.
Tuesday, two days before my favourite day of the year. I sit down to write a Christmas card to his Mum on Pantone Rainy Day, which takes me an hour too long and in the end I abandon it for one with flowers. Merry Christmas but really, what the fuck is happening?
You have to keep the blisters away from water, the doctor says. I dream of swimming but wake up dry. I take Bonnie around the Botanical Garden track trying my best not to engage with the Ficus
Macrophyllas pirouetting against the garden’s peremeter. All the roads lead me to her, C.S Lewis wrote about his wife. I set out on one of them but now there’s an impassable frontier across it.
Evening, I go to the top of the bathroom cupboard but find the little blue pills no longer. I pull Bonnie to my chest and concentrate on the sound of her lungs taking air in and then releasing that air. I can’t go as slow as her and so it is all out of time. The duvet is lumpy. The duvet, I realise, does not belong to me.
Count backwards into a nightmare, into a mine, deep underground. The air is thick, and he is there. We have a lot of work to do, he says. We are both holding picks, but my arms are even smaller than my conscious arms. My strokes hardly disrupt the wall. I’m not sure what we’re digging for but he pleads with me to put in more effort. The walls start to cave. Light occurs. I come to. There is a large truck in front of the deli; I watch the burly man take my rubbish away.
A friend hands me sunflowers that are all yellow yellow yellow – the brightest kind. Then another friend plops a present in my arms. I open it and a chocolate sardine falls out. The expression of the aluminium wrapped fish is one of blissful indifference and I find myself struck in a state of jealousy over the inanimate object. The main present is a book by Dr. Seuss: Oh the Places You’ll go.
I don’t have the concentration to write. Mum lends me a Dyson stick vacuum and for a brief moment when I turn it on, I feel like everything is going to be alright. I tidy the house, surfaces and corners I have never thought to address before. I unsubscribe to emails and paint my nails with precision I wasn’t aware these hands are capable of. This will be the best thing that has ever happened to you. I browse tattoos and haircuts, turning over the idea of a shag, a new dress, bright lipstick. But then consider that if I am to reinvent myself am I agreeing in saying: yes, you are not enough?
I go places, mostly bars and patches of sun and bodies of water but can’t swim away the feeling of something having been dislodged. I make triangles in dusty rain from 11am until 12pm; the Band-Aids on my blisters are flapping like a flag in the wind. In the car, I am curious and type the word into a search engine: to dislodge is to knock or force out of position.
How do you feel, Mum asks. My eggs are too runny because she asked for hers well done and I asked for mine normal and so the difference is cosmic. Bright orange seeps. I know it’s bad, I think. I’ve started napping. I push it around the plate watching it coat all the other stuff. There is a lady photographing her pancakes. They are green and tall with things I have never before seen on pancakes. Why, I wonder.
Joan writes about the feeling of distressing somatic waves that can last anywhere between a moment and an hour. I settle the waves with another bite of runny egg white. The woman is yet to start on the pancakes; I imagine them being cold and firm by now. I pass a billboard for the next season of MasterChef and a long line of people waiting to buy sneakers. I wonder if all this is the opposite of meaning; the relentless succession of moments during which I will confront the experience of meaningless itself.
I put away books, a tall pile that belongs in the personal development section. Stuff about slow sex and loving oneself and learning to look on the bright side but it’s the middle of summer, overcast and the rain is falling in horizontal sheets and my heart is in pieces. I open a book on the star sign Gemini and flick to the section on relationships then a little further to the section on the ending of these relationships.
The dislodging is temporary, it says.
I tell Mum I find myself desiring cigarettes, even when I haven’t had the big meal that sometimes warrants one. Are you eating enough, she says. Mum was a heavy smoker; in her smoking days she never believed she would be capable of living a content life without them. How, she wondered, will I have a meal, drink a coffee, see a friend, hang out the washing or lie on a beach without one in hand. She tells me she could not envision her life beyond smoking. Until she stopped and her heart kept beating and she unlearned and relearned the old tasks anew.
Another friend sends me home with a large zucchini and oyster mushrooms that look too beautiful to cover in oil and swallow. I am reminded of my earlier decision to leave the lights lit and the digital radio set to ABC Jazz so when I was to walk up the stairs and through the door like I have just now, I will have succeeded in tricking myself into thinking this is a lovely environment in which I will fall asleep easily. The bed is impeccable. There is the smell of pizza wafting through an open window. I sit on the bed to think about what is going to be required to restart my life.
One Tuesday night, at nine, sunny rain starts falling. I pull on pants and a clean jumper just to get some drippy brie. I have it with some fresh sourdough so chewy it occupies my mouth for a while. I clean my teeth, studying how this looks in the mirror. Everything is brand new. There is a new calendar opposite the toilet seat, which I have hung prematurely to the New Year due to commence in two days’ time. I understand the calendar, along with the small bright orange diary still cellophane wrapped in my bag, as a profession of faith in the future even if I am ambivalent about what it holds.
I am getting on with the business of living.
The dislodging is temporary, remember.
Yellow Days 