On Plans

After drinks with my soon-to-be roommates, I walk home under a sky that is see-through teal in the east and purple-haze-magenta in the west. It’s seven thirty and thirty-two degrees. We had a wine that got better twenty minutes after we opened it. I drank on a relatively empty stomach and now the music in my ears is making a large impression on me. I go from jovial to too-reflective in a matter of seconds. I start crying around the third park, around Jolimont station. The Pullman’s tower is glowing ugly and iridescent above.

The water comes to the boil. I plop six hargow dumplings in and a mix of exotic mushrooms I walked out of the store without paying for. I sit down to eat the lazy dinner with the last glass of a sixty dollar chablis. My phone alerts. Millie has made a spreadsheet for all the houses we are supposed to visit in order to begin this new chapter of our lives. People keep referring to all the imminent changes coming my way as the The Next Stage Of Your Life, so now I too refer to it this way. It’s easier to digest, I suppose.

I study the spreadsheet, opening up each house with the command-shift button. I am trying to distinguish the houses based on their respective locations, bedroom sizes, outdoor areas. The tabs in my browser shrink with every new addition until there are too many open and I am all muddled up. The chablis is nearly done. The chablis is delicious, I think. Though at the same time, I ought to be more frugal if I’m going to move into the next stage with comfort and ease. We have been soon-to-be roommates for longer than anticipated. Last week, eighty bodies turned up at a semi-desirable three bedroom house. We were not the winners.

Gentle mist is falling from the roof of this cafe courtyard in North Fitzroy, it’s subtropical and I wonder if anyone else thinks this. A woman with a tattoo just like mine seats herself at a high table and I am forced to recognise just how very much I am in Melbourne right now. The waitress drops a Virgin Mary in front of me, it is the promising colour of health and vitality. I swallow it before I am able to recognise the full extent of its burning savoury heat. At the table to my left, a woman leaps up to embrace a man. The man asks the waitress for a mimosa because, he says, I’m celebrating. They’ve finally, after two months of looking, secured a house to move into. I pull up the spreadsheet, wondering if I will be ordering a mimosa anytime soon.

In three hours time I am supposed to meet for a drink with a stranger, a potential employer. I am standing in front of my wardrobe trying to figure out what my best hire-me outfit is, when my phone rings for the fifth time. You’ll be fine, Nico said when he told me about the potential employer, just be your book loving self. When the phone goes off again, my mind wonders to the worst kind of catastrophe having occurred in the family. The premier is about to announce a 5-day hard lock down, Mum says. I hang up, throw items of clothing, bottles of liquor and several books into a large pink tub and hop in the car. If you were stranded on a desert island with one other person, who would it be? For one hundred and eleven kilometers, my foot is firm on the accelerator.

Three hours later, Daisy is opposite me contemplating a menu. We are in Daylesford, drinking wine at The Wine Speak. There is a complex texture to the air, one of movement, of disappointment. Cars take the roundabout with impatience. There are lots of palms being pressed into steering wheels. I don’t really know what to make of any of it. We are going to the pub over there for dinner tonight, for one last hurrah, my sister says. The sky is see-through teal again and cooling rapidly. I pluck a jumper from the pink tub wondering how long I might be living out of it for.

After two glasses, my body is thoroughly lubricated, so much so I sign up for a membership at The Wine Speak, fill a box with a dozen and order copious amounts of cheese. I am surprised by the feeling of calm in my body in the midst of all this chaos. I consider if it’s the wine inducing this sense of oblivion. On the balcony of the public house, Daisy orders the pie, I get the risotto. We clink our glasses again and while it is all very delicious, there is an unspoken ambilavence.

Into the evening, emails trail in until my inbox is full of bold, unopened subject lines:

Notice of cancellation of your inspection

Due to COVID-19 updated restrictions

We apologise but due to COVID-19

I start to wonder if I will live above the deli forever. University starts in two weeks, on the first of March, but will it? From the balcony I can see the outskirts of Daylesford and Hepburn. Who is to say this lockdown will end when it’s supposed to. Who is to say? Who is to say? Who is to say?

On day two of what the media have decided to call the ‘circuit breaker’, I roll over to find Daisy awake. There is a new ebola outbreak, she says and flashes me a screen. What’s that again? I don’t know but I’m pretty sure it’s when peoples brains explode, she tells me. My own brain feels like it might explode. The recycling bin is filling at a drastic rate.

Yogalatis because there is nothing else. Each morning, around 9.30, we ascend Wombat Hill and lie under an established elm. Daisy puts on her best instructor voice and teaches me to move my body in ways in doesn’t want to go. At first I resent it; my inability to reach, stretch, balance. Now, I wake up and find myself desiring the satisfying pull of too-tight hospitality muscles.

There is a folder on my desktop called Life Admin. I can see it right now as I type these words out. I set my alarm this morning because The Next Stage Of Your Life involves employment. I open Seek, Indeed and Scout and apply for miscellaneous jobs that don’t rouse me, not one bit. I don’t want to go back to the metropolis, I say.

Daisy and I make our way to a waterfall 10km outside of Daylesford. There are no cars on the road so when we reach the swimming hole at the bottom of the rocky descent, we undress so every bit of skin is exposed to the elements. Lava once flowed through here, the sign says. The rock formation, in front of the bright blue background of the sky, is magnificent. I plop in the water by way of sliding down a slimy rock face. All day I remain like this.

In my book, Sheila Heti writes about her experience of having seen a fortune teller. I ask Daisy if she had the power to briefly and accurately peek into her future, would she. Tomorrow is day five, D day. What will Dan say? In Daisy’s slow response, I realise I have woken her dozing body up from a nap. I pose it again, thinking it through myself. If someone two months ago showed me the image of me lying here naked somewhere between Daylesford and Trentham where lava once flowed, in the midst of another lockdown with no partner and no job about to start a new degree and about to move into a house with two friends and one stranger, I would not have believed the image. Daisy then says, after some thought and consideration, no way. I nod as if peering into The Next Stage Of Our Lives. I think I agree.

Dan says we can proceed with caution. I collect my things back into the pink tub and drive until I cannot drive any further, until I am looking out over the Bass Straight. There is so much blue, each window is a picture frame promising different things at different times of the day. I apply for more houses, more jobs. The sun is lethal. I break a sweat on the soft sand and feel all kinds of stress rise up. My hot body in the cold Bass Straight-water generates steam, so I am made to see just how alive and functioning this body is.

What are you doing, Jack says. My phone is in front of my face making white noise. I am in the middle of a virtual house inspection -outcome pending. A boy messages me asking when I am planning on returning home. He teases about my never ending holiday. And while I realise that being employed is both socially acceptable and necessary for survival, I also agree with Sophie when she says not working and lying on this beach suits us so well. I don’t want to return to the metropolis, I tell him.

Towards the end of my book, Sheila writes,

I recently learned that what happens in a cocoon is not that a caterpillar grows wings and turns into a butterfly. Rather, the caterpillar turns to mush. It disintegrates, and out of this mush, a new creature grows. Why does no one talk about the mush? Or about how, for any change at all to happen, we must, for sometime, be nothing -be mush. That is where you are right now -in a state of mush. Right now your entire life is mush. But only if you don’t try and escape it might you emerge one day as a butterfly.