When I wake up this early I feel as though I am doing as Szymborska said in that I am catching the world in its otherness. My plants, the blonde wood table, even the power lines out my window seem to shriek in discomfort like a door being opened and you, reader, are not yet decent. My lamps are especially roguish. Caught in a pose, they give off the impression they have leapt to a spot and here they will remain until night descends and I shut my eyes all over.
I step into my walking clothes and press play on a podcast staring Anne Carson. The Greek Mafia are already out the front of the cake shop drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and discussing things beyond me. The table they usually occupy has been removed, though the men make make do. The notice of Auction sign on top of the cake shop has been perpetually postponed. I am manifesting a bakery move in. A good one.
Rain fell overnight leaving deep and shallow puddles for me to dodge. Anne is in Iceland right now, which she describes as elemental. The trees around the Botanical Garden track are only half dry so their smooth trunks look tie-die. I admire the creases where they bend, which to my delight are called elbows. The poet, Anne says, is a careful writer of books.
I wonder if Anne has read much Szymborska. Probably. A man introduced me to the polish poet several months ago. I was absorbed immediately. The collection was a gift for my twenty-fourth birthday, which fell on the eve of lockdown number four, or was it five? We broke bread and drank wine three times that day. Lately, it has become apparent that I enjoy this man in the same way I enjoy champagne and baths, which is to say I like this man in ways I can’t fully comprehend, in ways I do not desire to live without.
For the remainder of my walk, I try on several genres of music. I settle on a classical playlist my ex-boyfriend made, which I have decided is really very good. This music colours my interpretation of everything I take into gaze -from the man stretching a muscle on the grass to the woman sanitising the pedestrian crossing. Mundane affairs like a leaf falling off a tree or a car slowing down for me at a crossing becomes inflected with drama and value until I wonder if music is just a means mystification, of delusion.
I spot my next door neighbour, the tailor, out running. He doesn’t strike me as a runner, though his compression sleeves and headband suggest otherwise. It occurs to me I know really very little about my neighbour, about any of them, which feels wrong given our proximity over the past eighteen months. Sometimes I can hear him cooking or laughing through the wall we share. There are a pair of pants he has fixed for me three times now. He advised me that if they split again there is nothing he can do. I remember when he handed them to me and the way he hesitated when he said it is a matter of size not depletion.
A client refers on the phone refers to the recurring sounds, flavours, faces and tasks of lockdown as her ‘lockdown soundtrack’. I enjoy the ring to this and write it down while at the same time reflecting on my own. I flick through the notes and videos and voice memos of the last few months, which reveal themselves to me as a diary of someone who has been instructed to resist living. It is a diary, I decide, of Lost-Living-ness.
It has become clear to me my next door neighbour, the tailor, has developed a penchant for singing. When he is not fixing and adjusting the garments of this suburb, he performs karaoke in his backyard. These sessions often take place thirty minutes after his shop closes the the day, at 5pm, and last anywhere between forty-five minutes to two hours. At first, I thought it was a special occasion. Then, I attributed it to something he liked to do on Saturday’s. But now, he seldom misses a day.
An ache in my head seeps into the rest of me. Mum implores me to get a test. I knew this day would come. The line for the testing centre takes form behind the Albert Park Pits where I kicked a soccer ball around three evenings a week in grade eight, nine, ten. I make time pass by way of browsing salt and pepper shakers online. There are so many versions, most of them hideous. I have a pair in mind I’m not sure exist. Occasionally the man will message me and I will grin widely.
The people in the hazmat suits advise me I will have a result in just fourteen hours. They instruct me to go home, directly home, but all I desire in this moment is a warm beef pho. I drive away sure that I am positive in the same way I am sure I will win the TattsLotto on those anomalous Thursday’s I decide to participate.
The strepsils at the back of the bathroom cupboard tast like old candy canes and pine needles. I think about how Christmas is upon us, kind of. Mum checks in every half hour to see if my result has come back to me and every half hour I reply, no. For thirty-six hours the virus feels as though it’s taken up residence in my body. She too entertains positivity. Who will drop us all food if we all have it, I say. Who!
A lemon cake would be so ideal in this moment of ill health, so would fresh strepsils and translucent soup. Or better yet, a fluffy scone, the kind that the man with the capable hands makes. In the fridge’s flurescence, I drag my index finger through the jam so as to confirm this craving is as real as it feels.
The jam reminds me of something I overhead at the pool, right before lockdown number six. I was in a cubicle. There were two women who knew each other well in the cubicle either side of me. I shampoo’d and conditioned while listening to them exchange marmalade recipes and discuss the ripeness of fruit. All of this while I weighed up the exponential growth of my right breast.
Symmetry is computer generated and overrated, the man once said to me. Water was falling between us while we each contemplated the other’s body. I had to concentrate on not raising my forearms to my stomach. Just once I like to borrow his eyes, anyone’s, and see this body from every vantage point. Lately, it feels as though I might never be allowed to move this body through the fifty-meter basin again.
This evening, my curiosity gets the better of me and I pop the top of my head over the fence. I am able to watch one my neighbour perform one song, the entire of Oasis’ Wonderwall, because he has his eyes clasped very shut. Both of his capable-tailor hands are wrapped around the microphone, which is pressed right up against his bottom lip. I try my hardest to contain my joy and awe watching my neighbour the tailor sing with the abandonment of a very drunk person whose favourite song has finally come on.
Due dates loom. I watch a TedTalk on attention, productivity and procrastination, which is really just mindful procrastination in itself. A man in a camouflage exercise ensemble walks past the deli’s front window and looks at me staring at these blank pages. He his holding a wrapped box of what looks to be favourites. I get stuck on how odd the shape of them is. My finger runs down the centre to flatten the spread so they will stay open on their own. The day is becoming partly cloudy. Another woman walks by with an orchid and it occurs to me today is Father’s day.
Father’s Day, along with its relatives – Mother’s Day, Valentines Day, Grand Final Day, ‘Australia’ Day, is a day that puts me at odds. It’s a day that makes me uncomfortable to be a person who occupies a body. I try and understand the origins of this feeling only to decide what these days all share in common is the way they make me reflect on all the unnatural and unnecessary things we’ve managed to achieve.
The five-pm shopping rush occurs. Cars of all sizes fill the empty spaces in front of the deli. The sky dims and I realise I haven’t left the clothes I woke up in. I finally conjure the will to carry out the bin full of yesterday’s bourgeois rubbish containing the residue of a French Bistro dinner I got carried away with. The French Bistro dinner was a transaction of sorts; a means of saying thank you to the man who hung my new artworks while I contemplated his smooth back.
I pause half way across the deck, directly in line with the part of the fence my neighbour is standing on the other side of. He is at it, alone, again. It dawns on me it is only ever his voice belting out these songs. I wonder where his wife is, the woman with the contorted frown fixed across her face all of the time, and why she never joins my neighbour the tailor in these fits of passion.
Daisy, Em and I sit up for a lunch of soba noodles covered in sesame oil. They are discussing the most appropriate location to practice on their new rollerblades, which they purchased sans wrist guards. I advise them to hold off until they have them and raise my too-flexible left wrist I shattered at Talyor Stent’s 10th birthday party. They ignore me. Instead, they discuss optimum surfaces and the week’s forecast. I will join them and bare witness, probably, in a state teetering on jealousy.
A person on the phone tells me they require support. They say it is a matter of urgency. The list of this person’s comorbiditiss is extensive. I tell them I am sorry but they will have to wait until December like everyone else. They say they can’t possibly and, if this is the case, they intend end their soundtrack. In fact, they want to unsubscribe altogether. There is a long silence while I try and recall strategies from the Mental Health First Aid Course I recently completed. Then the sound of the person crying fills the large space between us. Over the road my neighbour looks excited to be signing for a large parcel. How, I wonder, can so many realities be occurring at once.
Em is beating olive oil into egg yolks when I ask her if she has seen the next door neighbour lately. I rub garlic into the microplane and slide it into the bowl for her. Yes, she says. I watch some of the oil leap up and lick her chin. The woman, I mean, the frown-y one. Em stops her pouring to think about this but even she cannot pluck the memory.
What is it about Monday’s, I say to the man. It’s reality, he says. It bites people. He drops me off and I embark on a lecture on Social Normativity. I don’t get far because my neighbour, the frown-y one, approaches the front window. She wants me to move our rubbish bin, which is apparently obstructing her driveway. I roll the empty bin a meter to the left and watch her car full of boxes, speed away up the street and out of sight. Humans behaviour is subject to momentum, my lecturer says.
Later, I dump a rubbish bag containing mostly ordinary rubbish into the bin. The young men over the road are throwing the basketball towards the hoop again, always. When I return, Never Tear Us Apart by INXS is coming to a triumphant end. My neighbour the tailor sings in such a way I can’t tell if it’s intoned with desperation or celebration or what. I stop and stand still in the deli’s empty courtyard trying my best to resist the urge to clap.
Yellow Days 