I was, in fact, desperate for some form of participation both because I was terribly bored at night and because I was undeniably attracted to the air’s libidinal charge, but I was unaccustomed to such hours and so much public space, the protagonist of the book in my hands confesses. I put it down to sit with this character’s disclosure, feeling slightly impaled by its relevance.
Meanwhile, behind me, a tropical storm is about to tear through the city. It feels like the world has slipped into some kind of apocalyptic humidity we will never return from. The feeling of other seasons and other climates is irretrievable. The sky is ash-tray-charcoal, full of the kind of jet greys you might associate with the lungs of a lifelong smoker. My uncle Mark fills my mind with this simile, specifically, his smoke-stained house and I make a mental note to pay him a visit soon. The tops of houses are dotted along the horizon like a crown. Rain is already falling in the areas where the houses on the horizon are fixed into the ground. The way they appear in this moment reminds me of when I use a gel pen and write very quickly.
Today is ‘Freedom Friday’. I declined several offers and feel okay about it, a little odd, but okay. I open the window to hear sandals clacking on the pavement like the keratin hooves of a parade of horses. Beyond this is the constant boisterous cacophony from the pub on the corner. Occasionally, the same voice with triumph over the others loudly enough I can almost make out the meaning but not quite. This man is drunk. I imagine he has been waiting for this moment of anticipatory obliteration for several months. Anticipatory obliteration (8-10pm) is when you feel a swell of tenderness for the people around you and for the body you occupy. It occurs right before a person becomes incoherent and requires nothing on the agenda in the morning after the obliterating experience. Anticipatory obliteration is transient, highly addictive, and practiced like a healthy sport in my suburb on Friday and Saturday nights.
I stumble across an interview with Joan Didion in which Didion explains her needing an hour before dinner each day with a drink to pore over any words she has committed to the page that day. From what I can gather, this is an hour of both necessity and pleasure; want and need; flavour and fuel. The interview reminds me of a similar one, which occurred in a different issue of the same magazine, with Rachel Cusk. Cusk speaks about the writer’s sacrifice of large nights and any kind of spontaneous, robust social life. The writer’s self-imposed coventry, which the writer seems to simultaneously adore and resent, is fragrant in both interviews. It is passages like these that make me think The Writer is a distinct and different breed altogether. Not quite human, not quite being, we float on the periphery of experience.
Occasionally, I miss the man. Though, I recognise this affliction is the shape of pain rather than pain itself. This morning the shape is bigger than me and so, I step into walking clothes and slap the grey pavement for ten kilometers. I do not enjoy the process. I try on different genres of music only to settle for Post Malone top tracks. I get home in record timing this way. My feet ache. Back upstairs, a tear rolls down the round of my right cheek. I catch it on my finger and lift it up to eye level. I marvel at it -my first tear in many months. I have been waiting for you, I whisper. According to the American Academy of Ophthalmology, a ‘normal’ human should produce between 60-120 liters of tears every year. I ponder what part of the human body manufactures tears and how I can get this part of me serviced.
Six of us are huddled around the deli’s bar this evening. Home visits of this size are legal now. We haven’t been this way together since pre-pandemic. Some of us are done with degrees, some of us have pivoted and must begin again. We complain about jobs and wrinkles and states of arousal like sims characters. Jack provides us with a lesson on attachment theory; we self-diagnose according to the book he is reading. He says I am ‘stable’ and while I disagree, I am flattered. Each person has their own pizza choice and so there must be a compromise. After hearing everyone’s request, I scroll the menu and compile a democratic cart. We all agree to forgo Jack’s Hawaiian. He is disappointed and it occurs to me that everyone is the main character, which really means no one is the main character and I can’t help but think of the poor Governments who are all rather destined for failure.
Ava invites me to dinner to celebrate the completion of her thesis. While I get ready, I meditate on what I would have written my thesis on had I gone through with Honours. This, I realise, is an irrelevant exercise because I didn’t go through with Honours. I greet Ava with all the congratulatory warmth I am capable of. I think she recognises my effort because she is grinning widely, more widely than usual. Our fingers entwine like the braid I have never been able to accomplish and twirl the way they have done since we watched Puberty Blues three times through that year. I often like to entertain who is Debbie and who is Sue, this alternates. I recognise this is also an irrelevant task as I am Harriet and Ava is Ava.
I stare at Ava’s fingers, marveling at the fact they produced eighty thousand coherent words on a single topic. I experience a swell of pride for my cousin having achieved this. I am holding a wine bottle I have to carry with two hands and concentration. People marvel at the size of the novelty Riesling, which is reminiscent of a very large bowling pin. We order most of the menu and ask the waitress if this is too much food. She pretends to glance over her notepad and shakes her head. Colourful plates fill the table. I quickly realise kibbeh is not what I thought it was. I thought we were getting juicy little sausages but no, they are clumps of mince dried out in a thick layer of cracked wheat. Hideous on the plate. They remind me of the poo of a not particularly healthy person. I ordered three large serves of them with a conviction I have to apologise for.
We fall out of the restaurant bloated from champagne and cracked wheat. I walk in between two people I don’t know all that well thinking about the kind of torture used in Mao’s China in which a prisoner’s belly was filled with raw rice, this rice was then followed by gallons of water until stomachs literally burst. Several members of our party carry with them a plastic container full of kibbeh and I am curious if they will eat them tomorrow like they said they would or if they were just being polite. We stop at a bar who informs us they won’t be closed for another two hours. I will stay for one drink only, I declare. They whine and roll their eyes but do not try to change my mind.
I recognise I may have thrown in the party towel well before COVID arrived. I enjoy friends in small handfuls but even then, I will retire by midnight -one at most. Most of these friends have not thrown in the towel. Usually, they are recovering from large weekends and tell me about their marathons with a grin and warm feeling running through their body. It has been a long time since I ‘kicked on’. At some point, Daisy and I both decided it is not for us and while I’m certain it isn’t, I cannot know for sure until I participate again. I also recognise this may be a symptom of some sort of control I ought to relinquish. I recall, when things were about to open up, confiding my anxiety in The Man. How does one determine the difference between necessary solitude and that of being antisocial? I remember he replied something useful and insightful as he often did. The precise content of this reply is lost on me today.
A message from Dad alerts on my phone screen underneath a Commonwealth Bank receipt for the whisky sour sweating in my hand. The receipt on my phone illuminated this way makes me think of something I underlined in the book I am reading, Leaving The Atocha Station, in which Lerner writes of the protagonist’s excessive consumption of wine and hash cigarettes…More important than the easily satisfiable addiction, what they provided me was a prefabricated motivation and transition, a way to approach or depart from a group of people or a topic, enter or exit a room, conjoin or punctuate a sentence.
Beneath the Commonwealth Bank banner, the message from my dad reads,
Are you at home? Can you see that moon and star under it from your bedroom window? It’s in the Western sky. It’s quite magnificent.
I read the message three times, each time imagining his thick, clunky fingers on the small keyboard of his phone. The time is 11.20 pm. I look up at the moon and the star he is referring to, then pull up a car service app on my phone because I wish to enjoy this sky from the comfort of my starched linen sheets.
Revising for my final exam, I feel well versed in Personality Psychology, specifically, the Big Five. The Big Five is the most widely accepted taxonomy of personality and is made up of five mutually exclusive traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. All of us exist somewhere on each of these five spectrums and it is nuanced combinations of these five traits that make up a personality. Over the four weeks spent studying this content, I recall the way my lecturer consistently framed extroversion as more desirable than its introverted counterpart. I recall feeling at odds with the way he esteemed the extroverted end of the spectrum as if to say the introvert is in a state of deficit, of error.
Occasionally, I experience disappointment in my psychology classes when I am made to see how little we know about the human mind as well as how little we have come since the discipline began. I reject this attitude toward the introvert, which is very much compatible with Freud’s dated alignment of solitude with anxiety. I experience a similar disappointment when I observe the extent to which our society possesses a mistrust of solitude. Matthew Bowker, a psychoanalytic political theorist who has dedicated many years to researching solitude, argues we have become a much too ‘groupish’ society with seldom capacity to be alone. This is evident in a study conducted at the University of Virginia where two-thirds of participants chose to receive an electric shock over spending time alone with their thoughts(!). This finding continues to baffle me – The Antisocial Extrovert. In a breakout room with my peers not long ago, we discussed the idea of fluctuating on the extroverted spectrum. A clever woman, who seems ahead of us all, told me I am what the experts call an ‘antisocial extrovert’ in that I require regular, lengthy bouts of solitude to recharge. This is true, I think, I need time to have time. It is what allows me to grapple with my predicament in this universe.
I enter the exam on Friday at 3pm, which is really Ava’s old bedroom she hasn’t slept in for several years. My limbs feel disproportionate standing in the small bedroom than when standing in the rest of the house. There are miscellaneous knickknacks and books I remember being popular once upon a time as well as postcards and travel artifacts she hasn’t taken with her but clearly can’t quite bring herself to throw out. Instances like these make it clear just how much we have grown and will continue to grow. I am confronted by the two big questions I have spent the past few months dissecting, the very two theories of human nature the next three-hour exam- 120 questions- is going to quiz me on. How much does one change and how much does one stay the same?
I still do not know the answer to this question. I remember teasing The Man in the lead-up to his thirtieth birthday with a quote my lecturer used to preface our unit on Personality. It was one by psychologist William James, brother of writer Henry James. James proposed by the time we reach thirty, our character has set like plaster. I am seeing Ava for dinner after the exam and make a mental note to discuss this with her further. I make an additional note to remember this moment, of standing in her old bedroom before sitting my exam and meeting her for a gin and tonic, when we are meeting for gin and tonics as elderly women. I attempt to grab these elderly women contained in the future imperfect. I try to discern what has occurred in the window between here and there; I try and peek at the physicalities of my body and my life and Ava’s body and Ava’s life. Nothing becomes of this. The only continuity I observe in my elderly self is the same one I see when I look back at my childhood self, which is a person who looks very content permitting she has had enough time left to her own devices.
Yellow Days 