It is the last Sunday of the year, Boxing Day. I move around in a daze having seldom slept. After collecting glassware from odd places around the garden and putting miscellaneous things away or in the bin, I say goodbye to Mum then Dad and climb into Em’s Mazda to drive home. Nobody is out, nobody is about. I fall on the couch and in less than a minute decide I do not desire to be at home today. This is one of the downfalls of living alone and by this, I mean facing hangovers and blank public holidays like Boxing Day on my own. I decide a swim is the only course of action, though before leaving I encounter the other downfall of living alone, which is applying sunscreen or moisturizer to my back. Today, I don’t bother.
Where is everyone, I say to the lifeguard looking down a lane of my own, then towards the empty steps. He shrugs, then yawns. I walk half a length of the pool before diving under to find that I am silicon in the water today, the black line on the bottom of the pool moves quickly beneath me. I am acutely aware of the sun staining the circle and strap tan line on my back a shade darker. I intended to swim only one kilometre, but the triangles are so easy. I keep swimming, keep making capital L’s that roll into tall, long I’s for two kilometres in total. In the shallow end, I watch a man raise his leg straight so his heel rests on the edge. When he eventually takes off, I try and mimic the stretch but cannot get the extension part right without feeling like something is going to give. The feeling in my leg reminds me of a scene in Rosalie Ham’s book where a woman takes a razor blade to her husband’s achilles tendon. I specifically recall the marvellous way Ham described the tendon coiling all the way up his hamstring. When I look toward the pool’s clock, it reads 1.45 pm, and the desire to see a movie in a cinema drenches this body.
Palace Como, tucked away in the rear of the Vogue Building, is a cinema I always forget exists. I toyed with the idea of inviting someone but decided against it and having arrived, I feel pleased with the decision. I have no capacity for small talk today, not even for my sister who calls a second time. The matinee doesn’t start for ten minutes yet I let it ring out. I picture her at the other end of the invisible line, some ten kilometres south from where I now stand, growing ancy then disappointed when she arrives at my voicemail a second time. At this moment I can’t be sure I even have a voicemail or perhaps it is just that nobody bothers to leave me them.
There are four women sitting on a plush velvet couch that takes up most of the foyer. They strike me as related but from different generations. In their hands, they carry all the snacks as well as alcoholic looking drinks of different colours, shapes, and consistencies. One, I know, is a Gimlet. I know this because I overheard the youngest having to explain to the oldest woman what this is. Usually, I would be envious of this kind of female family outing but today it does little for me except provide some brief entertainment while I wait to order my choc top. After much deliberation, I order mint flavour and only partially regret it.
In the 3.10 pm session, it soothes me to learn there are other women, both my age and older, who have like me pursued this experience on their own. I sit next to a young woman, save for a seat, who gives off a mood and seriousness about the human condition not at all dissimilar to my own. On the other side of me is a rather tense older woman cradling a steaming cup of tea. She has her small limbs crossed in such a way it looks painful. She strikes me as a regimented person who doesn’t allow herself much pleasure. This is verified when the movie begins and she unwraps a piece of what I think is chocolate, dark chocolate, very slowly so as not to make a sound. She doesn’t place the whole square in her mouth, instead, she opts to nibble at it incrementally to make the chocolate last. I feel for her when it is over, and she folds the wrapper up in such a way I wonder if she intends to keep it.
Sitting next to this woman reminds me of what I said to Mum when she recently asked me if I had any resolutions for the new year. The topic came up because I was writing an article on resolutions for a psychology practice and expressed to her that I am unsure how to feel about them. The precise details of the origins of new year’s resolutions are murky. In my research, I learnt Babylonians were participating in similar decrees over four thousand years ago. They held the belief that what an individual did on the first day of the new year had a profound effect on the rest of that year. When I said mine to Mum, I was surprised it had verbalised as it is something I’ve been turning over for some time. We were having eggs alongside thick cuts of salty grilled cheese when I told her I want less regiment in my life, that I’d like to lean into desire and pursue impulse. She nodded, perhaps recognising my capacity to overthink. As she did it occurred to me she might also benefit from taking up this resolution. That was two weeks ago. Now it is five days before the new year and I feel pleased to be sitting in this cinema at 3.15 pm tugging off the cellophane from an ice cream whose mint flavour I only partially regret.
I don’t know much about the film except that it is Norwegian, and the main character won best performance in Cannes. The film follows four years of Julie’s life, from 26 to 30. It focuses primarily on her relationships and career, which are all subject to her terrible indecision, doubt, and desire for something she cannot name. It becomes quickly apparent that Julie and I are somewhat alike. Not only for the things I’ve just mentioned, but the fact she started out studying photography then pivoted to psychology; writes for a non-existent audience; doesn’t desire children; is arrested by and disappointed in all of this; loves intensely, recklessly, sometimes even cruelly. She is full of doubt and wants to be the object of others’ desire in the way she says she likes when the penis is soft and becomes hard against her. Julie doesn’t follow things through, floats on the periphery of her own life and spends a lot of time inside her own head, which is both incredibly complex and empty at the same time. A paradox men find intriguing but are not permitted to comprehend.
Throughout the film, you are made to watch, over and over, Julie deny the love available to her in favour of her pursuit for what might just be an unsatisfiable hunger. The last scenes pivot between where her past lovers are now and Julie arriving home to her studio apartment, which she resides in alone. We watch her enter, remove a large professional camera from across her body and sit up at a computer. Then, just like that, the movie screen goes black, the lights of cinema six brighten, and the credits begin to roll to a song I find inappropriate for how I feel. The young woman to my left has a nondescript expression hanging over her face, though I think she is un-impressed. The older woman, however, looks completely floored. She has a cloth handkerchief in one hand and her eyes are explicitly red.
It disgruntles me that I cannot tell if Julie is content or regretful in this last scene. In this moment and the many moments that follow, I cannot help but think of The Man, who I asked to be away from for reasons increasingly lost on me. After the credits, we all shuffle out of the cinema. The older woman who sat next to me discards her paper teacup into the bin, inside of which I imagine is the neat wrapper of the small chocolate she allowed herself today. The poster of the film we’ve just seen is suspended in the foyer. It is a close-up of Julie running triumphantly out of one relationship and towards another. Only now do I pay attention to the title of the film, The Worst Person in The World. For the whole walk home to my own studio, I try and attribute the title to a shortcoming of translation.
Yellow Days 