Anne asks me if I can pick up my mirror. Your painting is here too, she says. It is not until I am standing in front of the large canvas that I remember the painting Anne is referring to. I pull back the butcher’s paper and feel a warmth move through me like I am being greeted by an old friend. It’s the scene of the three languid swimmers, whose pink creased bellies I like to get lost in. Back at the car, an old Subaru I pleaded my parents to delay selling, I slide the canvas in carefully as if the three swimmers are alive and full of the same sensations as Anne and I. Over the road, the Alliance Française building stands resolute; I stare at it wondering why it is not taking my breath away like it used to. It was only twelve months ago I rode past the building on the way to those dreaded shifts at The Restaurant Above the Beach. There are no old facades that take my breath away anymore, come to think of it. I open my phone and type a message to The Man: What have we done?
In the lead-up to Christmas, I become aware of a disconnect between my mind and body. I observe this disconnect as I move through previously loved rituals like wrapping presents, writing menus, and walking around surveying all the brightly lit Californian bungalows surrounding my family home. I consider if it is Santa Claus who makes me anxious, or if it is the many guests he engenders. I study The Man closely, trying to detect this unease in him, but he seems fine. From what I gather, he enjoys being home, returned to his many friends, and another long summer. On Christmas morning, I try on several outfits but nothing sparks joy. To the extent I wonder if our mirrors are made of a different material to the ones I stared into last year. I try these outfits on in the same frenzied mood as I have been trying on outfits since I got home: with the feeling of going on stage. I consider the questions that will be asked of me, and how I might best go about summing it all up. Like the city, my family feels smaller, older too. Though, for the most part, they are fundamentally the same: the men still drink too much and the women still justify their feelings of fullness aloud, prefacing the exercise and the fasting surrounding this day. When people ask what it is like to be home, no similes occur to me. Though I do tell them about the volume, which a blonde woman from Sweden warned me about: it is the loudness of being able to tune-in to every conversation taking place around you. It is exhausting, I remember her saying. I recognise the conversations taking place around me last year were no less mundane, that they must have also referenced meals that were had, where to meet, and how out of line X was. But it felt so different, so different all the time.
What else, people ask? What else, I think. I notice the abundance of green like it is a new colour. And the sounds of the birds and the width of our big sky, which I must use my neck to take in. What else? they ask, unsatisfied. I notice I’ve been taking things too seriously again, not sleeping particularly well, and ruminating about everything, wondering how I will keep up, and, worst of all, prevail. At this moment, I think of a sentence I underlined the night before last in Leslie Jamison’s memoir: I was neither a villain or a goddess, but just, as they say in recovery, a woman among women, a person among people, no better or worse than the rest. It was the absence of all this, I think looking around, that made last year in that boot-shaped country so relaxing to be in. I was at ease, we both were, I think, because we were exposed to a mode of living in which our rigid and externally imposed conditions of worth and success were inoperative. In the small 2000-person beachside town, one’s level of education, clothing size, or degree of material success were not indicators of worth. It was the deli worker, the garbageman, and the barista who were deemed worthy and valuable to the community.
Throughout the day, I tally cigarettes with the other smokers, oscillating between my mother’s friend’s tailored cigarettes and my cousin’s poorly rolled ones. In the corner, under the pergola, I watch the day unfold. The rise and fall of conflict between children and the cadence of people’s drinking. At one point, my mother’s friend asks me if I remember her son while simultaneously calling him over. She is a writer, I enjoy her blogs, she says to her son. Though they are few and far between, she says turning to me with a look about her as if I have done something wrong. I wait for her face to break into the warm smile I know and love, but it doesn’t. It’s coming, I say and bring the wine to my lips only to find the glass complete. I think I am waiting for it to make sense, for everything to fall back into place, I said to The Man last week. Though I am beginning to realise it might not. I don’t desire to hang around at the family Christmas like I usually do, I don’t want to drink all the wine. I am down about this, though I plead with someone to take me home all the same. My family members are sad, some genuinely angry, and implore me to stay. It’s just the jetlag, I say. And while weeks having passed since the plane, nobody challenges this.
Each time I pick up the phone to speak with Mum, she answers in the quick Italian she’s been practising all her life. I can feel my capacity to answer her dwindling. The shame of this becomes heavier until it is intolerable, and I find myself texting her instead. The Man is adamant about not losing the language and locates an online tutoring platform, which he vows to engage with every Saturday morning for one to two hours. I feel spread thin already, and I do not locate a tutor for myself. How will you keep this up when you start work in two weeks, I do not say. The night before last, I found myself horizontal on my bedspread, typing the average hours of a worker at his new place of employment. According to the search engine, sixty-to-seventy-hour weeks is considered ‘standard’. Every week when Saturday rolls around, The Man disappears downstairs and fumbles through phrases, verbs, and sentences with Diego, his tutor. Occasionally I hear a fact of my life repeated, like: Harriet riprenderà presto a studiare. In these moments, I let my book fall to my chest and picture his gesticulating hands, his body bouncing up and down on the medicine ball, while he tries to recall, and I catch myself smiling widely. He always emerges from these lessons hungry, exhausted and satisfied in a way I am not.
I meet Sicilian Nic at the wine shop. He messages to say he is running late, and I reply I don’t mind. I don’t. It means I get to watch the people who have felt alien to me since I stepped off the plane. Though, the longer I look, the more I transition into a state I can only describe as disturbed. This used to be my favourite place to sit and drink a glass of wine in the city, but tonight it feels like a playground for the affluent and the ambitious. These people, of all different ages, seem adamant about establishing their individuality, and I wonder how they cannot see they are all going about it in the same way. I then consider if this me, if I am complicit, and make a note to ask Sicilian Nic when he sits down. While I wait and watch the scenes of the wine shop, my mind wanders to Jia Tolentino’s Ideal Woman, who she describes as ‘an Instagram’ sincerely interested in whatever the market demands of her: good looks, the impression of indefinitely extended youth, advanced skills in self-presentation and self-surveillance. This is how an ordinary woman evolves into an ideal, Tolentino writes. Though the only product of this, I observe tonight, is hostility not vitality by which people only seem to look up to check if they have effectively signalled their worth via what they possess, or what they do. Or if not this then to observe the quality of their reflection in a window. Nic says we might be complicit. He also says this feeling does not go away; he’s been back six months now and still, he feels confused. It’s the feeling of being in a zoo, I reason. Perhaps Montaigne was sound in his interest in the naked, pure state – proposing that anything added is inherently anti-social. Complicit or not, Nic and I still toast the cheapest wine on the menu and discuss what this next year holds as if we have any idea, as if we are exempt from the uncertainty of being alive.
It is a Monday, our last off together before commencing study and work, so The Man and I make our way across town for a highly anticipated bagel. We are in his Dad’s Saab, the roof above us a light blue lid of sky, which makes me feel like we are on holiday all over again. Is it that the city has changed, or we have come home different, I say staring out at the suburban sprawl. I order the bagels how we like them via the app designed by the bagel shop for the sole purpose of ordering bagels, which are more expensive now. I don’t think it’s that we are that different but that we have afforded ourselves a circuit breaker and so now we see it from a different angle for how it really is and has always been. I consider our angles, respectively, and recognise that while similar they are fundamentally different. This is just how it is. How it will always be, no matter how much distance we attempt to close between us. When I let myself go to this place, I feel both lonely and claustrophobic at once. In our year away, The Man must have learnt to recognise when I am walking down this path in my mind. Maybe it gets caught on my face, or in the set of my shoulders, but I am glad for the way he interrupts it. We wait on the curb for the bagels, and I watch passersby avoid my eyes, as if to acknowledge our shared humanity might poison them. It’s a zero-sum game at the end of the day, he says, shrugging. Later, sitting on the toilet brushing my teeth, I type zero-sum-game into a search engine. It’s an economic term that describes a situation in which one person or group can win something only by causing another person or group to lose it. I think of the word hostility at this moment, and the feeling of the wine shop, and the young woman, about my age, at the lights today who did not have room for my existence. ‘It’s your being cool affects my being cool’, The Man declared this morning with cream cheese all over his face.
My hand is quick to silence the alarm this morning, so much so I consider if I had been anticipating it during sleep, my hand hovering over the phone the whole time. I roll out of bed quietly, send the kettle to the boil, and pull-on headphones It is upsetting to be up this early and there are no biscuits to dunk in tea. This time, 5.45 am, is the only time appropriate to speak with Suzie who is situated -9 GMT from me. I am now able to comprehend this distance after The Man sat me down and explained the quality of time zones. I know, I said crossing my arms, I’ve studied them before. Though when he asked me to substantiate my knowledge, I could not say. What I do remember is the feeling of year eleven geography. Specifically, the dampness of the room and angle of light on my desk, and feeling of being chilled to my bone, unable to concentrate on anything but the small amount of recess I would soon allow myself. Though now, since his lesson, I cannot un-see us as an orange-severed segment constantly in motion. The Man is settling in better than me, I say to Suzie. I recognise there is an expectation she will be able to make sense of the disparity between us but then I remember she does not know him, at all, or this city. Suzie then says something interesting. In fact, it might be the most valuable thing Suzie has said to me ever: I’ve never thought to mention this, it’s not been warranted, Suzie says in her lilting accent, but I have other clients from your city, you know. Oh, I say, piqued. It’s interesting because they describe the same feelings and concerns you name. There is a clear theme of surveillance, both the intrapersonal and interpersonal kind. In coming home, you have been returned to a former version of yourself, which is a woman introjected from the culture around her, Suzie says.
There comes a point when we don’t discuss being home because it makes us too flat and full of shattered visions*. The weeks pass at a disturbing rate. Every Friday afternoon at my desk, I stare at the date and time, remembering the Friday before, the weekend plans I was anticipating, with an uncanny closeness, unable to account for the week that has occurred in between the woman sitting there and the woman sitting here. I notice, with the return to his work, a return to a version of The Man that more closely resembles my own state, which is to say dysregulated, bathing in nostalgia and riddled with indecision. It seems that his sixty-hour work weeks, seventy floors up, have returned to him to a narrative of worth he has also spent the last few years trying to dismantle. Like the women at the wine shop, the people he works with are as familiar to him as they are alien, and I start to see this city contains, for each of us, difference versions of the same story. But like a song that you have played too much for too long, it is story he is bored of. Then, late one Friday night, I observe him cancel the second of his Saturday morning language lessons in a row on the grounds of not having had enough time to do the homework during the week. This happens more and more until I come to see he has withdrawn from the program altogether. He would rather spend his brief window off with me, asleep or in the company of friends rather straining over grammar of a language he is no longer needs to get by day to day, he says. I was expecting myself to feel relieved about his withdrawal from lessons. I thought it would alleviate me my guilt and jealousy about not participating in a service myself. But instead, I am just sad as if it signifies it really is all over and done.
Yellow Days 