For me the word private will always suggest deprivation, fear and lack of openness. Indulging in the expression ‘private life’. Writing is something public.
– Annie Ernoux
How about a walk, Mum asks.
Do you feel like a walk, Daisy texts.
Let’s go walking, Ava says.
Why don’t we meet for a walk, Sicilian Nic suggests.
If I walk any more, I might start to bleed.
My callouses, now deep, will crack open.
But they are right, the walking feels good.
Like you’re moving through it. Away from it.
But eventually you must circle back, shower, make dinner, and lie on that godforsaken pillow.
On these walks, when people ask what happened, and I reply he broke up with me, I find the phrasing unsatisfactory.
We broke down might be more appropriate, but even this feels misleading – a false use of the plural pronoun.
I don’t feel I broke down, exactly.
Rather, it would be truer to say that he ejected himself from my life, leaving behind gaping wounds I’d only just managed to heal.
—
It was the first Saturday of summer. Or was it the second, I don’t remember now.
What I do remember is the ninety minutes of yoga prior, the way my body moved through the poses like it knew what was coming. As if it were bracing. There was a very clear sense that I was walking toward an execution.
Not my execution – I would recover, I knew that. But rather the dissolution of the shared world we’d built: its small rituals, a language only we spoke, a particular rhythm of togetherness. The ending was coming, and I knew it subliminally.
Looking back though, replaying the conversation days, weeks, months later, I cannot tell if the decision that was made was one-way or mutual – that is, the decision to be apart.
One-way, I initially thought, given the pain and resistance I’d felt since. But now I’m beginning to see it as an equation with a logical solution: if one party does not know what they want, the other cannot stick around for that.
Or put another way, not knowing equals not good enough.
The unexpected aspect of the execution was its arbitrariness. He didn’t reach for this word, naturally. The words he reached for were flippy floppy, which he said a total of seven times throughout the course of the execution.
He seemed eager to put off solving our equation until he left the country. Only then – after an undefined period – would he be able to tell me where I stand.
When I requested a decision sooner than this, he appeared injured. As if, in an ideal world, I would wait patiently while he stood by the lever, unsure whether to pull it.
History tells us the executioner rarely escapes unscathed. There’s a moral reckoning in taking something away. A decision that, once made, can’t be reversed. He wasn’t prepared for that part. And so I did the one thing he couldn’t. I pulled the lever myself.
But really, I said to Em on the phone afterwards, didn’t his mother ever tell him he can’t have his cake and eat it too. Or did she tell him he could have it all, the whole world?
I don’t know, I’m a jumble, he said. I considered telling him this isn’t an explanation for flippy floppy, but rather, a synonym.
We were sitting on a park bench at that point, though I remember feeling so much energy in my body I wanted to run very fast and very far. Then he declared as if he’d plucked the thought right out of my head: well yeah maybe I am running away.
I stared at the names engraved in the cement at our feet, and at the plaque dedicating the bench to a stranger. Was the couple still together, had they sat here. What else had this bench been privy to, I wondered.
He suggested we keep walking around the park, but I shook my head. We walked home in silence, and I thought about this trip he was proposing.
While it was – is – clear I was not being invited on this adventure, he couldn’t quite articulate this part, so my heartbreak feels implied.
—
The house heats up, my bed becomes a symbol of wakefulness, so I pack a bag for my family home. When I arrive, I watch my gloom course through my parents. Then, Mum’s girlfriends – my other mothers – suddenly materialise.
I disappear without ceremony, preoccupying myself with episodes of Girls and the chipped nail polish on my toes – the remnants of the pedicure he bought me three weeks ago, the day before I flew to Thailand.
The trip was meant to restore my housemates and I after the studious year that was. But whatever calm I gathered in those two weeks away vanished the evening I stepped off the plane, replaced by a fresh flood of cortisol I would carry around for months.
Throughout the trip, I remember wondering about the strange blue colour I’d let him choose for me, fixated on what it must look like through his colourblind eyes. Every time I glanced down, those ten oblong shapes of blue stirred an unmistakable warmth in me.
It felt like love. Or rather, my understanding of it: a gentle declaration that someone, somewhere, cared for me. It sustained me in moments of holiday exhaustion, food poisoning and long, longing showers.
I replace the blue polish with Mum’s boldest red. It is old and thick and takes two goes. I move slowly, precisely, because of the sound of a second wine bottle being opened, but also because time itself has shifted.
Morning, afternoon, evening: all of it has a new quality. In fact, this shift is one of the few sensations I remember from last time. Ava likens it to standing on the edge of a cliff at the very end of the world.
In a book detailing her marriage collapse, Rachel Cusk describes this shift from normality, this edge, as ‘glamorous’. Though I am yet to reach such an understanding. To me, glamour is desirable.
The episodes of Girls fold into one another easily, their messy lives collapsing into the centre of my family living room. So, for a brief time, I feel released from the discomfort of my own experience.
Hannah has a new boyfriend: an actor I’ve always had a serious crush on, which I cling to now for all the reasons he is different from, better than, the person who just left me. For one thing, I think, this character is authentic.
Meanwhile, Marnie has just found out that her ex of two weeks (boyfriend of four years) has a new girlfriend. It’s the first time in my third rewatch of the series I find myself sympathising with Marnie, quietly rooting for her in petty conflicts with the other girls.
Eventually, in some very far away-feeling future, I’ll go back to disliking her, I reason. I’ll find everything she says and does insufferable again.
It’s a mechanism that parallels how we forget illness and pain. That is, once healed, the raw experience fades from memory, only to return when illness strikes again.
We aren’t psychologically any more resilient the second, third, or fourth time we experience it because the mind erases the pain. If it didn’t, writer Lewis Hyde point out, we would go extinct.
—
My own girls welcome me home like I’ve returned from war. They’ve opened my bedroom window to let in the cool change. There is champagne, a wrapped present that looks like a book, and a yellow card that serves to validate my ambiguous loss. As if to say in its own quiet way: yes, this really does suck.
They have made plans for an evening of martinis, homemade burgers, and tall piles of French fries. They’ve picked a show called Rivals, which they tell me is full of sex and barely any romance – something that feels oxymoronic, though I comply.
The whole evening soothes my nervous system, and I sip only one martini. This is a different kind of love – quiet and steady – I think while looking at them gathered around me on the couch. A kind I’ll need to return to – again and again – in order to make it through the next six months alive.
For dessert, I retrieve the obnoxious advent calendar he pressed into my hands the day the girls and I arrived home from Thailand – the calendar that casts their Cadbury ones in shade.
I’m disturbed by the memory: the way he led me out for dinner the night before the execution, the way I unwrapped the gift, and peeled back the first chocolate door with pride and delight.
The girls gorge on the chocolates, all 25 of them are unwrapped, emptied, scrutinised. They taste different, Charlotte says, they’re not as good. I agree with her despite not having any myself.
The word [ordinary] never left my mind, Joan Didion writes in the aftermath of her husband’s sudden death. It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it.
I sweep the wrappers from the glass coffee table, which has the chaotic disposition of a colourful box of used tissues. I stuff the massive calendar into the wheelie bin. It is the 16th of December.
—
At night, I lie awake trying to stay open to the hours I dread most. My back stings from where the small points of my new acupuncture matt press into my skin. This is normal, the instructions advised – try not to move.
Somewhere in my bedroom, a mosquito evades me. This was always his job – mosquitos, moths, miscellaneous insects. I hid under the covers so the light wouldn’t confuse my circadian rhythm while he stalked the innocent insect around the room.
Tonight I turn my head to one side and cover the exposed ear with a towel, pretending there is no mosquito, that all of this is just temporary.
I hurt myself by imagining him with other women. Then I hurt myself again by imagining him with me. Shame slips beneath the covers.
How, Lauren Elkin writes, could I want someone who left me so casually?
I remain like this, rigid on the plastic spikes, trying not to hear the silence pressing in on this strange moment of my life.
Eventually, I sleep. But the dreams are no softer. He is there, so is T, morphing in and out of one another. I run from them all night.
—
In the morning, there’s a small window – barely perceptible – where I wake without knowing anything.
There is only the ceiling above me, pale and undecorated, and the sound of something distant. Birds, maybe, or neighbours dragging bins, but context does not reach me.
Then memory returns. Not all at once, but in fragments. My mind contracts over painful details – a sense of having had a fight without knowing how it ended.
Each day the pieces arrange themselves slightly differently, but the bench is always there, our bodies too, above the couple’s names engraved in the cement.
What began as a long moment of morning oblivion has grown progressively shorter. Now the oblivion barely exists before it splits open, giving way to another Summer’s Day.
This shortening, I recognise, is my learning to live with the shape of his absence – a neurological adjustment, the mind quietly recalibrating around something lost.
I move through the day as if under water, performing normality and the rituals of summer. Outside, the sky is generously blue. On my walks, the people of this city appear idle, yet busy.
I don’t have the concentration to work but I clean and get on top of things. I take calls, I make plans, I write them down, I assemble meals I don’t want to swallow.
I remember learning about a condition like this in a second-year psychology unit called fugue state. The term ‘fugue’ comes from the Latin word ‘fugere’, meaning ‘to flee’, reflecting the conditions association with flight and leaving one’s life behind.
Dissociative fugue, they say, is a response to trauma, potentially as a defence mechanism against overwhelming psychological distress.
I wonder if it is he who is in a fugue state, if all of this might be temporary – a necessary response to his demanding job. Maybe soon he will return to me, lucid and loving.
—
My tattoo artist tries to postpone my appointment until after Christmas, but when I explain the recent facts of my life, she insists she can fit me in. I swim fast and far on the morning of the appointment, so sitting still for five hours feels almost necessary.
The studio, and the people who move through it, never fail to remind me of T. This used to be a point of discomfort, but today it’s a welcome distraction. The pain of that time has been replaced, updated, so I almost look back at it fondly.
The tattoo artist and I slip into a quiet rhythm. She moves the needle around my arm – almost gracefully – while we exchange small-talk.
I think everyone has a villain, the tattooist across the studio says.
Do you mean an enemy out there, or within oneself? I hear myself say.
She glances up, thrown, trying to locate the unexpected voice. It’s the first time I’ve spoken to anyone other than my tattoo artist since I arrived. Until now, the conversation has been between the three artists who know one another well.
Within, she replies. She smiles into the mirror at my feet, and I feel myself relax.
This woman’s beauty is the kind that is difficult to look at, namely for the way it distorts my own self-concept. I remember this difficulty from last time too. It’s the by-product of rejection.
But I know now the task is to resist rejecting oneself because to reject oneself is to agree with the villain, as if to say, yes, you are not enough.
I picture my own villain as a short, stocky gremlin running wild inside me, lighting fires and guarding my oldest wounds and insecurities.
This gremlin has origins I can’t fully trace, though it grew larger in the aftermath of T, where it capably served to protect me from the dangers of the relational world.
During the nearly four years I spent with The Man, I tried to shrink it, to understand it, to weaken its power to make me act from a place untrue to myself: unkind, unaligned, even ugly.
He preferred to use clinical badges – anxious, avoidant – to describe this villian, assigning them to us as if they were fixed traits, as permanent as our surnames.
But the naming is only useful when it expands one’s understanding, Ester Perel warns; it is unhelpful when it fixes us to a symptom, reducing complexity to a false sense of certainty.
These clinical terms – anxious, avoidant – are as scientifically sound as star signs. They are not who we are; they’re merely constructs to describe ways the gremlin in each of us acted out, scrambling to protect us from the uncertainty of each other.
I’ve worked so hard to turn down its volume, I say to the tattoo artist after a long period of quiet. So have I, she replies, and tells me she hasn’t had a drink in six years.
—
Every other Tuesday, I walk through three expansive public gardens to see M who tends to my wounds like a surgeon would a patient. Only we go slowly, one stitch at a time. I often waste minutes in these sessions trying to impose a narrative on what has happened.
M always interrupts this impulse. She reminds me that trying to construct a coherent story – one that doesn’t, in this case, exist – would mean inventing something, not uncovering the truth.
It’s ironic how heavy absence is, I say, feeling the weight of him inside me. I want to set it down somewhere, hand it over to someone, but she tells me that’s not how this works.
Instead, it spills out of my fingers and my mouth. For now, it’s all I can talk about. I insinuate him onto every instance, every bit of the world.
Today, we configure a new plan. Instead of waiting for the days to become normal again, I am to wake up and join in with others. Swim. Or walk. Have breakfast. And dinner. I am not to forget lunch. Take one day at a time. And do not hurt yourself by imagining your whole life at once.
—
People try to lift the weight from me. They steer me elsewhere, take me away, cook me dinner, pour me wine, and massage my shoulders.
But it’s all in vain. He is always there making my senses misfire. I am holding onto an impossible attachment, I reason, caught somewhere between wanting and disbelief.
I observe my bank account deplete in my pursuit for pleasure. Sessions with M too, which are not exactly pleasurable as much as they are necessary.
Early for a haircut, I pass time at David Jones, wondering what to do with a $150 voucher from my employer. I find myself browsing the array of OPI nail polishes.
I can no longer justify the salon and regret the times when I thought I could. For 45 minutes, I stand in front of the colourful wall consumed by indecision.
I buy three shades and a nail repair kit. The items come to $148.50. I didn’t calculate this, I say to the shop attendant in disbelief, but she doesn’t care. She gives me a receipt with a $1.50 credit. On the receipt the nail polish colours, unbeknown to me, have names:
It Never Ends
Raisin the Bar
Dawn of a New Grey
—
The days between seeing M are gruelling, slow, fugue-ish. When I tell her this, she says this is because the tectonic plates have shifted beneath my feet giving way to a vast cavity of water. Some days the water is still, though often it is not.
You’ve lost your anchor, so now I am your anchor. Each time we meet I bring you to the surface but between sessions you fall back in. What we need to do is locate you some other anchors, for out there, she says.
In here, we begin with containment, which M calls the burial. After that comes the mourning, which will be slow and unspectacular. Only later, when enough time has passed, can we return to the archives and begin to understand what went wrong.
I detail my dreams, the way they are both there like two sides of the same coin. I tell her about the passage I came across in a book in which Cusk compares the dissolution of her marriage to the removal of a tooth, an apt metaphor she’s living through at the time.
She writes: the extraction will leave a sizable declivity – a crater of sorts – behind it. This molar, a large tooth of personal and practical significance, whose disappearance will, however, go unnoticed from the outside. It will not, of course, grow back. The intimate world of the mouth will suffer irreversible loss.
Cusk notes there is a mirroring absence on the other side. Her other molar had decayed and been extracted long ago, and she reflects on how that prior absence makes the present one even more difficult.
M nods approvingly as if I were responsible for the passage. She advises me to keep reading. And I take this to mean that books will be my anchors.
Every time our sessions conclude, she asks what I’m doing afterwards to which I reply swimming or sitting with an ice-cream. She always nods approvingly and says to be careful crossing roads.
—
People advise me to focus on myself, a self, they remind me, who is not relative to an Other.
What do you want from the next six months?
How do you want to emerge?
I remember these questions from last time, too. As if transformation and growth are something I can direct.
In the mirror, I observe my shoulders broaden before my eyes. My swim membership transitions from Bronze to Gold. It’s the only place I let myself replay everything without guilt or interruption. It’s as if I’m swimming through memory, the way Dumbledore drops a hair into his pensieve to rewatch a moment he once participated in.
What I return to most is the last image I have on file: the moment we spoke before time fell apart. We’re in the doorway of my house – he outside, me inside – when I say, I hope you find whatever you’re looking for, and then firmly shut the door. It felt like a line from a film, one I’ve since searched for but can’t find.
It is not uncommon for my goggles fill up while I’m in the pool. All the remembering makes the black line blur. It catches me off guard, this sadness, as I do not recognise the people in this image: two strangers who can no longer speak to each other.
On particularly bad days, I swim laps wondering if it could have gone differently, if I could have gone differently. On these days, I revise one of my anchors, which is a line from Heather Richardson:
You cannot make good decisions about your life or your future if someone keeps you in the dark about what’s really going on, any more than you can make good business decisions if your partner is secretly cooking the books.
Then there is the harsh truth and small joy that I’m writing more than ever. Maybe this is the glamour Cusk was referring to. But it leaves me with a question, I say to Sicilian Nic after my swim over a matcha latte he insists on paying for:
Do relationships dull our senses, or was it just this one?
—
My family congregates for Christmas eve pippi pasta. It does not feel at all like how I pictured this day throughout the year. It is as though we are separated by a pane of glass, everything is muffled. That he is only one who can possibly reach me is as true as it is depressing.
I decline more wine and set up a wrapping station in front of the television. I press play on The Polar Express, a Christmas film about not believing in Santa Claus, and, ultimately, the pursuit to preserve childhood innocence.
Every time I return to the back room to refill my tea, the adults are a little more inebriated. With the children in bed, they have begun assembling large dollhouses, bicycles, and basketball hoops.
My brother, the most inebriated of them, is wrestling with 104 screws. Behind him, my dad swears at the dollhouse manual, a drill in one hand and a Coopers Red in the other. I feel my mouth break open and I laugh audibly for the first time in weeks.
It occurs to me that my family living room is its own version of The Polar Express. They will drink the milk, eat the cookies, leave footprints in flour, all to preserve my nieces and nephew’s belief in Santa. They will keep going, even if it takes all night
I would give anything to be a child at this moment, asleep in the next room, waking up to the joy that Santa has come and the ignorance of heartbreak. But knowing that is impossible, I pick up a tool and help.
—
You’re being impatient, M says.
Am I?
These things take time, she says.
If I hear that again, I’ll yell, I tell her.
You once asked me how someone processes something or someone. To use your words: what is the process of processing?
I couldn’t answer then, she says. Namely because there isn’t one.
But in your case, I think what you need to process is your impatience.
—
As the weeks of silence compound, I find myself studying my gremlin more closely. It manifests most in conversations where I list his specific flaws and the fundamentally unique ways he is wrong for me.
I feel the gremlin cheer when a friend shames his behaviour, when a family friend admits they were weary of him all along, and again when M attributes to him descriptors of psychopathology I’m sure are a leap.
The sound of his name in their mouth splits me open the same way morning does when I suddenly remember. I feel, almost physically, the gremlin swell with each retelling, each reframe. And after these binges, I’m made to feel briefly fortified, even strong.
Gradually, I receive less attention from friends, less check-ins, less invitations to walk. Maybe I am supposed to be over it, I deduce. I move through the gardens mostly alone now. I am intentional in passing the bench I sat on the first or second Saturday of Summer.
I am trying to overwrite the memory with new information just like my first year cognitive psychology teacher explained to me once. This is uncomfortable, and at times futile-feeling. My brain is not, like my teacher explained, a computer – none of this feels logical.
I pass mostly new faces on my walks, though some recur and stick. One in particular: a middle-aged, red-haired woman who is always out walking her Jack Russell – her body gaunt. Something about this woman, some private affliction, depresses me greatly.
She doesn’t seem like she wants to be out walking her Jack Russell. Her head is always angled a little down, her face printed in pain, as if she were encountering a strong icy headwind rather than the fourth day over thirty degrees that it is.
I fear this woman, I think. Or to be more specific: I fear becoming this woman: frail, alone, perpetually in wind.
—
You said you’re worried you’re going to carry him around forever, M says.
I nod.
That’s exactly why no contact is crucial, she says. In a situation like this, any form of contact is like hitting rewind. You’re forced to start over. Your grief grows back to fill the whole box that is your life.
I blink. I’ve forgotten that metaphor, I tell her. Remind me.
Your life is a box, and grief is a ball inside it. At first, the ball is huge – pressing hard against the sides, causing pain all the time.
But over time, she says, the ball shrinks. It still bumps the edges – sometimes out of nowhere – but less often. And you handle it better.
The goal isn’t to make grief vanish. It’s to change its shape. Every contact makes the ball grow again, shaking the box, making the pain bounce back.
—
As ritual dictates, I walk to the grocer after seeing M. I buy pistachio and cardamom ice cream, then stand beneath the fairytale trees in the gardens that make me forget I’d seen M at all. There is something about the combination of the sweet rich cream and the metallic tree trunks that has a soothing effect on me.
I sit on a bench near these trees and it occurs to me I cannot remember the names on the ground. They are gone, no longer on recall. On my way home, I look for that bench again. I even sit on it. Only it is not The Bench, I don’t see the names on the cement. Confused, I scan the area. I’m certain this was the spot, and then I realise he is the only person who could verify this.
I move on to the next bench but find no names. An hour passes as I drift from bench to bench finding nothing, no familiar marks. Exhausted, I move up the hill towards home. Capable gardeners are replanting the flower arrangements lining the aisles. I pause, watching them at work. I consider asking if they know anything about the names, about what else I might have misremembered.
—
Em says closure is a myth. My aunty agrees: it is something your generation made up, they both declare. According to these women I should opt to welcome and lean into the ignorance of not knowing and find closure in the complete absence of information.
But I am not cut out for ignorance. I feel this in every part of me, so I reach for books the way I always do: to depart from, or seek an explanation for, my own existence.
Today I reach for Joan, for her calm, exacting prose, which pour into me like a cold glass of water in the middle of a heatwave. There are underlines from last time. Barely legible annotations. So many exclamation marks.
I take the thick, small-printed edition of her collected nonfiction to a strip of sand at the end of New Street. It is 4.30 pm, a Sunday, and the low sun still has a bite to it. Em is there radiating a strong and unwavering love I can almost reach out and touch.
I move straight to Joan’s personals, past On Keeping a Notebook to an essay titled, On Self Respect. For a little while, reading Joan next to Em on the warm sand with a plan for a beer and a potato cake after, I feel that everything is going to be just fine.
Maybe because the essay ends with a particularly steely sentence. Joan says that without it, self-respect, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself and finds nobody at home.
—
It’s the last day of the year, and the sight of his name, bold in my inbox, impales me. I open it to find that contact is being broken by way of a 2,155-word email I don’t fully understand.
There are subheadings, and dot points and question marks – so many question marks. I sit down and read the email twice through, my heart is in my ears. Then I close it and walk until I cannot walk anymore.
Discussing the email with friends is like being in my psychology classes – ethics, specifically. The semester will commence shortly; I fought hard to earn a place, but now I am unsure if I want to go at all.
Ava is cautious of the email. Jo deems it manipulative. Nic is sympathetic. Others unanimously express disbelief, outrage, even. Meanwhile Daisy just finds so sad.
My feelings towards this email shift daily. I am a combination of these reactions, a product of the last person I showed it to. My days cycle and recycle them until I don’t know what I feel or who the person is who wrote it.
It takes me time to realise this email isn’t the start of a conversation. It’s not a peace offering. It’s a placeholder – a way of holding on – until he finally decides what he wants.
At night, I dream of the lever. We are hovering over the cliff that descends into the grotto near our Italian home. It’s one of those days that is too choppy to swim. Both of us are standing there with our hands around the lever. Our friend, Allessandra, is there, willing us to wake up. I wake to the sensation of falling.
I ignore the collective opinion and reply, only to regret every word I write. There is no I told you so, though. Not from Em not from M not from Ava.
Emotions are fundamentally irrational, M reassures me. Then: I’m a big believer that people must make their own mistakes, but in this case, I feel I have to caution that this all feels very unsafe.
Yellow Days 