Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.
– Mary Oliver
I tell M I’ve noticed myself referring to him in the past tense. I am not sure when this happened or what it means, I say.
She takes off her glasses, grinning widely. Something is different about her. In our time together, she has always felt a little distant to me, almost indifferent – a feeling that I was just another client.
Though somewhere along the line, it’s clear she has become invested in me. I feel it today, undeniably.
It’s a sensation I am going to spend the next two years learning to cultivate with my own clients. Though I’m not sure how, exactly. It just crept up on us.
It was important not to force you along to this point too fast, M says. You’ve been in mourning, understandably. But I think you’re ready for the archives now.
You are no longer just to feel, but to investigate. To treat memories and dreams like documents and perform a kind of forensic post-mortem. To notice not just what you miss, but what you missed, she says.
Freud called this noticing dream work, believing dreams were a ‘royal road’ to the unconscious. With defences lowered in sleep, repressed thoughts slip through – rarely directly, but disguised as symbols, fragments, and distortion.
I see them everywhere, so red, she says of the flags. I look at M, right into her beady eyes, and consider asking if I can borrow them but we are all out of time. We are always out of time.
—
In my periphery floats the task of writing about all of this. Occasionally, a friend bumps it into focus, asking if I’ll write about it, as though it’s obvious I should.
My answer shifts depending on how much yoga I’ve done. The Tuesday morning instructor, Zigy, begins every class the same way:
This practice is about dissolving the ego and returning to body and breath. Nothing has happened because of us. Nothing happens to us. This is all just happening, Zigy declares in his deep, untroubled voice.
Iris Murdoch called this release from the fat, relentless ego – unselfing. She writes of looking out the window, anguished over damage to her pride, when a kestrel hovers into view. And for a moment, in her full engagement with the bird, she forgets herself.
These one-hour yoga sessions distort time. Some days they stretch. Others they vanish. I’m not sure which is better. Or if I even like yoga. I’m not sure about much anymore.
Ava believes this is the cruellest part of a breakup: when you’re in the relationship, you glide along thinking you have it all figured out, only to realise afterwards how wrong you were.
Crueler still, I say to Ava, is the doubleness of it all; the other person, who is probably living a version of those days you’ll never truly know.
That was so good, I say to a woman after the dynamic flow class tonight. We are tugging on our shoes, both flushed and dazed from all the bend bending. Mm, it really was, she says, but I’m not so good at breathing.
In the car, I write the exchange down in my phone notes, along with the Zigy’s sermon. It sits atop a long list of things I’ve snatched from the world lately – fragments I’m not ready to sit with.
Though I suppose, at some point, I will have to. I’ll do exactly what the yoga people warn against: I’ll place myself at the centre of all these moments, lines, and observations.
Years ago, a playwright cautioned that the more universal the experience, the harder it is to capture. Though last year, I found myself sitting in a small theatre in St Kilda watching her render the ordinariness of an Australian marriage remarkable.
Ocean Vuong echoed this sentiment when the writer says: sometimes I will experience something so exceptional that you’d think it would end up in my novels. But I write it down and it feels so cliché – because life is such a cliché.
For now, I write everything down in my yellow notebook. It doesn’t feel like catharsis, exactly. More like the appeasement of a desire I can’t satiate. I find myself explaining the sequence of events to the notebook as if it might become confused if I leave something out.
But each time I try to type something, I can’t get past the first sentence.
When did it begin to go wrong, I think.
Maybe it never went right, I hear M reply.
—
Why is nicotine so relaxing? I type into my search engine tonight while feeling the effects of my brother’s e-cigarette travel to my feet.
The horizon too, which I spent the whole day staring at, submitting questions to. But the ocean only answered with the tide, which climbed so high our towels got wet. I took this to mean the answer to all of this is time.
In her memoir, Splinters, Leslie Jamison says our online search histories may be the most honest biographies we leave behind.
The same is true for iPhone notes, I think. I have over 700 of them. Lately, I thumb through the digital notes looking for clues. One unassigned quote reads: if you are frank, you elicit frankness and so, if you are honest, you elicit honesty.
I don’t know where this came from or why I wrote it down. It contains a snapshot, I suppose, of whoever I was, whatever was happening, on the 11th of November 2021.
I begin to visit my search history, noticing and extracting themes, screenshotting lists that accuse or embarrass me. They tell a story, this story, more accurately than I am capable of.
—
Search History 06/02/25
- What happens when you block someone
- What does the blocked person receive
- Can you block via email
- Salmon bento near me
- Brown rice cooking time
—
My housemates tell me my Saturn has returned. This news makes them squawk around the house. They urge me to download an astrology app. I do, though I don’t pay for the upgrade. Each morning, a notification arrives: some vague forecast linked to this apparent milestone.
It happens roughly every 29.5 years, I am told, when the planet returns to the place it occupied at your birth. In astrology, it marks the threshold of actual adulthood. A rite of passage, K says. A reckoning, Ava echoes. A period where everything, apparently – career, relationships, identity – is subject to audit.
They say this is why things feel so unstable. Why endings keep coming. Why I’m so tired. It’s meant to be clarifying, they say. But the clarity is slow. And mostly retroactive.
I type questions into my search engine. Things like ‘how long does a Saturn return last’ and ‘can you fail your Saturn return’. I play Angie McMahon’s version of it until I know every word.
The internet says no, but also, yes. You cannot really fail; you just repeat the lesson until it sticks. And remember, the astrologists caution: your transition is conditional on letting the scaffolding fall.
It’s a season of endings, realignments, and asking yourself what’s still real, and what never really was. I hear somewhere it strips away anything not built to last. Some days I feel like I’m being peeled.
—
It’s too cold for ice-cream. Now I frequent the bookstore behind M’s office – a product of the change of season. I get to know a staff member whose eyes it is easy to get lost in. When he is not selling me books, he tells me he is writing poetry. I buy his book. He asks for my email. I’m not sure what this means, I say to the girls when I arrive home.
That night, Ava locates him online, and we learn he is married – two kids. K hands around martinis. Even the seemingly good ones are rubbish, Charlotte says.
This is quickly becoming the thesis of dinner party conversations in our household. Supporting evidence for this thesis is no longer solely from me, but from K as well. Our next-door neighbour too, who continues to reject our dinner party invitations.
We orbit around the topic of heartbreak, and aftermaths, and masks. We zoom in and out observing how our experiences are distinct but also so much the same.
You know what’s really off, Ava says, slurring her words. Behind her, the bin is overrun, bottles spill around it like a growth. That they both initiated the conversations in your bedrooms. Of all places, she yells, looking genuinely disrespected.
I change bookstores and discover a title, Animal Joy, which comes recommended by a staff member. I look into the staff member’s eyes, which are not dreamy, though still I am weary. The book, by a psychoanalyst cross poet, is a whole book about performance, the kind we do to be liked, to be chosen, to avoid rejection.
Over time, Nuar Alsadir says, the performance can swallow the self and the mask becomes the face. Psychoanalyst Helen Deutsch describes it more sharply still through the ‘As-If’ personality: someone who doesn’t lie, exactly, but who lives through mimicry. A self without depth, without anchor.
—
Search History 26/02/25
- Co-dependency
- Signs of co-dependant relationship
- Adopt a dog – Australia
- Dog breed fine in own company
- Red wine nutritional value
—
The longer I spend with my search histories, the more I find myself unsettled by his preference for incognito browsing. As if there were parts of him I wasn’t meant to see.
I consider the neatly organised computer and Google profiles, the endless bookmarked, filed tabs. How can one person hold so many selves at once? I remember posing to Em when the execution was still contained in a future that has been and gone.
Alsadir writes that bookmarks function like personal myths: not places we dwell, but places we want to be seen as dwelling. It extends beyond browsers to the clothes we wear, the objects we arrange in our homes, the versions of ourselves we publish online. Some even hire professionals to manage the illusion. A performance for an imagined witness.
Winnicott called this the ‘false self’, the version that pleases, adapts, and performs so well it forgets what it truly wants. There are, of course, rewards for staying at the surface: safety, coherence, applause.
I think of him the whole time I read Animal Joy, slowly realising that, as Solvej Balle writes, I did not have the privilege of his true portrait.
I expect to finish the book swiftly, but I can only manage it in pieces. I consume it a chapter at a time, like the tub of rich ice cream in my freezer, drawn over several sedate weeks.
When I explain this theory to M, she says deceived is the wrong word. I don’t believe it is necessarily intentional, she says. Rather, you were misled by someone who may not know any other way to be.
—
Over Zoom, I break the news to our Italian friend who replies in cries. I know, I say, I know. But it’s for the best, I assure her.
These words are merely repetition of what other people tell me, something I am yet to fully integrate. We make plans for a trip to her motherland, Sicily, which I know won’t amount to anything. Though still, it feels good.
When we hang up, I am alone. My bedroom is a mess because I spent the evening remembering. The wooden box he made – from his carpentry phase – is still open, spilling handwritten notes, blank postcards, museum stubs.
I don’t know what to do with it now. With any of it. The trip, the photos, the images that impale me at the most unexpected times of day.
On the back of an Italian grocer receipt from the summer of 2022, I have written:
He has a picture of the cancer hospital set as the background of his phone - a reminder to keep perspective when he gets in a mood, as he often does. The photo is blurry too. I consider how I can be in love with someone who does this, but here I am. I am.
The internet, predictably, offers advice, plain and directive: delete it all. Apparently, men are better at this. More skilled at compartmentalising, boxing things up, moving on.
Women, by contrast, are seen as narrators – drawn to meaning-making and cataloguing loss. But the internet warns this gendered theory is reductive, and there are exceptions to the rule. I nod at the internet – I know. With T, I was one of them, the most manly of them all.
I pack everything into a suitcase I never use and drag it to Ava’s attic. She protests, telling me she doesn’t like the energy. The only other option is the cupboard under the stairs, but it can only store hard materials, she says. Soft ones decay in the damp.
Ava gives in; she understands. She’s been here before. Charlotte hasn’t, and so she watches on from her relationship, feeling very much afraid.
I catch the scent of incense drifting from Ava’s room, moving slowly down the hall like soft permission. For days, I can’t stop picturing it up there: cold, quiet, sealed shut.
But my efforts are in vain: a photo falls out of the novel I’m reading. The image depicts the two of us, cheek to cheek before the Colosseum, jet-lagged and euphoric, at the very beginning.
In the novel, Unquiet, Linn Ullman writes that a trip is not only the trip itself, but also all the time you spend thinking about it before you leave and after you come back home.
Ullman is unsatisfied with the word thinking, as you may manage not to think about the trip, but you can’t escape feeling permeated by it in some way. The trip has taken up residence inside you, and you have to live with it for some time before embarking on it and for some time after it has come to an end. In this way, it’s a lot like the flu.
—
Search History 03/03/25
- McKinsey Consultant salary
- Psychologist salary
- Author salary
- Famous author salary
- English speaking psychology jobs in Greece
—
Daisy, true to her New Year’s resolution of spontaneous drop-ins, calls to say she’s passing through my neighbourhood. We stop at the bottle shop on the corner and walk around the MCG gardens with our beers as if we are in another country. People smile and nod approvingly at us as if the image of us makes them too feel like they are in another country.
There is a man playing tennis against the wall of the MCG. He is good; the rallies are long, methodical, on target. Watching him makes me consider vulnerability tennis. M’s reply to my concern that I no longer trust my instincts to discern good from bad; genuine from inauthentic; men from boys.
Twice now I’ve misjudged, I told her. Now I don’t trust myself.
She described vulnerability tennis as a kind of emotional rally. A person offers something real – grief, confusion, fear – and waits to see if the other responds in kind. When the exchange is mutual, something grows – trust, intimacy, the kind of quiet recognition that makes you feel known.
But, M cautioned, a lot of people don’t know how to play. Not because they don’t want to, but because they tried once, and what they served was ignored, or worse, rejected. So now they only offer the parts they think are acceptable.
Polished fragments. Safe sadness. A kind of curated self. But connection doesn’t live there. That’s performance. And performance, eventually, always collapses under its own weight.
Daisy asks me how it’s all going – the sleeping, the healing. She is someone who plays vulnerability tennis well, I think. A well-attended guest of what Jenny Offill refers to as The Little Theatre of Hurt Feelings.
I tell her I have graduated from my ‘ouchy’ playlist to my ‘srs-ouchy’ playlist to my ‘getting on with it’ playlist, which Daisy demands to see. I am proud of you, she says. But also let me see, I need to change your settings because do you know he can see these?
—
Search History 03/03/25
- hungarian vizsla temperament
- german short haired pointer temperament
- hungarian vizsla for sale Victoria
- how to train a therapy dog
- therapy dog training cost
—
Ava and I drive to Waratah Bay for one last holiday before university commences. I’m relieved to find everything as I remember: the generous stretch of sand, and the water that never quite warms. I rise early, swimming, walking, and sifting through old notebooks, while Ava sleeps into late morning.
We come here for the same reason we always have: to rest, and process something unexpected. Over the years, the specifics of these moments have changed, but the underlying themes – disruption and transition – remain the same. Over time, we’ve learned that we don’t get to choose how we’re changed, though that doesn’t stop us from trying to understand it.
It’s the constancy of this place, the unchanging curve of the bay, the cold of the sea, the complete isolation that makes it safe enough to sit with what unsettles us most. I realise this on the first morning, standing barefoot on the sand, not thinking so much as noticing that I am not thinking.
A few days in, I notice I’ve stopped dreaming too. Instead, I wake with a calm I barely recognise. By the time Ava stirs, I’m full of things I need to say out loud. I’m also starving, it’s 11.30. Over a Spanish omelette and black coffee – hers real, mine decaf- I pull out a passage, something I wrote in April 2023, which I read to Ava without preamble.
I have 30 weeks and 23 days until I can hand in my resignation, he says. His feelings about work have shifted again: it’s still a good learning opportunity, but it’s not for me, he says. These aren’t his people. Some days he says he feels borderline suicidal. He’s questioning everything again - work, leisure, cities, salaries, friendships, family, capital, duty. I try to read for university, but I’m distracted by the sound of his mind travelling down careers made up from hobbies and borrowed ambitions, cities spanning Berlin to Launceston. I don’t know what I want. I’m excited, tired, and, if I’m honest, scared. Scared by the constant state of unrest, which hasn’t let up since we met.
Ava doesn’t respond right away. She chews slowly, the sound of the beach folding and unfolding behind us. I’ve always admired this in her, which is to say her presence, and ability to listen, really listen. We’re only a year apart, but in our relationship, time is elastic. It seems we take turns being the older, wiser one – the one who holds and the one who is held.
At the time of writing this passage, I was unmoored and flooded with cortisol. The whole journal reflects an attempt to make sense of our return: of two people trying to understand their desire for one another in a new place that was really an old one, haunted by ghosts that kept getting in the way.
Maybe this is what returning offers us: not answers, but the chance to witness. To trace the shape of change not as rupture, but, as M says, something quietly unfolding, exactly as it needs to.
In our time at Waratah Bay, I decide that I want to, as Alsadir puts it, live hotter – to emerge with destructive aliveness, I say to Ava on an evening walk. In relationships, Alsadir says one must be able to tolerate the other’s destructive aliveness, to sit with the full range of their emotions without needing to respond in a prescribed way.
That’s usually what makes a relationship feel safe: where you are free to be yourself, to express spontaneously. In this way, it’s also where outbursts of laughter are most likely to happen. Looking back, I see there is a level of consciousness, or unconsciousness, we could not access together.
—
I arrive home from Waratah Bay to find my belongings on the doorstep, packed into a box bearing the logo of my favourite pasta brand. Inside is a birthday gift I can’t make sense of and a card that feels vaguely threatening. The girls are away. I pace the house. I cry. I forget to buy groceries.
I throw the contents of the box in the bin, save for the card. It doesn’t go to Ava’s attic either. It sits on the mantel for a while, quiet and insistent as if to say: this is not the person you thought he was.
Whatever you do, Em warns, do not reply.
I don’t. Weeks pass. Summer becomes Autumn.
One cold morning, riding home from the pool, his name appears in my inbox. I pull over and tear off my glove with my teeth. Disclaimer – Hope, the subject line reads.
An hour later, I read it aloud to Sophie. Cryptic, she says. No, Daisy replies on loudspeaker, just off night shift. He’s drunk.
This time, I draft a reply. It lives in my iPhone Notes for three weeks. Every other morning, Siri suggests I return to it. Meanwhile, M, Ava, and Em advise against this.
People comment that I’m not quite myself, wondering if it might be eating up more of me than I realise. Mum agrees, asking again if I’m eating enough?
The heartbreak is no longer abstract, or immediate. It’s documented in a string of emails over many months – each one betrays a different mood: grief, fear, guilt, rage, even hope. But never remorse. Or compassion. Never regard for the individual reading them.
Alsadir writes that for a conversation to be truly honest, it must follow the unfiltered path of the mind. It must be accurate and walked together without agenda or time limit. And it must happen in person. Not over Gmail.
—
I am late to university orientation because I don’t know where to go. A wide-eyed, highly strung woman tells me she arrived 45 minutes early. As it turns out, many of my cohort did.
I scan the room, trying to absorb some of my their eager energy. I don’t know it yet, but some of these strangers will become confidants, and others, my closest friends.
I’m not the only one navigating disruption, apparently. I don’t know why I’m surprised. It comes in many forms: siblings abroad, dying mothers, romantic love gone awry.
At lunchtime, a university peer tells me she hasn’t slept in three months. We bond over our parallel aches while our soups rotate in the microwave. I can’t do anything I used to, she says. Everything reminds me of her.
Months ago, Ava posed a theory that breakups tend to happen at the end of the year, at the start of summer. It’s a cleansing season, she declared. I rejected this at first. It felt too generic whereas what I’ve been experiencing has felt so profoundly personal.
I tell my new friend it gets better. I don’t add that I’ve never struggled doing the things I used to. I put this down to his many transient versions – the hobbies, careers, and passions he tried on so quickly that nothing specific ever stuck. So I encounter no signs.
Save for the clouds, I suppose. He was always so arrested by those.
The other day I read Grimaldi built an instrument to measure their height. I had to put the book down and sit there with the uncomfortable desire to send him the line.
I suppose this is what I find hardest, the invisible thread that tethered my body to his. That sense of safety in being anchored. As T.S. Eliot put it: he was the still point of the turning world.
—
Search History 06/04/25
- Do you put a full stop after your name in a letter
- Sent Mail – Gmail – donegan.h…@gmail.com
- Draft Mail – Gmail – donegan.h…@gmail.com
- Malice definition
- Acupuncture sleep mat pain
—
People ask if I am surprised by the content of these emails, or the progression of events. They seem sceptical that there were no tremors before the collapse.
I am investigating it, forensically, I do not say.
Others are unsurprised, telling me that you can never really know someone until you break up with them.
I just shrug at these people and turn it over again in my mind why it – why we – took this shape.
We were filling each other’s void from the beginning, he wrote in the first email.
Initially, I declared to myself that I had no foreknowledge, that there are just some parts of life you cannot predict.
Though the more I peer back, the more I see it as the inevitable outcome of the conditions we created. The shape, Cusk writes, that formed because nothing else could.
—
Destructive aliveness, I decide, involves gardening. I repot the almost-dead fiddle leaf he gave me, the one that sat on his balcony all that time deprived of love and light.
I wonder now whether this was an omen of some sort. Here, have this dead thing I can’t be bothered with, and see what you can do with it on your own.
But I know nothing about gardening save for plants need water and light, so I befriend an enthusiastic woman at the Bunnings 600 metres up the road.
Oh dear, the woman says, raising her hand to her mouth. She needs a lot of love. See these leaves here, she’s self-harming, ok, write this all down. I write down her instructions before purchasing an enormous terracotta pot, special soil and two kinds of medicine.
I tend to the fiddle leaf daily, rotating, spraying, feeding. I study her, trying to decipher what she needs. In the beginning, the fiddle leaf makes me sad to look at, so I face my back to her while eating.
I return to Bunnings on a Saturday. The aisles are crowded with people, mostly couples, queuing for sausages and arguing over tiles. I find the plant doctor among the herbs. I explain the fiddle leaf isn’t responding, but she only shakes her head. It’s too soon, she says. Patience.
—
Search History 10/05/25
- Online dating risk
- Online dating horror stories
- Evolutionary mismatch theory
- Evolutionary mismatch theory and modern dating
—
Week one becomes five, becomes ten. Autumn slips away, and I find myself glad for its absence. The fiddle leaf, once bare and fragile, unfurls new wings where the old ones fell. Her small shoots catch the afternoon light while I sit to plan my thesis.
Her growth is patient, I realise, almost indifferent. She no longer resembles the sad plant I used to glance at while drinking tea in his bed, talking about a future that never materialised.
I begin a new journal. I meet a man, a Teacher, who is both a welcome distraction and entirely wrong for me in all the same ways the last one was.
And then it dawns on me: they know each other, though to what extent, I can’t decipher. I try to place the new man’s name in the mouth of the old one, to remember if we’d met before. But nothing becomes of this.
When I tell M, she laughs. You’re not in love, she says. Not with either of them, you’re in withdrawal.
She prescribes a detox, of dopamine or cortisol, she isn’t sure. I tell M I haven’t had caffeine in four months, but she only shakes her head.
It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that you’re relationally addicted to pseudo-feminist narcissists. It’s not him you want. It’s the feeling. The hit. The high. The hope.
She names the emptiness I feel after seeing him: the comedown – a hollow ache that follows the high.
Eventually, she says, you’ll learn to see it coming. You’ll stop chasing what drains you. You’ll want something steadier. Something that doesn’t hollow you out.
—
Search History 17/06/25
- Don draper theory
- Don draper personality disorder
- Don draper in real life
- Flight deals June
- Clinical trials Melbourne
—
When we emerge from the cinema, it’s no longer morning but afternoon, because we saw Wicked. I’m surprised by how much I enjoyed it, I say.
K tells me that Brok, a nondescript character in the film, recently left his psychologist-writer wife and their six-month-old baby for Ariana Grande, who played Glinda. What started as an on-set affair turned into something genuine, apparently.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that not even a seemingly happy marriage and a baby can protect you from it, I say, standing back as couples fill their trolleys for the week.
We’re doing a supermarket shop to obtain free parking and settle on homemade burgers, again. Our food phases come and go, together and alone. Soon enough, even the thought of this dinner will make us wince, and we’ll move on to something else. I can’t tell if this is an adaptive trait or a kind of shared delusion about what newness can solve.
Since the breakdown, I notice other couples with a different gaze. There is a feeling they have succeeded, and I have failed, Cusk writes, moving around the grey London streets. Though she cannot seem to nominate why.
It has something to do with desire, I think. Or, like wealth, with how we’re conditioned to signal it. You can take out a loan to feign affluence, wear the right clothes, carry the right bag. What’s the equivalent with desire? Youth? Beauty? A partner whose presence elevates your own? As Lacan put it, our desire is predicated on lack – we always want what we cannot fully have.
In my thesis research, I explore Zygmunt Bauman’s idea that modern love has become liquid: something we crave but don’t want to be trapped inside. So we keep it flexible, provisional, a swipe away from the exit. But that flexibility comes at a cost.
No longer coupled, I am learning desire still exists, just in different spaces. Sometimes it’s spectacular. Other times, it’s quiet. Like when Charlotte drops the yoghurt I like into our basket without asking.
We were in the cinema for three hours, plus one, she says, noticing me staring at the growing pile. So we need to spend at least forty dollars.
I smile. It’s such a small act but it stirs something in me. Something that isn’t performative, but unmistakably real.
Yellow Days 