being the beacon

slide a note under the door

Eating popcorn for every meal because your out-of-town friend taught you how to pop it in a saucepan. Buying a pint of ice cream (marked down to $5, the fancy stuff) the week before you move from the country. Drinking Bundaberg Lemon Lime and Bitters from a green bottle, feeling like you finally could fit in with your drinking friends, even as you sip it alone at home on a Sunday night. Your hands just want something to hold. Clearing the bottom two shelves of your allocated kitchen space, wiping the wood down with vinegar solution. Remembering to rescue your tea strainer from the knife drawer.

Six boxes shiny with tape stacked up in front of an empty bookcase, a housemate’s inheritance. You must remember to tell the driver from the shipping company the odd way your house is on the street that is not listed in its official address. Using the brown paper side of old Christmas wrapping to pack up a gifted painting you can’t bring home. Another bullet point on the will of someone leaving after four years. Using your housemate’s furry pink Disney blanket after you’ve given your doona away. The two suitcases open in the corner, filled with the clothes you’ve doled out for your last month.

All these bus rides on routes I’ve never taken become newly significant. This morning on the 555 from Epping Plaza, I played peek-a-boo with a small girl in a pram. I was jealous of her red plaid shirt. I have passed through Lalor twice in the past two days, I have walked up and down High Street in Northcote and Westgarth twice in the past two days. I don’t know where else to go to see for the last time. I stand with my back to the road at the big roundabout in my university, holding an umbrella against the weak drizzle and staring at the moat. Last times and forever seem inconceivable and improbable. But I never want to take this bus home again.

Going to rehearsals for a play that opens the day I get on my flight home. Slipping my homemade postcards under the doors of absent lecturers, getting hugs from people I have never touched that way. Welling up, and shrinking back. Last minute connections like static electricity bridging two fingers – why did we not speak before, we could have been such good friends. Last days, two cakes, two gifts from the university gift shop and we all mean well. I leave in one week, less. I am excited and scared. I am excited and scared. I am terrified of leaving, of forgetting, of being forgotten, of being far away, of being lost and losing. I keep thinking I should be crying in the shower a lot more than I have (not at all) but the bus rides are too short to carry the sadness home.

Going away drinks six days before the flight. A good friend’s birthday party on the Saturday two days after my final hurrah. No second helpings, but none of us can’t help it, this calendar we hold to is strict and unforgiving. Make me stay. Keep me here. It’s all a little too late.

Goodbye, goodbye, hello again, I’ve just forgotten a cable, a cardigan, a card, one last hug and a kiss and yes how we will miss each other, who knows what I will do in the next few days and years, goodbye for real, now, for real.

sickness and the suspension of time

My nest is made up of ever-rumpled sheets, pillows thrown about, damp dresses from yesterday’s laundry hung up on hangers and empty hooks, handwashed bras hooked limp and soft on cupboard handles, lining the hallway banister. A pyramid of toilet paper tissue by my bed, an empty box of raisins, a jug of water. A white bowl with drying bits of yoghurt and cornflakes. A metal spoon.

I’ve been sick since Tuesday night, soon after my return from Sydney. It’s felt longer than that. On Wednesday night, my brain felt like it was boiling inside my skull, and I managed to soak up the fever from my skin with a cold wet tea towel dipped into a full metal mixing bowl. I kept wishing for a loyal handmaiden. Or a boyfriend. Or to be seven again with both parents. Sickness brings out the worst in you. I went to work with my hair uncombed and in my unflattering puffy grey jumper. Who cares about appearances when you feel like death?

This month was meant for so much more. I haven’t blogged since the first, and I leave the country in 18 days. I went to Sydney! Every night next week is booked with plans and friends and dates and rehearsals. There is still so much to do, and I am writing about none of it.

I think about my housemate in the bedroom next door, who has to listen to me cough up my lungs, hacking and snorting and sniffling all the live long day.

Last night, I stayed home instead of going to a friend’s EP launch, guilted the whole hour I knew his band was playing. I hope no one missed me.

a jumper of squares

Tags

bodies, Gillian Mears, reading, the best Australian essays of 2011, women, writing

There’s something beautiful about being given something to read by someone, having them tell you that they think you will really love it.

My friend S stands at the photocopier, making me a copy of Fairy Death, by Gillian Mears. A choice morsel from her book of the best 2011 Australian essays. When she gives them to me, I give her back promises that I will read it. I will read it. I mean it more the more I say it, but as I tuck the sheets into my bag, I worry it will slip from memory, how much I mean it.

Before I leave she remembers she has forgotten the last page and dashes off a quick copy. A photograph, I can see its black photocopied edges from a quick peek, but then she tells me it’s what the whole story is about so I look away.

A day goes by and I find time to read it as my bus drives past, myself a second too late stepping off the curb. I cross the paved circle near the moat to the little alcove of the David Myers Building. A folded glass screen, a few benches and a bank of vending machines. Three large panels of stained glass art. A quiet garden behind us, a green brass statue of a woman washing her hair.

S describes the essay to me as about being female, a woman, having a woman’s body, death and sex. I nod with each descriptor, a small downward and upward movement of my chin, tick tick tick tick.

The first sentence of the second paragraph starts: “To have lost the ability of orgasm before it is time for such a disappearance seems inconceivable.”

Mears’ body is declining because she has multiple sclerosis. She says she comes “from a family addicted to assessing its appearance”. She speaks of her fascination for mirrors, specifically for the “simple pane of mirror glass” bolted in Decateur South, a sea cubby built by sculptor Marr Grounds, located on the south coast, near Victoria. She names the glass The Mirror of Beauty. She says of this place – “Where else had I ever been more beautiful? Where ever again could I appear so poised for pleasure?”

Back in my own alcove, a young man in a white hoodie printed with colourful squares has come over from the small bus stop on the opposite side of the road, the one framed by the beautiful lake this university has claim to, and the wide swatch of green grass that rings the border. He is yelling or is at least angrily vocal, and he seems to be directing his fervent comments at a group of people standing on the sidewalk.

A photographer – Vincent Long – has asked Mears to be a part of his portrait of Australian writers. She insists it can be nowhere else but herself, nude, in this sea cubby. There are beautiful and moving descriptions of the bodies of women – of her own and others – all painted with a loving stroke. She speaks of sexuality in a time of sickness and disease, of the desire to own one’s body and to be wanted for one’s body and to speak with one’s body. She speaks a lot of sex, but a mirrored sex, fuzzed, distorted and a little bit tricky to capture.

“Or to return to a Paris orgy I’d left early in ’92, as if the huge mirror at the back of a stranger’s living room even now holds the bodies of a naked and relentless crowd.”

On page 5 she quotes John Berger, and my fingers dog ear the page in response – “The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.”

The young man is still yelling. He never stops talking. He tries to buy a drink from the vending machine, he paces, he stoops at a water fountain, and still he speaks. The people on the other side of the road have disappeared behind a procession of large blue rectangles on wheels. Whisked away. Who is he speaking to? We give him sidelong glances, and I can hear the thoughts of my fellow commuters, loud only by mutual amplification.

This reminds me of a fight that happened on the Epping train a few nights ago, the loud tense voices that pushed people through the connecting doors from their carriage into ours. All of us twisting our heads for a better look, connected in that moment by a strong and pressing curiosity. A refugee from the other carriage sits next to me, and sheepishly we smile when we catch the other’s eye. I hear only a woman’s voice, briefly, young if I can make such assumptions. The ruckus happened at Melbourne Central. Not a peep then all the way to Reservoir.

Each sentence under my eye feels strange, has the touch of someone else weighing them, measuring them, feeling them up. Which parts made S think I would want to read this essay? Which parts resonated with her, and why? Which parts reminded her of her body, and are ours now connected, however briefly, from this mutual female consideration?

“The orgasms of childhood are like very ripe raspberries bursting open under your finger, exquisite enough but swiftly past.”

“Beneath my other hand parts of Marr are still capable of thinking themselves far younger. We smile at this.”

“For a time, on buses, trains and planes, I find myself studying the lips of strangers. Has that bald businessman’s face ever arisen from between his wife’s legs as wet as if from a swim in a sea of crushed mangoes?”

What sentences. I dog eared the page this one was printed on simply for the beauty of the look and shapes of the letters in the sentence:

“Does this Velcro twenty-first century also have glass houses full of rose scientists intent on breeding blooms from which no perfume can ever float?”

Out of context, it may mean nothing, but say that out loud to yourself a few times and see what I mean.

The bus I get on has the old kind of brown plastic upholstered seats, the ones that seems to make the whole bus cooler and less stuffy somehow. I hope the young man in the hoodie doesn’t get on. I do not wish him ill, but I figure, leave him to this alcove. Leave him to his unceasing speech. Maybe he loves his own set of sentences. Maybe he is rehearsing a play. Maybe it was all an experiment, a performative exercise. Maybe he has some things he needs out of himself. Maybe he likes talking to himself.

The last page of the story, the photograph, looks like the fallen doll of childhood - one bud of a nipple dark against the flat and pale breast, the ribbon of a red balloon cutting her torso in half. The photo is taken from above. We are Mears’ Mirror of Beauty. She doesn’t look sad, she looks pretty serene, in fact. The photo fuzzes and blurs from her waist down, her fingers caught in this border, her limbs unfinished, unmaking themselves.