Sometimes I get this feeling that all my teeth are about to shatter and fall out of my mouth. I am soft and quiet and careful, and so I must also be this fragile. Normal things happen to me and they feel so important. A knee aches, a nail breaks, and I think oh, I am splintering. My body is falling apart, I am coming undone at the seams. This is what I’m imagining when my therapist asks me what a journey Outside would look like. Crumbling, combusting, untethering completely. Awake for all of it, the shame loosened, crossing over to what cannot be undone, taking it so far that it cannot be come back from.
But this doesn’t seem to suffice as an answer when it is all happening inwardly. It is not enough when you still appear whole, no matter how much you have changed and changed and changed, the past too far now to rely on, becoming as much of a stranger to the world as you are to yourself.
I made a lot of promises to myself for the new year. On its first day, I went for a drive in Jordan’s car. Not far, but it was something, and I fell asleep on the couch after with a hopefulness that made the world feel small. Then when I woke up in the middle of the night in a fit of disassociation, not thinking of but dwelling within the terror of space, all that endless black expanse, its indifference to our existence, the voicelessness of God, my own name, someone I love’s face, well, I had no answers but to beg myself back to sleep.
My brother is painting the house a creamy white. It reminds me of when we first came to Australia and our first house and that smell, everything new, everything changing. It was summer then too. Turpentine and step ladders, the cicadas outside my window pushed open through the night. I think there are some people for whom childhood existed in the distance, whereas for me it seems to be always happening, my constant centre. I circle around it in everything I do, always coming up short to, say, learning to ride my bike by observing the neighbour’s son, rolling down the tilted ground of our backyard in imitation.
I used to go for long rides, around the creek track at the end of our road. It led eventually to farmland where there were horses and blackberry bushes with sharp thorns. I’d stain my shirt with a picked blackberry, look at a horse right in the eye, both afraid and excited by those great stallions, then I’d turn around and ride back home. Now when I try the pedals my thighs burn and I am forced to recognise my height, etc, etc., and maybe I’m better for it. There are no creeks near this house, no horses. I know, sometimes you spend your whole life making something and the thing it was for was to throw it out. That’s just how it goes.
I should be preparing a PhD proposal. I should be looking for a job. I should be working out, sleeping earlier, looking at myself in the eye and thinking about death enough that it stops me from living like I have forever to figure things out. That’s what it is then, the creaking of my joints, the bruises: the weight of more ‘shoulds’ than I know how to turn around.
This morning Henry had something small and hard in his mouth and when he spat it out I saw it was a ceramic leg. On the floor more pieces, a head, a tail. I’d forgotten that in that panic of the night I’d reached for water, knocking over the horse figurines and sending them flying against the wall, onto the tiles. It seems I must start all my new years with a shattering. It seems I can never escape what once was.
Is the road you leave on the same road to take back? Does something in you always know the way home?
I put the horses back together with a push pin dipped in super glue. When I pressed the pieces firmly against each other the cracks were still visible to me, the shine of the glue seeping through. My horses, changed and changed and changed, perceptible to no one, maybe, but me.
I don’t know what to do with the new year. I didn’t know what to do with the old one. But there are no fresh starts anyway. It all carries over, thank God.
Beautiful! I hope Henry is okay 🤣
Just wanted to say that of all the New Years posts I was expecting to read, yours was the one I was most excited for. Always such a pleasure to read your beautiful writing❤️