24 hours; no phone, no people

I light a candle, unwrap Bon Iver’s new record, settle it into the player, and sprawl on my rug with a notebook. I decide that if I’m going to switch off my phone for 24 hours and spend the time alone, I may as well make it romantic.

After 15 minutes of romance, I give up. The candle’s scent is making me feel queasy and I am annoyed that I have to turn the record over every ten minutes to keep the music playing.

~

My neighbour hands me a parcel. It is a letter from a friend, announcing her pregnancy in a card of pink flowers. There is a small photograph of a scan, along with a gift of felt-tip markers and a Cute & Comfy Colouring Book. She lives in the same city as I do, but we mostly send each other gifts and long letters in the mail. I love that after a decade, our friendship has adapted to allow us to love each other in new ways. There is a quiet insistence to keep one another nearby.

Once, this friend and I booked a papermaking workshop in Lismore. She thought Lismore (9 hours from home) was Lithgow (2.5 hours from home). We drove into the night and learned about paper pulp and stayed in a dingy hostel and danced in a heaving club in town and then drove all the way home. The teacher was shocked we had driven so far for her class. We didn’t have the heart to tell her it was a mistake.

~

I realise that my phone is the transition activity rather than the destination activity. Usually, I might cook a meal, then pick up my phone and scroll, and then move on to the next task. Without it, I have to fill the space with something not so brainless. Or do I just move from one task to the other?

~

I cook a meal for friends who have recently had a baby. A big pot of curry simmers on the stove while I write. The cat curls up next to me, licking her paws one by one.

Later, I scoop the curry into four plastic containers. I stick a ‘Ruby’s Preserves’ sticker on the side and scrawl Vegan Chickpea Curry in a ballpoint pen.

~

I take my book to the headland. I lie under the sun overlooking the ocean with a towel and the pillow I take on picnics. Very soon I can smell the feint scent of cat piss. For a while, I think it’s just the smell of the outside world. But as I sniff closer to my person I realise it’s the pillow that smells like cat piss. I throw it to the side and try to read but the smell lingers. I get up and walk back to the car and take the pillow home and throw it in the washing machine, filler and all.

~

I realise that without my phone, I cannot check the time. The clock on my wall – a black cat with a black tail that moves from left to right as the seconds pass – has been without batteries for a long time. I drive to the store for C-size batteries and wedge them in the cat’s backside. Now, when the studio is quiet, I hear the black cat’s quiet ticking.

You would think a day without your phone and without social media would be peaceful. A chance to rest. Instead, it shows you the cavern of uncomfortable emotions you’re trying to hide from with the numbing of phone use.

If you want to know how you’re really feeling, put your phone in the bin.

I decide to write a list of everything I am stressed and worried and fearful and anxious about. There are nine Very Big Things. Doing this makes me feel like I’ve done a big poo. A release. However, it comes with the knowledge that I will have to poo again. I will have to keep pooing for the rest of my life.

~

Throughout the day I imagine people dying: my parents, my partner, my best friend. Nobody can reach me. Nobody can tell me. Is this selfish? Do I turn the thing back on?

~

I finish reading a book.

When I do, I reach over for my phone so I can log it in StoryGraph. It is not there. It is in the kitchen where I left it in the morning. It is off.

~

I buy myself three crumbed lamb cutlets because this is a Special Occasion. They are $46 a kilo, which means they’re more delicious. I eat them on their own. No salad. No potatoes. They are so expensive, they deserve my undivided attention.

Tonight I eat them on a chopping board on the couch with my fingers and watch a YouTube video about building a backyard garden that produces 450kg of fruit and vegetables a year. The oil drips down my arms and onto my pants.

I drink my second can of Coke Zero for the day.

~

If you were to print a photograph of a cat in greyscale, that would be what my cat, Ponyo, looks like. Even her nose is charcoal grey. Some days I wonder if I love her. If I am capable of actually loving an animal beyond its function. Other days I feel so overcome by love for this little creature that I feel breathless.

This week I had the realisation that she knows who I am, that she knows that she is mine. In social situations, she chooses my lap to curl up on. To be chosen is a special feeling.

Even now, as I type, her head rests on my wrist and I think, you are happy here, aren’t you?

~

I Google Can cats cry? on my laptop. If she can’t cry, I can’t make her sad, right?

~

When Ponyo is naughty I yell PONTIOUS PILATE!. This is a funny joke I have with myself and my former Christian self.

Nobody understands the joke when I tell them, except Ellen. She laughed and laughed until tears filled her eyes and she was doubled over on my couch.

~

I bake a batch of chocolate cupcakes. My tabletop oven is too small for my cupcake tin so I have to wedge the tray in on an angle. The cupcakes cook with a slight lean to them.

~

I open Facebook to send a message to my boyfriend. This was always the plan. A quick message. In another thread I see that one of my best friends has been in a car accident. This is why you don’t turn off your phone, you idiot.

I turn on my phone and message her.

(She is okay.)

~

Well, now the phone is on, I think. May as well keep it on. I scroll for three hours. I reply to a few messages, I log a few events in the calendar. But mostly I catch up on everything I didn’t engage with in the first 10 hours of the day. I scroll and scroll and scroll.

Maybe next time, instead of switching my phone off, I will just delete the apps?

Sometimes I feel like Meta has a foot on my throat.