july diary

crucifixion, dream interpretations and my first month off.

I ask the masseuse why I find myself crying when I get my wrists massaged. She pauses before reaching into my mouth with her gloved hand. She runs a plastic finger along my gums while a small string of saliva runs down my chin.

“I think you must have been crucified in a past life,” she tells me.

“Or maybe you were blind?” she says later in the appointment.

“Actually,” she says, as I am handing her my card at the counter, “I think it’s a sign of being born prematurely. Do you know much about your birth story?”

~

After the massage, I ride to my accommodation on my bicycle, my jaw slack and loose.

Melbourne, what a place! Bicycle lanes abound! I am like a dog with its head out the window, tongue lolling.

I arrive at the room to find a letter written to me from

Anna Martine

, who spent a year knowing nothing. I sit down to pen a reply, and I suppose this is it.

~

Babies seem to be falling out of trees and into the arms of the people I love like apples. Golden Delicious, Pink Lady, Honeycrisp.

For decades, I have watched my friends grow taller and now they’re growing souls.

How did we find ourselves here?

I remember pashing strangers in sticky King’s Cross nightclubs and wedging condoms full of drugs inside our bodies to avoid the dogs. I remember driving along the highway, pressed up against the heaving subwoofers in our school uniforms, giving our phone numbers to passing cars. I remember eating feral cat tortellini and getting drunk on camel’s milk cocktails with gambling magnates wearing baby pink outfits we had purchased from Salvos. And now here you all are! Drowning in nappies! In vomits! In rosy-cheeked smiles and gummy laughter! And I am here with you, all these years later. On your lounge room floors, aghast at the beautiful little humans asleep on your shoulders.

My friends are softening into new versions of themselves and I find myself softening with them. We are growing roots and branches and leaves in our own ways. It is a sight to behold, and I never thought I’d love this time as much as I do.

~

What I planted this month: raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, boysenberries, river mint, coastal rosemary, a lemon myrtle tree, a grevillea, a banksia, native grasses, garlic.

~

In July I have a dream and in it I am a passenger in my boyfriend’s van. I am asleep and when I wake up I look over at him behind the wheel. I am happy, I am bursting with joy. I want to tell him about my ideas, about what I want to do, about all of the exciting things that lie before us. But he looks at me, face cold and sad. How could you possibly be happy after a day like this? he says. My body sinks like a river stone. What happened today? I pan over to the dashboard and the floor below my feet. I am surrounded by clothes stained with mud and grease. I look in the back, where the bed is usually made. There is a pile of dead bodies. The dead bodies are our friends.

I wake up.

Some dream analysts, particularly in Jungian psychology, believe every character in your dream represents an aspect of you. If that is the case, am I in a car with all of the dead versions of me? Does that mean my boyfriend would be a version of me too? Where are we going with all of my past, dead selves? Why am I oblivious to the grief of them?

~

What I ate from the garden this month: three snow peas, lettuce, choy sum, dill, parsley.

~

Before I learnt what a panic attack felt like in my own body, I sat with a girl I didn’t know in the middle of her own.

I was at a Christian conference, where thousands of teenagers gathered to learn from the Bible. After a series of emotional hymns and a thundering call to prayer by the preacher, I stood at the back of the hall, arms outstretched, waiting for the birds who had chosen to fly with Jesus to come to me.

I was 20 years old and she was in high school and she was hyperventilating when we locked eyes. We sat on a brick wall in the 5-degree Katoomba night and I counted in-two-three, out-two-three with her. She was trying to tell me something about her Dad. He wasn’t a good man. I was trying to placate her by telling her that she had a good and perfect Dad in heaven and that she could rest in Him instead. And so we prayed together and I wrote down her name on a piece of paper so that she could be counted in the conversion count tally at the end of the night and then I waved goodbye and she walked back into the conference centre alone.

At the time I thought I was teaching that little bird how to fly. In reality, I think I was just ushering her into another cage.

~

What I knitted this month: two baby cardigans, a baby beanie, an adult beanie, a scarf, the back of a cow-print vest, the beginning of a brick-red jumper.

~

The other day, I sat at my friends’ dining table and I asked their youngest what the name of her toy sloth was. The sloth was sitting opposite me, its soft, sloth-y arms spread out on the table like a business tycoon.

“Matilda, first name,” she said.
”The, second name.”
She took a breath.
”Musical, last name.”

She turned back to her tempe and rice and I laughed and laughed and laughed.

~

It has been a month since I left my work and I don’t want to get on the train for what comes next. Let me stand here, in the dead of winter, watching the train
with its technicolour windows and
driverless compartments
and multi-
channel optimised
algorithmic
hyper sensory
fantasmagorical
zoom zoom
flyyyyyyyyying past.

Forget about me, Claude. Forget about me, Siri. You too, Google Home!

Sometimes I am lured in by the hustle and ego of it. And why wouldn’t I!? So many promises. So many honey-dipped impossibilities. You make one thing efficient and you optimise another thing and you circle back to the thing you once made efficient and you find you can do it all again. Rinse and repeat. Over and over. A pat on the back for you. A bonus for good measure.

It’s so easy to forget the possibilities that remain here, as the train flies past. It is the dead of winter but it’s getting warmer. Spring will be here soon and if I stop for just a while longer, I might be able to see the flowers sprouting around the platform. I sense that they will be bolder brighter softer more tender than anything I’ve seen before.

I think what comes after will be worth the wait.