The World Was Whole

by Fiona Wright

  The French philosopher – and famous anorexic – Simone Weil wrote that ‘to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul’. Weil was writing in 1943, towards the end of the Second World War, and the massive upheavals and uprootings that it caused, at a time when her own country was occupied and unfamiliar. Her version of rootedness is a sense of connection, both to the past and to the future, and to other people; it is durational, and it is also a precondition of leading a fulfilling and moral life, the condition to which we should aspire. I keep thinking of those characteristics I had been imagining for myself and my travel: bravery, transformation, independence, adventurousness – that these are things we can really only want for ourselves if we’ve never been forced to actually draw upon them, if our ordinary lives have never been ruptured by events or circumstances that truly require them, like war, like violence, perhaps even like an illness that changes the way you have to be in your body, in the world, in time.

  Rita Felski argues that our modern, global world has developed a ‘vocabulary of anti-home’, which privileges restlessness over rootedness, the transcendent over the immanent, and it means that we are conditioned to see standing still only as stasis, a kind of living death. But standing still, or moving in repeated tiny orbits – this is how we connect with, and cope with, the much more ordinary existence that really is the stuff of so much of our lives; and our habits are how we attend to it, pattern over it and shape it – unspectacularly, perhaps, but beautifully, gently, and in a continual and immanent present.

  WHEN HEARTS ARE THIN

  I arrive back in Sydney mid-winter. Winter: I dislike it. My bones grow cold, my muscles sluggish. My mother used to call me a cold frog, but I think I am part lizard, longing always to stretch out on a rock in the sun.

  My mother and I go to the Art Gallery on a Tuesday morning; I walk to meet her through the streets of the city with earphones in, my sleeves pulled over my icy hands. The exhibition is three modernists: Margaret Preston and Grace Cossington Smith, who my mother has always admired, and Georgia O’Keeffe, whose work neither of us has ever seen outside of textbooks. One of the didactics (I love that they’re called didactics) for a Cossington Smith – an interior that is luminous and golden, a mirror bouncing yellow light back towards an open window – calls the work ‘domestic sublime’, the phrase bounces in my brain all day. I plan to take photos of all of the O’Keeffe works that look remotely vaginal to send to my queer friends, but they’re mostly landscapes, rocky and lonely and beautiful and deeply, deeply sad.

  I have chilblains on two fingers of my right hand, the smallest toe of my left foot, and they make me feel Dickensian.

  I go to the café on the corner of my street to write one morning, and they have Gymea lilies, huge and raucous, leaning up against the espresso machine from a glass vase on the floor – these flowers that grow in the bushland behind the house where I grew up, that are taller than a person, implausible-looking and wild. The barista has hot pink hair, the coffee cups are a deep, rich red, and there’s a translucent sauce bottle full of honey beside them, almost glowing in the morning light. It looks, for a moment, like a Cossington Smith.

  Two days later, and there’s another vase beside the lilies, this one filled with three stalky purple blossoms, perfectly spherical, like oversized chives, like pompoms. I’ve never seen these before, and ask the barista what they’re called. She doesn’t know, of course.

  Luke Davies writes, ‘lushness of winter / when hearts are thin’.

  I’m too sad to go to see a new movie by one of Alex’s favourite directors, even though he’s bought me a ticket. I’m too sad to go to a gig at Bondi, even though I’ve bought a ticket. I’m too sad to go to Alex’s house, even though his housemate is looking after her sister’s puppy, to drinks with friends, even though one is going overseas tomorrow. I can’t make it to a writers’ festival in Melbourne, even though they’d paid already for my flights and accommodation, or poetry night at my local bookshop, or Alex’s house, or Sarah’s baby’s birthday. I’m too sick and sad to teach my tutorials on Monday morning, or my workshop on Monday afternoon, to go to trivia at my new local, or Grace’s birthday, or Alex’s house again.

  The café is playing Lorde’s new album on repeat. I hear her sing, still painfully adolescent, I’m a little much for everyone, I’m a liability. My heart catches.

  Later, I look up the song on YouTube, there’s no clip, not yet, just a static image and the recording of the song, a slew of commentary underneath. Young women saying, this is me, this is my life, I can’t even; a man who writes, this song is about those girls who cry all the time no matter what you do for them.

  Vivian Smith writes, ‘Winter’s ways are not our ways.’

  I take my dog to the park on a day of high sun, high wind – all day dead wood from the scraggly eucalypts next door has been blowing into our back garden and Virginia has been bringing these bits of branches, some three times as long as she is, inside to chew to pieces on the couch. She tries to chase the leaves that the wind scuttles past her on the street; and when I let her off the lead she makes a beeline for a group of big dogs – a dalmatian, a wolfhound, a boxer – and their owners all laugh as she chases them, rolling and bouncing in the grass. One of the owners turns to me and says, I think your little dog has Napoleon syndrome and I say, yeah, but so do I.

  Drinking with Isha, she tells me stories about a party from last weekend, where she spent the whole night sitting by the pub’s fireplace and flirting with a programmer from Brisbane. Isha says, you know how there’s that point where something is definitely going to happen but you just don’t know how? She says, it’s so exciting, it’s the most exciting part. But this isn’t how it happens for me; I ask, but don’t you ever get afraid? Isn’t that part frightening? And she looks at me blankly. I feel exposed.

  On Sunday morning I drive my housemate to a work event in Paddington, because she needs to take in more supplies than she can carry; she offers to buy me a coffee because it’s early when we leave. When we order, the barista shakes his head and says flatly, we’ve run out of skim milk, and there’s a pause, we both expect him to continue, and he doesn’t. I say, I can run up to the supermarket – it’s barely a block away – and he answers, we ordered a heap of it on Thursday and it didn’t arrive. Another pause, and then, I could add some water to the full cream for you.

  A few days later I stop in again, to read in the window for a while on my way to yoga. I’m carrying my gym bag, and not my handbag, and realise that I don’t have in it the artificial sweetener I usually keep there because more and more cafés don’t have it on their tables. I ask the barista, the same barista, if they have any at the counter and he says no, but the sugar on the tables is agave-based and better for you anyway. He adds, what’s wrong with you? And when I look confused he clarifies, you’re always careful what you eat, what’s wrong with you? And because I am polite here’s what I don’t say: what the fuck, my friend, is wrong with you? My housemate is watching a series on Netflix about a therapist and there are scenes where she’s at her supervision, talking about her patients with four other therapists, venting frustrations, asking advice. I knew about supervisions, that all therapists have to do this, for their own sake, as well as that of their patients, but I start imagining my psychologist sitting in a room like this one, all white light and angular armchairs, and talking about me, I keep thinking of her saying, intractable, exasperating, unable. I burn with this, for days.

  I spend seven hours on a Saturday baking for a friend’s baby shower the next day – caramel slice, a thick and seedy bread, a vegetarian frittata. It’s methodical, rhythmic, even peaceful, I play music as I work and sing along, the cats curling around my ankles.

  That night I meet a new friend, Sonia, for a drink in Surry Hills, before we’re due to join her friends for a quick dinner before a show. She asks me how I feel about the dinner and I say, I’ll manage, which is usually enough, but she says, yes, but
is it what you want to do, and I realise that she’d stay here and just drink more instead of having a meal to keep me comfortable and I’m astounded by her kindness. As we walk to the restaurant – one of the no-fuss Lebanese places on Cleveland Street with names like Abdul’s, Fatima’s, The Prophet – she asks me what my favourite kind of restaurant is and I say, Thai’s my go-to, it’s the easiest, and she replies, that isn’t what I asked you either.

  Sonia’s friends are talking about sick leave (they aren’t casuals) and how the managers keep an eye out for patterns when you take it (too many Fridays, too many days near public holidays) and how it’s best to save it up for when you really need it. But sometimes, one of them says, it’s good to take a mental health day, if you’re really tired or stressed. I agree, wholeheartedly and affirmedly, but here’s what I don’t say: I take a mental health day when I want to claw the skin off my own face.

  On Monday morning, early, two young women walk into the café carrying huge sheaves of flowers in their arms; they lay them out on the back table before carrying the Gymea lilies off to their van, one woman holding their stems, the other their shrivelling heads. I ask the younger woman, the one with swishing green eyeliner, about the purple flowers: they’re called alliums, she says, they’re from the onion family. She grins and adds, I love them, but they really stink.

  She brings a spray of bright yellow orchids to my table, three crimson paper daisies. She photographs them on her phone.

  I can’t help but think: in the hospital, they had a service like this, a team of florists who would sweep through every Wednesday and place fresh arrangements at the nurses’ stations, the little tables in odd corners of the corridors, the dining room, where I would stare at them instead of looking at my plate. How one week I thanked one of the florists, and she startled, looked at me wide-eyed, and very obviously afraid.

  I see a new GP, recommended by a friend, and I like her, I really like her – she’d heard of my condition before, she is kind, she treats me like someone with intelligence and agency and any one of these traits is so surprisingly rare, that all three seems nothing short of miraculous. The next time I see her, though, her left arm is in a complicated plastic sling and she says she won’t be able to practise for some time as a result of this injury. She’s the third GP, and the fifth practitioner, I’ve become comfortable with recently who’s suddenly left their job, and I wonder if I have a special talent for choosing doctors, the way I still tend to choose crushes: only those who are spectacularly unavailable.

  She recommends a restrictive elimination diet to help with some of the physical effects of all this sadness, and when I say that makes me nervous because I’m truly excellent at elimination diets she dismisses my concern and I’m not so sure I like her any more.

  It is bitterly cold again, with driving rain. My fingers ache, again.

  Laura drives us in to the theatre at Walsh Bay, curling through the new development at Barangaroo, a place I haven’t really been to yet, all empty but illuminated glassy shopfronts, modern and cold and glowing weirdly in the night. My mother gave me the tickets, so we only realise once the play starts that one of the actors is a friend-of-a-friend, a woman who’d once told me that she agonises over eating too; she wears her thin limbs like they’re part of her costume. Except I know she cannot take them off.

  I go to a festival in a country town, driving through fields shining with stiff grasses, the dry air itchy on my skin. I’m staying in a hotel on the main street, and my room is beautiful, full of old-fashioned and brassy fittings that catch the light and hold it. There’s a deep bath, a spa bath, and one afternoon, after a morning spent walking and working, I fill it, let the jets pummel my legs and feet and my body feels good, just good. I realise that my body so rarely feels good, just good, free from one kind of discomfort or another. I stay in the tub until my skin is worm-white and soft, then wrap myself in the hotel bathrobe; and although I intend to lie down and read, I’m asleep before I open up my book.

  I throw up in the middle of an evening event, and go back to my hotel at the first intermission, crossing through the church grounds, the grass crackly with frost. I leave without saying goodbye, both this event, the town the next day; there is thick ice on my car windows that burns away before I hit the highway. When I get home the house is quiet, the garden full of afternoon sun and I too feel sticky and slow and half-congealed.

  Some friends of mine, all women, all writers, are talking over drinks about some men we know who are struggling, really struggling because their relationships have recently broken down. I say, I know I haven’t ever been with anyone long-term enough to really understand it, and one friend answers, no, that isn’t it. If your girlfriend leaving you is the biggest trauma you’ve encountered, she says, if that’s the very worst thing that’s ever happened to you, then holy fuck, I want your life.

  Alex and I see a movie about a man whose girlfriend falls suddenly, terribly ill, is hospitalised, and it’s under these circumstances that he meets her family, gets to know her parents, far too quickly and intensely, far too awfully and intimately. It’s a comedy, but I tense up somewhere in its second act and I keep crying, especially when the parents look so powerless whenever the doctors, who they don’t trust, who they have no choice but to trust, explain what they’re trying to do. They’re doctors, they know what they’re doing, the father keeps saying. They don’t, they’re just muddling through like the rest of us, the mother always replies.

  I want to ask Alex, afterwards, how it was for him when I was in the hospital, but I don’t. I can’t. I don’t want it to seem, again, like I’ve made the movie all about me. One of those girls who cries all the time no matter what you do for them.

  Walking through the city, on the way to a book launch, a man’s voice: I’d still like to take you for a drink. I don’t see him, or the woman he’s talking to, but hear her laugh in response, a nervous laugh, a buying-time laugh, a laugh I recognise too easily and too well.

  On the way home, on a bus, another man says to the woman beside him, please let me be gentle.

  I’m at the Glebe markets, scouring through the second-hand clothing stalls for the tiny pants and dresses that women are normally selling because they have outgrown them, and I run into a friend who’s pregnant, so much so that the baby is two days overdue. She is uncomfortable, and utterly exhausted. I tell her she looks beautiful. She snorts in disbelief. I buy a skirt, and the woman selling it says, I loved that skirt, but then I had a baby.

  I keep thinking of my friend, across the afternoon, how all she can do is wait now, how I can’t help but be anxious when all I can do is wait.

  I get a text the very next morning from her partner, saying the baby is here and safe and doing well, and I can’t quite believe how so much could change so quickly and forever. In the hospital, I can’t stop looking at her tiny fingers, each perfectly formed but impossibly small and thin, her even smaller fingernails, barely a millimetre wide. She has the deep-set eyes of my friend, a full head of dark hair. She’s beautiful, and she’s squalling.

  I have a panic attack in Broadway the next day because all of the baby clothes I see there are just so fucking pink.

  A woman who buys a takeaway most mornings at the café always carries the same tote bag, a border of curlicued roses, and thick black text: I AM A GODDESS, it reads, A GLORIOUS FEMALE WARRIOR, QUEEN OF ALL I SURVEY. And then, in larger type: ENEMIES OF EQUALITY, FEAR MY WOMANLY ROAR.

  A man who buys a takeaway most mornings at the café has the longest, thickest mullet I’ve ever seen, thin-framed aviator glasses, thin legs stalking out from cut-off denim shorts, even now, in August. I cannot tell if he’s ironic or sincere. I can never tell if anything’s ironic or sincere.

  I break up with Alex, and it’s awful. We both cry, and all there is to do is walk away.

  I meet Sonia for a drink in the city after she finishes work. Two of her colleagues have unexpectedly come along, because they’d all found out that afternoon that the
ir unit – they work in student counselling, at a university – is being restructured, and they’re not sure who will still have a job in the new semester. They order spirits. One of them tells me that he really loves counselling and doesn’t want to do anything else, and Sonia asks, have any of the students ever made you cry? Oh yes, he says, but there are rules around that – you can’t start crying until after they do, and you have to stop before they’re finished.

  I rent an Airbnb in Mullumbimby with Laura and her husband, a sprawling Queenslander perched on the crest of a hill with louvred windows on every outward-facing wall; we open them all as soon as we arrive, and the whole house seems to breathe around us. I walk through the house looking at the objects of its owner – three yoga mats and a shelf of yoga textbooks, spiky crystals, two tarot sets, a row of ‘aura sprays’ in white bottles on the bathroom vanity, an outdoor shower, a tightrope, and a recipe for magic bean cake (main ingredient: kidney beans) stuck to the fridge door. I’m delighted by these, and by the woman that they conjure; then imagine a stranger wandering through my house and listing – books, books, sewing machine, ironic lamp shaped like a cockatoo, ironic soap dispenser shaped like a poodle, more cheese platters than actual plates – and thinking, what a fucking hipster. Later that first evening, I try out the outdoor shower and I love it, how vivid and breathy it makes me feel.

  We’re there for a wedding, and the day after I feel strange – tired and listless, and heavy in the chest. We go to the recovery brunch, help take down the marquee and the fairy lights, pack rented glassware into crates. I fry mushrooms and eggs in two enormous skillets while the bacon crisps in the oven and am suddenly, violently ill after we eat. A man I hardly know laughs in my face: I thought you said you weren’t hungover, he says. I stalk away and lie down in a hammock strung along the veranda and I realise that what I’m feeling is alone, and lonely.