I get up and leave the bathroom, grab chocolate and a book and curl up in my bed and think, FUCK. Am I here again? Am I failing? Why can’t I seem to get it sorted? Why do I keep falling into places I shouldn’t be?
In the quiet, he comes into the bedroom, holding a tea. It smells like soft fruit flowers. He leans over, brushes his fingertips against my forehead, like he is a nurse checking for fever. With the blankets pulled tight below my chin, swallowing my body, I am just a head stretched on a bed – thinking too much. I say the words I have needed to say for a while, ‘It’s over.’ He looks away for a while, then back at me, nods slightly. He finishes his tea, turns on the news. A bomb in Iraq has killed sixty. He carefully folds his clothes into his suitcase and takes it out to the car.
I don’t sleep that night. I walk to the edge of the woods in a coat that does little to warm me. The trees spread out gnarled roots, and in most places, the last autumn leaves have given up and fallen. As I walk, my world becomes a leafy canvas, dark and damp and cold.
I thought I would feel happy, casting myself off like a ship into the night bound for any port, to go where the tide wishes to carry me, but I don’t.
I feel lost and loose and without an anchor.
I MOVE to a small white house near the woods on the far edge of the city.
Because I have a house, with a fully fenced yard, it quickly follows that I need a gardener or a crash course in mowing my lawn (and a mower), and because my nine-to-five is really a 7 am to 8 pm I get a cheap fortnightly cleaner too. All these things neatly file themselves under the title, Responsibilities. And I, now with many of them, feel quite entrenched in this little spot I have chosen as mine.
Spring rinses the city with honey sap. I take a running leap back into life: I begin French lessons. Cello lessons. I learn how to make milk chocolate on long marble benches. I stand around a local hall in the evenings, trying to master the sway of salsa and samba.
Our suburb is awash with wattle. It tickles my nose and brings the burring of bees. I buy seasonal lemons from the farmers market, the shape of eyes, and they sit in my kitchen and watch me intently as I make sugary lemon crepes and pretend I’m in France.
I plant chamomile and think about the best time to pick the baby buds, steeping them for tea. Lemon balm grows rapidly like a weed, but I can’t get the coriander to hold. The bugs enjoy the basil as much as I do. Luckily there is enough for both of us; it grows to my hip within a month. The soil must be fertile here.
An elderly gentleman down the street tells me my house has been with the same family owners for almost a century, that in the 1940s they used the backyard to grow their vegetables and fruits – they never needed to attend the local shops, except for cuts of sirloin and brisket. The original owners raised four children there, and only moved out in the eighties when the husband died peacefully in his sleep.
All this land around me, the woods, the fertile soil, the sound of kookaburras in the morning, the peaceful wash of breeze through leaves in the evening. But still, at night, I can’t sleep. I rely on naps; in the train, dozing in the night, but most of the time I spend awake. After a month, my life is too much to keep up; I quit French. I stop making chocolate. I let the samba steps slide from my mind. I zip up my cello and place her in the garage, promising to return. I don’t.
I continue to go to work. Write emails. Approve plans. Come home.
I must wait until I have done a full 8.5-hour day before I can swipe my card and leave the building. They clock us in and out. Our breaks too. There is an entire team, somewhere in another building, watching to see we complete our hours each week. It has a 1984 Orwellian ring to it. Some days, with little work to do, I sit there, knowing I can’t leave. Having looked up the internet on anything I’d ever wanted to know: the Latin word for hedgehog, the best coffee in my suburb, the world’s weirdest burger, the most popular boys name, the percentage of people who hate their job (66 per cent), I drink too much coffee, then overload on water in a bid to balance it, then spend the afternoon asking if I can please leave a long three-hour meeting to use the bathroom – again.
There is no prison like the one you willingly walk into every day.
It sours my sleep, presses into every thought, makes me feel I am locked in a chest, thrown off a cliff into the ocean. Sinking – but still with an air pocket.
I try to rekindle my life. New books. A drive to the beach. Watching French films at a local festival. I buy an orange tree, mature and budding with fruit, and stand it at my door. Now every time the wind blows, I smell blushing blood blossoms and the cleanliness of citrus.
But no matter what I do, each day feels fixed, the same as before.
I buy things I don’t need. An Italian suit. Tiffany earrings. A new sofa.
THE TRUTH reveals herself. I don’t want those things on the mantelpiece after all. A life lined up. I want to walk for days along the glaciers of Norway without seeing anyone, or swim off Cape Tribulation as far as I can. I want the rush of Icelandic wind against my cheeks, the smell of pine trees, to walk barefoot among the wild woods where wolves sleep.
I begin to notice how everything out there, in the wild, seems to move. Oceans. Sharks. Wolves. Elephants. Rivers. Nothing stays in the same place. I want to be like them too, to keep moving.
People look at me as if I am absurd. You have to have a place, some where you can stay, settle down. Don’t you? It isn’t a question.
I am, to the people that stay easily in one place, lacking something they hold in bountiful amounts – resilience, fortitude, maturity. They have been taught that life was about staying put, working hard, sticking it out, being strong.
Friends look at me strangely. You want to just leave? Again? They laugh. Where will you live? How will you earn money?
I can’t answer, so think it best to make a plan. If not to follow it, then at least to have something to tell others about. Each weekend – in-between vacuuming the living room and tugging old clumps of hair from my shower drain – I try to conjure one.
I sit with a blank sheet of paper in front of me. At the top I write, Plan, but underneath I can’t scrawl anything. I think perhaps it would work better if I list things, point by point, of what I should do.
So I write the number one and then a full stop. And below it, two, and another full stop. But even this precursor can’t elicit any words to join their numeric counterparts. Soon the page just becomes a series of numbers, like I am practising counting, and by the end I have reached one hundred – Norway and Iceland feel very far away.
I should just leave, I think. Pack my bags. Go.
I open up my suitcase. I throw in a book. A pair of old jeans. Where exactly am I going? I sit down on the edge of my bed. Beyond the window, clouds gather, the smell of rain coming. A spider in the corner of my house spins a lacy web.
Mostly, this is as far as I get.
A KIND of madness settles within me. It comes long after the exhaustion and a brief but unrelenting shroud that some might call depression. The madness has a quirk to it. I’m not yelling at strangers or forgetting to wear clothes. I’m not cuffed and sectioned by the police, or squatting in the corridor of a hospital, peeing through my jeans and underwear. (I had once seen a woman in mid-psychosis do exactly this.)
No, my madness is noticeable only to me, and that is a dangerous thing.
I struggle to remember words. On occasion I forget my own name. I begin to forget why I am getting up in the morning – What is the point of it all? – so I sleep later. I lose my brush and never buy another one, so my hair begins to curl and tangle. One night I wake with pins and needles in my left side that won’t subside. Quickly afterwards, I lose the feeling in my left leg too. When I start seeing sparks of light like a camera flash in my eyes minutes later, I call the local health line.
‘Lay down. Right now.’
‘Why?’ I ask, feeling my voice rising to a weird high-pitched screech. ‘What’s wrong with me?’
‘We think you’r
e having a stroke. Lay down.’
I do as they ask: I open the front door, hang up the phone, lie down in the hallway and wait. From across the other side of the train line I hear faint ambulance sirens wailing their way towards me.
At the hospital nurses bustle around me, connecting me to cords and wires. Doctors ask me a series of questions.
‘Have you been away recently? Overseas?’
My mind is blank. I don’t know.
‘Have you been in any rivers?’
I don’t know.
‘Have you had a fever?’
I don’t know.
There are a series of tests. Walk straight. Hold one knee up. Hold the other knee up. Hold a pen. Write. My right side is complicit, performing all tasks admirably well. My left side is numb and slow. I keep opening and closing my left fingers, and even though my eyes say I should feel something, I feel nothing. It is a hand that belongs to someone else.
There is a CT scan. An MRI. Multiple blood tests. The doctor makes several hushed phone calls, mentioning words like neurological disorder, quick onset, unstable and stress. And all the time I lie in the plastic bed and watch my left hand opening and closing without feeling.
WHILST I am lying in the hospital bed, the walls I have known in this world begin to crumble. I receive a series of calls from friends with words that swirl – cancer, surgery, chemotherapy, car accident. People I know are dying.
Instead of Christmas and New Year’s Eve invitations, I receive dates to attend funerals.
I stand in black at the back of large halls and try not to sob. I grab hands with others – white knuckled – and we hug. I press myself into them, just as they do to me, trying to find something to anchor ourselves to. But all of us are haunting these halls like ghosts – the living and the dead.
When people ask how I am, I want to say, I’m not doing very well. I feel eerie and strange, like the sky before a storm, but I know no more than that, and hear the words escape my mouth – I’m fine.
I don’t tell anyone I still can’t feel my left hand. I can’t hold a pen. My phone. A bag. That I was released from the hospital with appointments for neurologists and more CT scans, and the word idiopathic scrawled across every page. Without known cause.
People I don’t know are dying too. It is splashed daily across the news. Murdered for being gay. For being the wrong religion. For being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I find it hard to sleep at night and lie awake blinking at the ceiling, replaying images of global terror attacks, plane crashes and beheadings.
We are at the hands of fate. A few nodules in your arm that grow differently and find places to cluster – liver, brain, bone. Everywhere the world reminds us; we are not in control. I try not to, but at night, I think about my friends, their cold bodies pressed deep into the earth. Decaying. And the others shoved into a cement box at the crematorium. Burning.
I want to pry open the life I had – that girl I was in Europe: full of life’s sap, the gloriousness of happiness – just as you crack open a chestnut after it is roasted by the fire. Warm and wondrous, the cracking takes a slight twist of hand – for something that wants to open will spring ajar with the slightest of touch.
But nothing opens. The chestnuts are small and hard. Impenetrable.
I try to think of trees – old pines, London planes (my favourite). The trees that held me as a child. I close my eyes – remember, remember. But instead of being under their branches – the leaves moving about in the wind as if shaking out a secret – it is as if I am watching them from inside, a thick pane of glass dividing us, the window firmly locked. It won’t budge, and they’re just a picture, a painting – no sound, no sound. I can’t remember how they smelled in summer, or spring when they budded. I can’t remember how the trunk of them felt against my back. I can’t remember anything.
I can’t feel anything anymore.
THE WORLD itself goes mad too. It storms and gusts. Gushes of wind and rain pound my window. Outside the palms bend sideways; their fronds flail in the wind. Storm water drains churn and froth, regurgitating mouthfuls of bark and old leaves and sodden plastic bags.
Flowerpots overturn, garden chairs blow into each other, a large Japanese maple lies sideways in someone’s garden, roots dangling in the air like legs trying to find ground. I watch as the trees are ripped of leaves, their brittle branches like skeleton fingers pointing upwards into the sky, directing the wind.
People shut themselves inside. Lock doors. Fasten windows. They stay off the roads. They message and mumble, ‘I don’t remember it ever storming like this in March.’
But to me it is the only thing that makes sense. I open every window in my place. The winds bring in the rain and make everything smell refreshingly of dirt and earth and leaf muck.
But it isn’t enough. I need to be out there. I need to stand in it.
The white tiled patio is ankle deep in water. My right foot first. Dipping tentatively, like I am getting into an incredibly hot bath. Then my left. Cold lapping at me.
I wade out. Deeper. Until the eaves of the roof no longer protect me and I am in the storm’s full force. Thunder rolls and breaks above my head. Winds scurry and whip my hair. The rain plasters my clothes, sodden in seconds. I can’t hear. I can’t see. I stand there for minutes. Maybe longer. Sopping and saturated. Teeth chattering.
But when I step back inside, dripping, something has washed away.
The storms are followed by incredibly still days – blue skies not broken by a wisp of cloud, no breeze. Temperatures drop, and the birds roost somewhere unheard. The muck and debris begins to dry on the road, but because of the road slicks, people stay inside, warming themselves around heaters, hibernating. It is a strange lull, as though we have been put on hold. Time appears to stop.
I need something else. To go somewhere else. To not be here. But where?
Without thinking, I begin to collect maps. Latvia. Finland. Uruguay. India. China. Antarctica. Alaska.
I unfold travel magazines and look at pictures of floating flower markets on barges and misty river mornings. Kayaking with orcas. Giant squid searches in New Zealand. Deep-sea fishing off America. Trekking the Camino. Floating across the Dead Sea.
I ascend into local libraries, finding the complete volumes of everyone that had ever travelled, and sought re-creation. Frances Mayes who gave up her house in America and moved, on a whim, to an old Tuscan villa, beginning a beautiful love affair with Italy; all of her pages smell like flour and semolina and summer leaves of basil. Thoreau who decided he had had enough of civil life and its strange suburban ideals (and this was in 1800s), walked into the woods, where he lived in a small, leaky hut for two years, two months and two days. He scrutinised things no other person had time to pay attention to: the bobbing action of a bluebird, pinecones, shades of a night sky, oak trees, the smell of winter coming. He suggested that everyone should walk in the wild for at least four hours a day – or risk a certain madness.
On my walks around the street at night, lit by lamps instead of moon, swallowed by the roar of car engines half-conversations trail out of people’s kitchen windows:
‘Did you get the butter?’
‘He wants to audit the lot.’
‘Harry! Put down your sister’s head!’
I am walking, but it is hardly Thoreau’s wild. He would have turned up at my doorstep, cussed a little, grabbed my hand and led me deep into his woods – so thick and dense I’d barely be able to see my hand in front of my face.
I paper my fridge and freezer in the red dunes of Namibia and the mountains of Uganda, where there are miles and miles of nature and jungle and dust. Where man has not fenced. Or governed. Or plotted. I long to stand in a place with no walls, no fences. A place that is wild.
Each night, I stare at those postcards papered across my freezer door. Botswana. Zambia. Namibia. Thoreau sits atop my kitchen counter, with a straw hat, strokes his beard with large earth hands, smells of leaf litter and sweat, and whispers,
Grow wild according to thy nature.
I wander in and out of my house, stand on my balcony, see the street light opposite shine into my bedroom window. Thoreau is busy naming plants in my kitchen.
When I come back inside I already know: I need a way to slip underneath the world as I know it, and reset my life from the inside out.
WINTER IS bitterly cold when I purchase a bottle-green backpack, a few pairs of lightweight cargo pants that zip off at the knee and a new pair of hiking boots. My mother urges me to take an old fisherman’s hat, for the sun. I squash it under layers of rolled-up singlet tops and windproof, rain-resistant Gore-Tex jackets.
I book my flight on the first day of August. It happens to coincide with Imbolc on the pagan calendar, which marks the midway point between winter solstice and spring equinox. A day that celebrates the wild goddess, the earth. A day that offers the power of renewal, rebirth, regeneration.
Although not superstitious, I enjoy the rhythm of cycles and traditions, the soothing effect of ritual. So after the sun sets and the briny cold of winter’s night takes up space, sitting in the corner of my house with bone-chilling breath, the outside wind making the foundations and frame squeak like old skeletons raising, I go around the house, lighting candles and turning on lamps, the gas heaters too, filling the house with the promise of light.
I am now the planner of plans, the mapper of maps, the dreamer, the plotter, the doer. How different it feels to be this person again. That spring reappears in my step, and I hum and sing while making dinner.
I take the time to create a hearty sauce from scratch. Tomatoes from the plant on the patio, small and tough-skinned but ready to burst with ripe garlic crushed under the knife. Flakes of salt, onions diced to fine translucent scales, handfuls of basil, their leafy stems lifting the scent of Tuscany to my nose.
Ways to Come Home Page 3
