(Steller)

In September, Things That Are New

(Journal)
Published – 29.09.2018
(Writing)

I called you as I paced, full of nerves and caffeine, back and forth in front of the building that belonged to a man who would become my employer. I wasn’t ready yesterday, I told you, but today, perhaps, I am. It was a Monday - you were at work in your teaching job, shimmying out of the classroom when my call flashed up on your mobile. I should have been at home preparing for another day of my own nine-to-five, but instead I was in an unknown city, negotiating a contract for a position I was both unsure of, yet intoxicated by. The day prior - a Sunday - I was inconsolable in my hotel room; the world of possibility crumbling around me amongst hotel-room soaps and worn-out passions. I had no idea what I wanted, and there was no one around to tell me otherwise. I wallowed and threw myself around, lazily picking objects up and admiring their solitude, wondering if I could take up as a woman who simply exists. The constant go-go-go of the city and the job and the life were getting to me, too deep in my veins and I was burning myself to the ground chasing something I wasn’t sure I wanted. I slept fitfully, angrily, and then I was there, calling you on the street on Monday morning, perhaps readier than I ever had been. Maybe it was you, an anchor, a weight, that helped me leap. You heard the surety in my voice, the clarity saying yes, yes, now I am ready, now I am strong enough, now I have arrived. Write it down, you said, because you won’t believe me when I tell you how ready you were, next time you believe it wasn’t right after all. You have to remember, right now, that you can. Read it back, tell me you still believe it. I never wrote it down, I’m sorry to say, but I have never stopped thinking that I should have. What I wrote somewhere in the back of my memory is the way I stood, after you said those words, shoulders back, head high, attack-ready, (I suppose). I leapt.

I’ve been making tea on autopilot - finishing one cup, or noticing the cold remains at the bottom and immediately padding back out to the kitchen to put the kettle on again. As it burrs in anticipation of bursting, my mind wanders. There are tangelos on the table, a habit I picked up from my father (“if they’re in season, buy a few”) and staling bread rests on the counter. It’s always mine, because I always leave it there. My housemate is not so forgetful as to leave her bread about the way I do - nonchalantly, uncaring. Cars whir past without pause and a bird whistles incessantly. Any other week I would linger to hear it, but this week I just wish it would go away. I close the window in a hurry, pour my tea, head back to the desk.

Places I am not comfortable: grocery stores, waiting rooms, hospital beds, foyers, some gift shops, and occasionally, home.

If you laid out an entire life in blocks of activity, it is said that you will have spent 67 days purely experiencing heartbreak. I spend fourteen minutes considering how long this really is. Is it enough? Is it too much? How does one classify heartbreak, anyway? Does it account for all the small times your heart breaks for things you have no control over - the acts that you witness but cannot leap into, the stories that are not your own? Or does it only consider the personal miseries and longings, the wrong things said and the deceit received and given? How many of my waking hours have already been chipping away at that number? Is there a right time to stop being heartbroken?

Spring has arrived, with not so much a bang as a whimper. I welcome it with old favourites: roast vegetables, stewed apples, Melancholia on the DVD player and books; Helen Garner, Julian Barnes. It is still cold outside, though around lunch the weather breaks and the sun warms the one specific part of the living room carpet that I can sit within and bask under for at least a quarter of an hour before it retreats again. There is music from the cars underneath the window - mainly radio hits, but occasionally, Wagner’s Prelude from Tristan and Isolde. I only recognise it because of the film that’s been playing on repeat; I am notoriously bad at holding tunes in my head if I have not recently heard them. The melodies almost always seem familiar, but I can never recall from where I recognise them. The Prelude though, from the film; it sits heavily on my chest; too heavily for Spring. I’ve closed all the windows now, because the chill has returned to the bones of my apartment. I choose to listen to new music, new words; melodies that I couldn’t recognise even if I tried to. I like this; that if you focus on the new, there is no matter if you forget the old. You have no reason to remember it now.

I walked towards the train station the other day, collar up against the chill, eyes pressed tight together leaving just a glint to see where I was going, the wind whistling through the tree-lined streets around me. I noticed a man walking hurriedly in my direction, looking ahead sternly, but eating an ice cream. I gaped at him; surely it was too cold to be enjoying a treat like that on a wintery day? He saw me looking and cracked his fierce exterior; grinned. As we bumped shoulders on passing - the streets not quite wide enough to walk two abreast - he winked and said, “some afternoons require sweetness”, not breaking eye contact. I stumble a little, as I’m known to do, knocked around by disappointment and beauty and the fact that some afternoons do, in fact, require sweetness.

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