It feels weird to be back. I've missed this.
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The weight of the past is crushing sometimes. This website, my website, is seeped in memories, shadows of the life I live/was living hidden in each entry. I could tell you where I am/was when every single century on this site is being/was written. I forgot I know/will know that. For every word written and displayed, 1000 more stayed/will stay with me. I feel/felt/will feel the same distant eyes on me now. I am/will be looking back at this moment too. I hope I will/know I remember what was left unsaid.
There’s nothing mysterious about clothing, if you take the time to look closely. Go ahead, turn your pants inside out, run your fingers along the seams, and peer inside at the stitches along edges of fabric sheets. What you see is all that is there! Where else in this convoluted world do you get that kind of honesty? Sandwiches? You could take a shirt apart and put it back together without revealing any hidden structures or invisible glue or secret wiring. There’s no trick, just thread spun, woven, and stitched, and thousands of years fine-tuning one of our oldest arts.
Penny takes poorly to daylight savings, just as she has every year. The end of autumn, unlike her evening dry food, has arrived right on schedule, and she now spends her night snoozing in the window of my bedroom, above the radiator. My thermal leggings are once again daily wear, and the reassuring snugness reminds me of the last November. Outside, the leaves are almost fallen, and the few remaining trees shine in their radiant reds and golds in the 4:30pm setting sun. Change doesn’t have to be new. Sometimes the wheel just turns because that’s what it does.
A century is a craft, just as much construction as expression. A cheeky contraction here, a sentence reordering here. Which idea do I present cold, and which follows? Are there too many consecutive fricatives in one phrase? In such a small text, repeat words must be minimized, which can be tricky depending on the theme (this time that word is “sentence”. See how I avoid it?). Here at the last line I need just a few more words- what can be cut? What have I said that adds little, that can be sacrificed so my conclusion needn’t be [Limit Reached]
How much of me is in Penny, in her persistence and familiar presence? I am what I do, how I act, what I think, and my verbs would be different without her. Who am I without my personal spaces, my roommates, our kitchen, where we offload our worries, share our daily burdens, and lighten each others moods? How much am I shaped by my city, the sense of wonder given by beautiful architecture and seamless geography, and the ebb and flow of polarizing seasons? If these things are me, what if change leaves a hole that could never be re-filled?
YUL (Montréal): Very filling, a wholesome sensation, but otherwise lacking any taste in terms of sweetness, bitterness. Feels healthy.
YYZ (Toronto): Not unpleasant, almost ozonic, the same way old bottled water tastes. Unappetizing but tolerable.
YVZ (Vancouver): Slightly sweet, well-rounded, a sensation that fills the whole mouth and coats the back of the mouth in a way that feels refreshing.
AKL (Auckland): A sharp sensation, but no real taste. I feel it in the tongue much more strongly than anywhere else.
MEL (Melbourne): Unpleasant. Kind of dusty? Tastes like a glass of water I left out overnight on my bedside.
November 8th was lost in a tragic aeronautics accident
It’s a shrill tweet from the treetops, a craw across the park, breaking up the monotony of the city soundscape. It’s frantic movement, dashing between trees, swooping under the bridge, bringing the scene to life, drawing your eyes into the sky, across the road, around corners you hadn’t noticed. It’s bursts of colour, bright reds and teals and purple accents that stand out amongst the greens and greys. This neighbourhood was made to have birds in it- colourful, vocal, energetic wildlife, making the most of the city’s every dimension. Having seen it, I’ll feel their absence in every place without.
Am I in charge here? Most of what I think passes through my mind unnoticed, and most of what I do happens without me noticing. The executive gets a few buttons to press, but it’s all delegation. When I want a sip of tea, I just page my secretary and a cascade of subconscious engineers calculates the motions needed to extend the arm, grab the cup, tip to the mouth, and swallow. If I’m lucky there’ll be a report from the taste buds on the desk that afternoon, but the chief officer’s moved on, too busy to notice the warmth.
Am I grasping at things that aren’t there? Is this asking for too much? Am I chasing shadows, or just keeping my eyes open? I see a bright light out there. Distant. Warm. And I hate to bring it up again. I hate to insert myself. I just don’t know if I could I live with the regret. And you- I’m scared to look you in the eyes. Do you see this too? Have I earned enough trust? I wish I knew what page I was on, let alone yours. I hope, I hope, I wish, I wish, I want.
Would a house still feel like a home with walls this thin? My parents’ house and my own past apartments all provided their own climate, insulating against all forms of harsh weather. I associate the feeling of home with the rush of warmth in the winter and the relief of cool, breezy rooms after a suffocating summer’s day. This building caves to 15 degree weather, letting well-earned body heat disappear through single-pane windows. Would calling this place home feel hollow without that comforting feeling of displacement, or would it make me feel more at home in the world beyond it?
The process of a century cannot be removed from the context of my computer/my screen
It’s like clay in my hand
Mould it, reshape it, cut it out a bit, pull some aside, the blast it into form, glaze, polish
Malleable It’s like distillation
Unfurled Each line is pulled apart like a spinal cord, then compressed into
Cannot remove a century from the HTML I transcribe it in
Paper is too solid, too linear, sops up the fluid nature of thought
Liquify my thought, turn it to soup, then strain a few lines back out again. Scramble. Try again
[to be transcribed]
Inhale.
The fire is dying down. A flicker, a gasp, and a single flame reignites. Briefly. The logs only have so much life to give. The coals fade.
Exhale.
I came out here to see the stars, to experience the night sky that the city light hides. And I saw them, cold, distant, just as beautiful as I expected, and no more.
Inhale.
The fire we brought to life with sticks and gum leaves and a gifted lighter wanes, glowing like a constellation of shattered glass. I warm my hands over the pit.
Exhale.
The coals flare under my breath.
Living eyes pierce through dusty air, focusing on the green sprung up on the mountainside, ignoring the expanse of petrified sediment beneath. Through lifeless trunks and rotting branches on the floor, a few cells draw breath. But the world is crawling with death, powered by it, shards of bone and dried tears stumbling to life for a moment before being plunged into 100 Million years of imprisonment in the rock, away from any light, any warmth. These mountains, just like all the others, are carved from bone. Organisms lived, died, and fell. Now it’s just corpses on corpses on corpses.
Being out in nature, as someone unfamiliar and untrained, feels like myself and my surroundings are made of paper. I’m a city girl, used to a world moulded to my needs first, where no care is needed. I shouldn’t go to that ridge, it’s not safe for me. I can’t camp here, it would be harmful to an ecosystem unused to me (and me to it). How I have learned (and failed to learn) to interact with my surroundings has locked me out of most of the world. I hope one day I learn how to coexist with the rest.
Penny grounds me in a way I only notice with her absence. It’s a sense, like testing the temperature of the air, or a feeling of which way is north, but temporal, like knowing you’re within walking distance of home. There’s a security she brings me that underpins every day of my life. A compass in my heart points towards her, and a timer in my head tells me much longer we’ll be apart, until she greets me at the door. But here, 36 hours and 10 time zones away, I’m flying blind. I don’t know which way is home.
What’s worth hanging on to? What can’t I bear to lose? How much effort is a memory worth- how much of the present do you spend to bring it with you into the future? Right now, in the midst of something I desperately want to remember, I realize I haven’t done the work to make sure I can carry this with me. How much context have I lost by not tracking my transit trips this last year? How many photos do I wish I had taken? Already I feel like a sieve, countless tiny beautiful details slipping through the cracks.
If it’s not in my ears, it’s stuck on my laptop, pinned to my satchel, or printed on my friend’s shirt, or it’s in the quickened steps I take against the cold, or in the deep breath I carry across every threshold, or in the first step, and the second, outside into the muffled streets after the first snow (just a few days away now, I can almost taste it) Once I worried I would outgrow it, but Spin expands to fill every moment again, again. 2 years is far too few. I can barely imagine my life before it.
Well, write it down then. I’m on the bike bridge over the Birrarung, halfway through see you soon, and there’s a single cicada chirping in the trees across the river, and a single image of an warm streetlight shining up from the water, and a light ache in my left calf, and the trees are so still, and the air is so crisp and soothing, and there’s only a few stars in the gash of open sky, and somehow it feels like this is my home I’m leaving, and I don’t know why and I don’t know what that means.