AUGUST
I can never finish my thoughts now. Isolation again, the months between connect with dread and terror I will never understand. We’ll stay like this until it’s spring, at best—high figures, state lines. Like I could give a damn about what I started writing in April. Time to myself makes me feel cold and cool, baseless, good, cut up, bored, bored, bored.
I meant to write more about the smokers in the park keeping the smoking a secret, keeping that time for themselves. Make the most of a bad run, illicit tenderness, but now even that seems like a stretch. I want to know if the secret smokers were to get caught out, would they stop, a habit to break, would they still come, would they shift out of the gardens feeling hot with guilt or hot with having got away with it all. I saw the woman in the trench coat once more, same spot, same pose, and now she’s gone. I don’t know what else to say about the smokers, I have been trying to find the neat angle—but really, all it is, is a small way to make trouble.
What have I done with this time? I put a rock in the bottom of a vase so it didn’t tip over from the weight of the flower. Walked around listening to ‘Flirted with you all my life’ for hours (that oh in the middle). Had wavering thoughts of moving back home, cutting my hair, thought of work I could do to become more clear or graceful but I changed my mind. I have done my best to keep it cool. Of course I am sad, always feel it a little, that’s all right, I mean it.
Since autumn I have found 23 four-leaf clovers. After years of looking with no luck, now it is easy. I give them away. I press them all in the same book. The problem with me is I think most things are special, which probably means nothing is. I’m trying to tell you my soft spots.
I stare at the seam of the ceiling in my room, get a text at 2am about two clovers I found. There is a peach pit in a tissue next to my bed.
I swear I saw a fire in the gardens a few weeks ago, right there on the grass, but I wasn’t close enough to tell.
I’m still walking, loops and loops, a pulled muscle in my upper thigh from pushing it too far in the botanic gardens, the camellia segment in romance colours, you know them. Two separate people look at me too long and I can’t tell if it’s in shock or because they think they know me. I check my face in my phone camera, there are no clues and there is no blood.
Smoking in a clearing, someone lights my cigarette—can’t get any closer. I can do it myself but I don’t want to.
What’s the best hour to be outside now? Twilight (it’s no trouble). The gardens changing when nothing else feels like it will, field violets, caught out in a heavy rain but feeling lucky, tension and collapse (flowers and other things). I take my phone out in a plastic sleeve to protect it from the weather. I see three women smoking from an upstairs apartment, half a body leaned out an arch window. They’re not worried. I’m sending weather emojis to my friends as a code—cloud, dove, fog emoji, sun peering from behind cloud. The cigarette emoji complete with double smoke lines. At a dinner between the lockdowns I offer someone a cigarette to get them out of a bad conversation; now that feels like the most important kind of gesture. I have not seen the smoking men again, either, but some mornings there’s a pile of half cigarettes on their windowsill. Intimacies are ceremonies, even if you just see the ash.
Intimacies are ceremonies, even if you just see the ash.
Some days at work I open a picture of a sunset, wide, to make better light on my face for a video call. There’s a set of arch cut-outs on a street near mine and I keep missing the good light through them when I go to take a photograph.
What else have I done? A day spent entirely inside, laying in a dim room fully dressed on top of the bed no shoes, a swollen eyelid for no real reason, my own birthday (picked nasturtiums for the table), sweating more in my sleep than ever, stress leave, deadline driven, all-nighters, an unfinished essay about love flowers and turmoil flowers, a meal plan, a fist full of hellebores, my father in hospital for nothing to do with any virus and then better again, the grotesque feeling of relief that he is well now when others won’t be.
I smoke more and then less and then more and then I don’t go out to buy more filters because I’ve already been to the store this week. I am being careful in some ways. I worry about dying as much as I did before. I wear a mask and it makes smoke from other people’s cigarettes smell strange, cleaner chemicals. There are still small things, little ways to cut through—being given a flower, picking flowers for myself. I almost got caught trying to take a camellia from out front a house—that was a good new thrill.
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I saw a poster online in someone’s bedroom that said it is ok for me to have everything I want. What I want is to roll cigarettes for my friends. What I want is to be able to go, to see a landscape that never falters, I want smoke signals, nosebleeds, meadows, low light, to be in the back of the car again. The baby has been born, I watch him fall asleep on FaceTime. I don’t know when we’ll meet. The season cools and evens me out.
Supported by the City of Melbourne COVID-19 Arts Grants
