July/August

thinking, being cold, travelling to warmer places, books

It’s rainy so I’m thinking a lot. As a teenager I thought Winter was the best season but now I hate the cold and not being able to drink wine in a garden or slip through time at a river.

I’ve been thinking about romance as encryption, dissociating at work, Co-star app notifications, dyeing my hair darker in an effort to look more like my Mother, camera roll lushness reminding me I’m faraway from where I want to be, after sex intimacy when the hall light is still on, the desire to leave the country for a long while, how pain protracts time.

Some things I wrote down whilst in Indonesia for two weeks in July.

Sunday

We get picked up from the airport and I forget what it feels like to be cold. A nice Indonesian man drives us to our villa. I look out the window at white spidery flowers with long petals for legs and women carrying miscellaneous things in droopy plastic bags. I place the cash in the man’s hand and notice a dark misplaced tooth receding into the back of his mouth as he waves us goodbye.

We’re staying in an isolated barn with an outdoor shower that only runs cold. The owner hands us a traditional iced-tea that is so sweet and thick and the endless pursuit of trying to understand English as someone’s second or third language begins. Leaving home never fails to make me feel perfectly monolingual. Distanced from the self-referential microcosm, I feel bare, unknown, an echo of myself. I’m undecided if I like her better.

The owner only talks to T so I walk outside to the green pool, the shower head dripping onto dark wet stone that makes me think of the man’s rotting tooth.

Monday

Walking the streets with wet hair, there’s never any traffic lights just frangipanis and palms or swampy rice fields post-harvest. Offerings of marigold and incense line the dusty streets and sit on every minimart counter so we’re enshrouded by smoke that smells like sandalwood (Cendana) and something else I can’t figure out. I stop wearing my own perfume.

We buy roadside fruit and eat it with sweaty beers that drip down our wrists.

Thursday

I sit on cool concrete steps and watch blue tv light move across the sheer curtains of the upstairs apartment. He smokes a cigarette, using a Coke can as an ashtray. The tv flicks and the room turns orange. After several minutes I look back at him and he says, “Finally”.

What I’ve been reading:

Picnic at Hanging Rock, Joan Lindsay. Green lace of the ferns, girls seduced by the bush, swallowed by the landscape, a desire to disappear, proof of life’s fuzzy boundaries.

The Years, Annie Ernaux. The passage of time told through objects, radio, politics, photographs from her childhood and notes from diary entries. Her voice dissolves then re-surfaces. Made me think how I perceive time through weeks and months and is this just because I bleed? I think women most likely created the calendar and therefore time.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk. The automatic normalisation of violence against animals, speciesism, feminist anger, defies categorisation. Using epithets for people’s names is so cool.

-M x