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Personal Essay, 2023
‘I was thinking about that pigeon. You know the one who would sit on top of the garage?’
I remember small things from that time. I remember the string lights in George Square, eating spinach and eggs for dinner every day because I hated going into the kitchen. Something quick, get in, get out. My clinic was near a superstore, and I remember going to the same aisle after every session and smelling all the laundry detergent. I would never buy anything, besides the time I bought a sponge. We went to Colonsay, and I cried lot. ‘Are you going to be like this at Christmas?’
The day came and went. It’s no fun being the elephant in the room; the reason for hushed tones and drawn-out glances. Knowing how many people know by the number of mindfulness books I get as presents (it was three). A separate bowl for potatoes without butter. I’d stand to the edge in photos in case someone wanted to cut me out with scissors or fold me to the other side of the frame. A neat reimagining of Christmas. I bought a new outfit that year, so I’d have something to be excited about; a dark green jumper and this black and white skirt. But I hated the way it felt; the wool was the kind that clings to your sweat and starts to smell rotten, and my skirt was too short. Sitting down felt like a good waste of a chair.
I thought back to Colonsay and my moment on the pier; the scratchy white lumps of rock under my feet that felt like upturned Lego and the sound of clanging metal in the black water. There was a single spot of orange light that drifted backwards and forwards over the waves as a beam from the lighthouse circled the harbour like a watch dog. I felt observed in my silence, it emphasised each moment longer that I stood there.
Some of us watch films to familiarise ourselves with experiences we haven’t had. For as long as I can remember, this has been my reasoning. I knew my life was somewhat abnormal, and to make sure I wasn’t missing out on these defining experiences that crop up often enough to become cliches, I became an obsessive observer. If there were things I couldn’t experience, then I might as well learnthe choreography of these moments instead, becoming so familiar with the lives and images of other people that they almost felt like mine. Picture Cher’s wardrobe from ‘Clueless’ in my brain; a kaleidoscopic spinning wheel of memories that I can insert myself into whenever I please, the characters becoming a placeholder until I feel the need to relive something that never happened to me. I notice pieces of movies everywhere; I went out for sushi with my friends and said it was like the scene in ‘The Holiday’ where Jack Black eats sushi. On a good day I think of Joseph Gordon Levitt dancing through the park in ‘500 days of summer’. During my moment on the pier I thought, ‘Kate Winslet did this in heels?’ I’m insufferable.
But there are some films that feel like being intensely seen, like standing between two mirrors at the end of a haircut and seeing an infinite reflection of yourself, trapped between layers and layers of skin. You slowly turn until you notice a new piece of yourself; a mole behind your ear, a frown line, the way your bum looks from behind (bad?). It makes me feel like a rotisserie chicken in an artgallery. That’s made of mirrors. I’ve never felt the need to watch with the intention of seeing an experience that already belonged to me, I’d rather be a fly on the wall. I felt this way until watching ‘Ordinary People’.
Chicago during the winter. A smudgy landscape of muted greens and browns accompanied by a string quartet. Everything looks feeble; a river of smudged glass, patio furniture covered in snow, a family home that looks like a house. The sound of singing. A schoolboy in the back row of a choir. The voices blend together until one rings out against the others, stark and exposed. You can tell something is wrong; his eyes look glazed over and small tufts of hair stick to his forehead, clamming up in the cold. Blending in and standing out, singing the same words as everyone else, breathing in unison. But even in chorus, he’s alone.
How do we talk about the unspeakable things? It’s a conversation that the Jarett’s aren’t ready to have. They sit together and eat breakfast, feigning normalcy in a room of tepidness, barely hanging on by a thread. One stray word, sigh, or moment of honesty will push this careful reimagining of family to pieces. Conrad says he isn’t hungry, and Beth puts his French toast in the garbage disposal. A dynamic like this is like a rubber band being pulled all the way; everyone’s stretching themselves over an open wound and waiting for the thing that will tear it open. Love becomes a routine and an act of necessity; the intimacy of sharing a life together feels awkward and constrained, no room for tenderness or sentimentality. How funny it is to live and breathe in the same house as other people in the absence of closeness; sharing a bathroom with someone you don’t know how to talk to, the awkwardness of being seen in your pyjamas or hanging up wet clothes. The family unit starts to operate like a ship; everyone plays their part to keep it afloat, and if you stick to your part, it does just that. Someone makes breakfast, opens the curtains, walks the dog. Life feels as though it’scarrying on. A constant treading of water; kick forward, kick back. A steady flow of life that keeps the lights on and washes away the shrapnel. Yet the tightrope act is still happening, and the chasm between what is said and unsaid slowly starts to eat away at the routines that hold everything together. And when someone doesn’t play their part, the ship starts to sink.
My family have this tradition on Christmas Eve where we go round the table and say the lowlights and highlights of our year. I don’t love it. Even now, I feel my neck heat up as I think about this question, thinking back to past dinners where I’d stare at my napkin (red, for festivities), everyone thinking the same thing but waiting for me to say something else, to keep it conversational, jolly. I like the dining table at my parents' house because there are all these cracks in the wood that I like to push my crumbs into. If you use the end of your knife (or the prong of a fork), you can smash the crumbs into dust so that it becomes pressed into the cracks. You can probably tell which seat is mine from the way the wood lightens; pieces of bread that now have a permanent home in the rivers of the table. Here lies the ashes of a former prawn cracker, destroyed by me during a game of scrabble, my sister winning every time with words I’ve never heard of.
Beth is like a lot of people I know, a ballerina in a jewellery box, an auror of constant hurry and movement, tiny shoulders and a painted-on lipstick smile. She spins around long enough to keep the waters cloudy, pushing away stillness and the clarity needed for introspection. The depths of the sea aren’t scary if you can’t see them. A queen of supermarket conversations, small talk with your hands gripped around the bars of the trolley. ‘I’m very well thank you. We must do dinner soon’. The house still stands, the kids are alright. No-one questions how the ship is running if it stays afloat. But a broken plate or rejection of French toast starts to feel like an attack. I’m doing my best, I’ve made you breakfast. She continues her performance of Mothering, but retracts her care in the coldest of ways, a reminder that whilst the obligation to parent is still there, no-one needs to know that her love is a chore. A rabbit in headlights as she stands next to Conrad in photos, an unblinking fear in her eyes at the idea of an inescapable memory. ‘Dad, just give her the camera’.
The films painting of Beth as a villain is one that doesn’t sit right with me. In fact, it doesn’t sit with me at all. Sometimes all we can muster is a wall, to create a floodgate between ourselves and the root of the pain. If emotions can’t hit a moving target, then it makes sense to go to parties, dinners and book club meetings, to wear our sparkly outfits and put an expiry date on our grief. Pruning an image of perfection becomes a crutch for our mistakes, a full-time life, leaning on the part of yourself that is clean, organised, disciplined, sociable. Like a hummingbird; tiny rapid gestures that last a lifetime, only functioning in the absence of stillness. It feels safer to live without variation, to become intertwined with the routines that wrap around your life, like curling up inside a clock and becoming part of the rhythm. A steady tick, tick, tick. We used to have a cuckoo clock in our house. At sleepovers my friends would tell me that they woke up every hour, on the hour. I hadn’t noticed that it made a sound. It lived in all of us, sleeping.
Sometimes after a bad day, I feel like dirt follows me and I can’t make anything clean enough. I wipe at the water on my kitchen counter and I feel as though it creates another puddle, like some horrible nightmare from ‘Alice in Wonderland’. A stain on the oven that only grows. I pick up a piece of dirt from the carpet, but my fingers are dirty, and it adds a black mark to the floor. It’s enough to make me scream. If the house is clean, then I’ll feel a bit better. If I wake up at the same time, I’ll feel disciplined. But these are only the bones of a life. Without anything else, the house always feels dirty.
Beth is dealing with the end of her own life, in some way. When she gets out of bed in the middle of the night, her night gown wrapped so tightly around her that it looks like a plaster, I want to cry. I feel the cold of her house, the chill in the dining room as her husband says he no longer loves her. I feel the tiles under her feet and the ticking feeling that goes into overdrive, the wings that flap under the weight of words that hold a pin next to her bubble of a life. Calvin asks why she commented on his sock choice at Buck’s funeral, the obsession over his brown socks. I think of my soap aisle (I think of it as mine), a silly thing that became one of the few things I remember from that time. I think I convinced myself that I was leaving the house to shop for new smells, and on the way, I’d stop by the clinic. Maybe I’d drop in and let them know how I was doing, fill out their stupid questionnaire, have a cup of tea and talk about bad dreams. How I sometimes dream in black and white or see myself played by Mads Mikkelsen.
Unspeakable things leave a trail of inexplainable reactions, they don’t make sense to anyone else but you. You frame the pain in a way you can understand it, becoming an expert at avoiding the things that don’t fit within the realm of your response, like wearing blinkers in a battlefield. It’s someone else’s mess, and you ignore it until you can make sense of your own. But when your method ofdealing with mess so wildly differs from those around you, points of connection become few and far between. Most topics are completely off limits. We don’t talk about pain, war, kidnappings, attacks, people you hate, people you love, a book that made you feel something. You can talk about the weather, your commute into the office, a non-offensive article about air pollution, an inconvenient task, pigeons.
Conrad sits in the garden, in the cold, timidly approached by Beth. A tepid olive branch about him not wearing jacket. ‘I was thinking about the pigeon, you know the one that used to hang around the garage?’ She says that the pigeon gave her a fright each time she started the car, and she shudders as she recalls the sound of it flapping away. Conrad says it was the closest thing they had to a pet, that Buck wanted a dog. And just like that, the moment falls apart; a conversation as feeble as the bird that started it. Trying to connect over a pigeon, anything, please, anything! A glimmer of
something familiar, something that feels effortless, we can do the small talk as well as anyone else in the supermarket. It’s a spark that lives and dies in the same breath. The conversation dissolves into a spattering of interruptions, a hundred thoughts spoken out loud to dissipate the truth. Conrad barks, forcing her to listen. It’s a moment so jarring and desperate that you’d have to say something. But if Beth acknowledges the bark, she’ll have to acknowledge what preceded it. And that is not how she deals with the mess. And so, she steps away. ‘Put a jacket on if you’re going to stay out here much longer’. He sits alone, the waters settle.
I, too, was never good at playing my part; always heavy with this feeling I couldn’t shake. As a child, I would sleep in my clothes, so I didn’t have to worry about getting dressed in the morning. I would imagine the funeral of everyone I knew and cry for hours, for no good reason. I remember my parents asking me what I wanted for breakfast; my Mum was having toast and my Dad was making porridge, so I could either have toast or porridge. I remember thinking that if I chose toast, my Dad would think I didn’t love him as much as I loved my Mum. So, I wrote out a schedule – I had to eat what each of them was having for breakfast, on alternate days, in order to be fair, to make the love even. I feared that one of them would think I preferred the other if I always chose their breakfast. Avoice that said, ‘but it’s the most important meal of the day!’ I had a stress rash when I was ten, which left a scar on my stomach. I started getting intense pains in my neck when I was twelve. It sounds stupid to say out loud, but I think the weight of my head and all its worries started to weigh it down, making it physically impossible to hold up. I saw a physiotherapist who said he’d never seenanything like it. I still get it now, like clockwork, periods of stress that force me to lie down for weeks on end, a pain that marks each chapter of my life. I stay in bed and watch movies until it passes.
Those particularly dark periods of my life are unsurprising, I think they were always there. Waist deep in the mess, sifting through it stone by stone. Long, reckless walks in the dark, taking a shortcut through the park even though it’s unsafe, trees that shake with infinite threat. Wet hair in the middle of Winter. To cross a road without looking. Seeing Conrad was like greeting an old friend; to stop treading water and let yourself sink, a hesitant surrendering to the past. A reconnection with the moments that gave you your thick skin, the ones that reshaped the path that still lies in front of you.
I remember the first conversations about what was happening. Looking down, a quiet voice, there’s a purple carpet. The painful relatability of Conrad baring his soul in a Macdonald’s, trying to find the right thing to say, to give a voice to the pain that no-one else creates a space for, the words lingering in front of them like a smoking gun in the dark, his sleeves pulled up. The moment is punctured by an eruption of laughter, a startling bustle of movement that scares it all away, darting under a rock. Her attention is elsewhere, yet he searches for a sign; a glance that says she hates the distraction, a wish to return to the moment that passed, a silent ‘sorry’, ‘how awful was that timing?’ To say the hardest thing you could ever say and be met with indifference, a moment of unreciprocated and raw vulnerability, wishing you hadn’t said anything at all. It feels safer to be quiet, to wade through it on your own, to live in the hall of mirrors and become friends with your reflection.
I think of home, the walls of my orange bedroom that hold so much silence. A wall that was painted over. A box of memories that make me cry. A photo of me that Christmas where my face looks like its running away from me, a smudge of pink bleeding from the edge as I try to move out the picture, just in case. Taking up a seat at the table. The hairdressers where I’d stare at the floor, afraid to look.
Yet even with all of this, Conrad’s story is one of hope, of resilience. The breakthrough moment where it all makes sense, the dappled sunlight in your therapists' office as the dust settles on a new thought, a glimpse of a new life. You don’t have to carry it by yourself, there will be others that carry it too. You became friends with rock bottom, laced into in the depths of its currents until youcouldn’t any longer, a milky silt that faded away and unearthed something new. A crack in the rocks. An abandoned ship. The chasm that finally split open.
And everyone is finally on the same page; voices, hearts and messes bleeding as one. Like waking up from a long sleep.
After living this way for some time, everything feels like Chicago. A relentless landscape that presses down on you, a trail of snow on your shoes that follows you inside. But Conrad is able to find his way out; to make his voice heard, to find love, to build something from the rubble. You will do the things you didn’t dare to dream of. You’ll stop replaying the scenes in your head, you won’t dream in black and white. To move away from Winter, from the longest Christmas I’ve ever known.
I’m at the hairdressers now, thinking about the small things. I like this salon because the ceiling is black, and when I lie down to have my hair washed, my eyes don’t hurt when I look up. I’ve found that in many other places, the ceiling is usually painted white, and when accompanied by the ceiling lights, it becomes impossible to look at. There’s comfort in the fact that I’m still sitting here; fingers running over my scalp, a leaf that blows through the open doors, a lady talking loudly on the phone, pieces of my hair on the floor. I look into the mirror and feel at ease with my reflection. We’re no longer in Chicago.