This is a record of self. This is a record of the twenty years of life that led to this record. This record will be told in a spiral, with episodes from further back in time hopefully not marred by correspondence to a contemporary date (I will give you a month/year for them).
I have come crashing, screeching to a halt this March, following a frenetic summer. I fell ill, not with Covid, but one of those minor devils that pick up Covid's coat-tails, and feel exactly like him. Now the illness has left me, but my lower windpipe (or somesuch) is harbouring the old mucus, and it wheedles me and tricks me and promises it will be gone soon, but even when I am reduced to fits of coughing and spluttering sometimes nothing exits me. And this has been such an appropriate metaphor for my current state of mind that I have not taken any sudafed to get the damn thing over with.
I wrote so many songs over the summer! So many merry melodies, and so much running around to people's houses with my banjo and guitars and sheet music. And diarising my social engagements. Making the right effort at the right time. There is a song I wrote that everyone likes, Brighton Girls, but I wrote that one a long time ago when I didn't even live at my current address. And it's from a time when I was an Arts student, in the big city, instead of this striving provincial office lady which I am trying to make myself into. Oh sure, I still love, I still hurt. I do it more! These emotions do not, any more, provoke the kind of ejections of literary waste-matter that are the songwriter's choice fare.
So I am becalmed. Having been bed-ridden for a few days, I am paler, and my lips have an attractively bloody red that never translates to pictures. Illness is a site of exquisite drama.
My attachment to my illness was so great last year that it curled up around me in the fainting bed to keep me warm. My illness "loved" me. Presently I know that is wrong: it desired me. My illness has the voice of Lana Del Rey and the leer of the men who stagger around outside the bars on Chapel Street Thursday nights - two sorts of siren. It has a special plan for me, it wants to wring the life from me until I am ashen and porcelain; until I am so paranoid that thought and movement unite in a constant ineffectual vibration. It is starvation, it is fear, it is distrust. So I walk about, creep about my house and my suburbs in all black and white and grey, degendered, wide-eyed, especially in mirrors, always perching on the edges of chairs and with my back to the corners of rooms.
My hair is one of few vanities permitted to me, and I wash it nearly everyday, the consequences of which will meet me someday on the high roads of life. I do not brush it, it tangles and mats. I dyed it black in the autumn and again in the spring. Everything else about my appearance is evidence of a mental prison; it all feels like toxic filth in the fur of a water-mammal, it aches to slough off and leave me clean. The illness promises cleanliness, but rarely delivers. It may leave me hairless and concave, but still I am clammy and bruised, and my many old sores look over-large in the limbs where they are set. The promise of cleanliness is starvation's lie. I have never been more intemperate or lascivious in my life.
But that was last year. In that year there were many great Humiliations, but at last since graduating high school I have been brought low physically three times. The first time was in North Geelong hospital with arrythmia, the second time was on the beach on the Mornington Peninsula throwing up into the ocean, and finally I caught Covid while staying in the Macedon Ranges and have had to quarantine for a week with my grandmother (which is where I currently write from). Each of these incidents has shewn me, in the most dramatic fashion, the error of certain ways. First, the substance abuse, third, the cringing frailty, and second, a certain stupid infatuation.
It helps to phrase these events as arriving from on high. Presently my sense of self is very small, and trapped in the same dialectical struggle of the past year. The stakes of that struggle feel high, but they shriek of their importance so incessantly that it just gets old. God's great reality principle has intervened, and liberated a small part of me which now only has to deal with the present situation. Yes, up in the mountains, I am nurturing this small, soft animal, which knows how to eat fruit and fish and pasta just as her grandmother tells her, who can nap in bed for an afternoon when she needs, and makes cups of tea for herself in the hope that she can pour one for someone else.