Selma In The City

Writer. Teacher, Misfit. Sydney, Australia

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Still imagining other lives, still turning the worlds in my head into stories, still trying to pronounce incontrovertible. Holding on to hard won hopefulness.

    • Sins Of The Past

      I always thought I’d have to go much farther than where I’m at to get away from the sins of the past. My sins and the sins of others. I’d have to start a new life completely, an unrendering, to fully escape them. When I cut the ropes that tied me to the daily grind I didn’t think it was my actual vita nova, I thought that would be a more glorious undertaking. accompanied by a fanfare of sorts. My days were suddenly quiet, unobtrusive, full of peaceful cups of tea, writing,, long, restorative walks and reading in the afternoon light. I was prepared for that, I hoped for that, but I wasn’t prepared for the noise that erupted in my head, throwing punches like a fight in the street

      I read in a self help book once that you can’t create in survival mode, which I agree with and have experienced, but I also have experienced that you can’t think in survival mode, not your day-to-day going from point A to point B kind of thinking, but your profound intellectualising of existence kind of thinking. You are too busy getting from point A to point B every single day (and back again) to think that deeply.

      I am a fan of deep thinking. I think it is important, it allows us to refine things previously unpracticed, to steady our path, so that we can speak with authority on our own lives. My thinking for almost twenty years had been hindered most of the time, a film on the surface of a more intensive pool of thought. I didn’t realise it then but most of those twenty years were spent in survival mode.

      I remember once seeing a little piece of sandstone down on the breakwater by the bay. It had broken off the sea wall sitting there for ages in the sun and the wind, frequently bombarded by rain and spray from the ocean. I stood on it one day and it completely disintegrated, dried out and hollow. I felt like that piece of sandstone in the last days of my marriage, internally eroded, waiting to crumble.

      When my marriage ended I worked in a way I thought was fearless, trying to convince myself I was ecstatic to be free. Working 50 plus hours a week for myself and my son, fighting off the marauders at the gates. But I was terrified – of debt, of loss, of grief, of more pain. So I focused on working, not thinking.

      When I stopped working the thinking came. “Do you remember?” it asked. “Do you remember that in the presence of love, there was indifference?” “Do you remember that in the presence of beauty there was anguish?” “Do you remember that in the presence of togetherness you existed in secret?”

      And I began to remember.

      Who would have thought that a possibly reckless decision to leave a good job and write a book would allow me to see and understand the sins of the past?

      And my greatest sin? Allowing myself to be lost.

      Sometimes the least sensible act can be the most significant. The step you need to take. The only way to welcome the dark, and in the morning, let it go.

    • Casting A Line

      Twelve years ago I told you to leave. And you did. I watched you get in a cab at nightfall with one suitcase and head off into the darkness. I was angry, disappointed, despairing but I still wanted you to look out the window of the cab as if searching, as if regretting the loss of your old life. But you didn’t look back. The lack of a backward glance has framed my view of that day, has made me think all those years spent were just a ploy, a system, set-up, planned, to use me.

      I see people, older men usually, down at the bay with fishing rods propped on stands, white buckets full of bait and seawater, sitting precariously on fold-up chairs, staring out to sea. I walk away, far, right to the end of the promontory, the sound of the lapping on the breakwater soft as a silk scarf flipping in the breeze, and then come back. The men are still sitting there, gazing north, lines uncast. One of them packs everything up, chair and rod under one arm, white bucket in another, and leaves. He doesn’t look back at the shimmering water, doesn’t even raise the slightest of eyebrows at leaving behind what he had chosen to do; he didn’t even cast a line. As he walks up the hill I notice he still doesn’t look back, unconcerned that all of the effort he put into getting his gear ready amounted to nothing. In the end all he did was gaze out at the water, line uncast.

      The fishermen made me think of my neighbour when I was a teenager living at home. I liked a boy who I worked at the local supermarket with. We used to walk home together after our shifts – he lived in the next street. I didn’t realise that my neighbour Lorna, was walking behind us one day, observing us chatting and laughing and as he walked to his street and I walked to mine she caught up with me. “He looked back,” she said. “He likes you. If they like you they always look back when they leave.”

      “What does it mean if they don’t look back? ” I asked. “They’re just thinking there’s plenty more fish in the sea for another day,” said Lorna. Maybe that’s why the fisherman seemed unconcerned about not even casting his line, maybe he was thinking ‘there’s plenty more fish in the sea for another day.’

      I worked like a madwoman for 12 years to erase the traces of what you did. I’m a survivor, so I’m told. Now that I’ve stopped working I’ve realised how enervating surviving is, what a liminal space it thrusts you into. When I was surviving I didn’t have time to sit and reflect, thinking of the things I couldn’t back then. Or shouldn’t.

      It’s been hard to think of them now. It has filled me with grief. Not grief for you. Only for me. A type of grief that is irreversible, it makes sure you live your life with no illusions. I want to sit again with you on the couch in the sunroom. The couch that leaned to the left because it came with the wrong-sized screws, the legs always threatening to buckle, but inexplicably holding firm. You were always honest with me in that room. I don’t know why, maybe it was because the room was so unadorned with its faded, old, rickety couch that even you realised it wasn’t the place for lying. I want to ask you in that room why you did what you did. I want to ask you why you got into that cab that night with your one suitcase and didn’t look back. But even if I could, I wouldn’t ask because I already know the answer – “There’s plenty more fish in the sea for another day.”