Transitions

I.

The visiting consultant, Nancy, is flying back to China again this week. She greeted me with hugs in her last week, since I’d spent the weekend helping with her research statistics. She was constantly feeding me too. We’d just gone to dinner with one of her previous residents, and a cardiology resident and I am driving her back. 

“You must be excited to see your son again,” I’d said, when I’d parked outside her house. Her street was dark, lined with trees and to turn around I’d three-pointed in the driveway of one of the larger, gated houses. Not that it was one of those kinds of streets. It was just a beautiful house, all silent and glowing from the windows.

Her little boy is all she talks about. He’s adorable. Handsome, too. I’d seen photos on his first day of school, when she’d been jittery on ward round and we’d asked why.

“Yes,” she said, hesitantly. Then she made to say something else, stuttered, and changed her mind. “I’m just…anyway. Yes. I just tried not to think about it.”

“Why not,” I asked.

“You wouldn’t understand.” She gave a sigh and waved her arms impatiently, brushing off the subject.

I shrugged. My little brother was 4 when I left him. It’s amazing he didn’t get stranger danger all these years, because I only go back to see him once a year. I thought I had a pretty good idea of what it might be. “Is it because you’re scared he’ll be different around you because he hasn’t seen you in ages?”

She suddenly jerked up. “Yes! That’s exactly it. —” Then she began to pour everything out — everything, not just this thing. Her fears about her son, about parenting him. How much she loved him. I unbuttoned my seatbelt and turned to listen. It was hard to tell if she was crying — the tree covered the passenger side in shadow but she sounded like her nose was blocked at some points. I tried to locate a tissue box but remembered it was in the back of my car. 

Her little boy intrigued me. It sounded like the kid’s a genius - one of those old souls who seems a little too good for the world. At the same time, his own reactions at age 3 and 4 and even at 7 remind me of things my mother used to say that I did. My attention to detail. Even my earliest memories are of small details: dipping my hand down in a crack in a trampoline, and the texture of tyre grease. The words on a sign (a book shop) that my mother and I were walking past. Dragonflies (at eye level). Oily fingers from those deep fried crouton sticks.

My mother had worried that the world would eat me up. She’d always say to me, “Toughen up, you’re too sensitive,” or “Snatch your toys back” when I’d cry in her lap at night about how someone took my things that way.

It seemed funny suddenly, watching Nancy wring her hands in love and frustration and fear. My mother, way back then — is this what she might have done to one of her friends?

If I could talk to my mother then, what would I say to her? I wish the old her could see me now to save years of worry. Of course, she’d worry regardless. It’s what you do if you have something to lose. As a mother, I’d be a wreck. To love something that much again - to have something from which the loss of I might never recover from…

I put my hand on Nancy’s arm. I wanted to say something reassuring about the future, but there’s nothing reassuring about the unknown as a doctor. So I told her the best thing my parents ever gave me was a happy childhood. Something to cling onto in the darkest, coldest days. That the internal life, when it was caging, would calm by the thought of that. That mythical thing called love, when things are forgotten or there appears no reason to believe it’s possible. It’s possible. We carry on.

Before she got out of the car, she hugged me - a long, relieved hug. 12 years difference - we were both born in the year of the dragon and we were very similar. She often told me that I was a lot like her, at least in terms of early career events.

She is flying back today. I hadn’t seen her since that night. Despite repeated assurances to visit if possible, I have a feeling that we’ll never see each other again. It’s strange, the people who walk in and out of our lives, and what they leave there. It makes me wonder if I’ve left deep imprints in others’ lives I’ve never been in.



II.

It’s later in the week. The night’s gotten colder, though this time no longer blamed on sea air. Outside the tea lights are blurred behind the glass.

I’m curled up in a chair, happy. Overwhelmingly so, really, at how well the day’s gone. Number one: Brighton had been lovely. A calm, peaceful few hours and I was surprisingly cheered up about it. Number two: someone else had driven, so I could have drinks (something I’ve not done for ages, having driven everywhere possible in recent memory).

I’d been to Brighton earlier that day, just as the sun set. C, a friend of S’s from school whom I’d met once at her house in New Zealand, had invited me to a beach property for a BBQ co hosted by S’s ex (Also an S), whom S had left me for. Athena’s a mutual friend of ours, and in the recent months Athena had been here I’d seen this girl a handful of times. I hadn’t seen C for a long time, and had always been meaning to catch up. She is doing 4th year now, in the same course as me. It’s the hardest year in the curriculum, and I wanted to ask her if she had any questions. More people fail 4th year than every other year, and averages get dragged down constantly.

I’d clearly moved on in life, but a stubborn part of me just wanted to segregate the past from the future.

Athena’s boyfriend, would later say when I explained that Athena had been watching the rugby with me the same night that she was meant to be at S’s place, with great confusion, “Have the two worlds collided?” He knew both S and S together through Athena, because they’d worked together for a long time, and were close. For a long time there was some kind of unwritten rule that made Athena feel the need to warn me whenever S would be at the same event as me, even though I never let it stop me going to things for friends. I actually had nothing to do with the rule itself, it was just something Athena seemed to invent for herself.

“I should go,” I’d said for the nth time that morning, while icing ninja-bread men (not a typo) at Renny’s place.

“Just go,” she’d said.

“It starts off with a BBQ,” I’d said. “It might be an off gathering next. But then you just passively absorb details about someone’s life over time and suddenly you’re just..in their lives. Or they’re in yours. Whatever.” I thought about all the details of S’s life that I’d known from mutual friends and S over the years. How she wanted to move to Melbourne two years before she did it. How her dream had been to study English at the university of Melbourne here. Some of her relationships after S (back when she was rooming with Gaayathri, a good friend of mine). All details that just happened to crop up in passing, not all of it intentionally told to me. It was ridiculous.

But all my whining was just whining about something I had already made up my mind about.

I’m at a cafe in Glen Waverley, and it’s freezing outside. The day had turned on itself, bitter winds coming inland - at first I thought it had been Brighton but even here it’s frosty. Jason, the kid from the respiratory lab, is with me. I shouldn’t say kid - he’s only two years younger than me - but it feels like it. Two years difference is an eon. Does time accelerate/decelerate at will? It makes me feel old.

He reminds me of a strange combination of people I’ve known in the past, including myself. Or perhaps his current situations just reminds me of something that happened to me once, that I wish had had a better outcome. We’re incredibly different in personality after all - in fact probably the exact opposite. Our moral compasses are way off.

It did make me acknowledge that I’m drawn to people with familiar sounding stories though. Recently at work I’ve been finding myself struggling with people who have been in similar situations as me. I feel myself wanting to wrench them by the collar, shake them, and tell them how stupid they are. Nicely. “He won’t ever love you.” or, “Have some self respect!”.

Probably an inappropriate way to feel about other people’s lives sometimes, but there you go.

I seem to be having similar conversations to this one with many people over my life. In fact, I feel extremely good at these kinds of conversations and cheering people up after break ups.

Then I realised: I’m a good at helping people through transitions because that’s pretty much how others have treated me in relationships. Someone transitioning them through parts of their life before they find someone they really want. Inadvertantly, obviously, because nobody does that kind of thing on purpose, but it’s what ended up happening nonetheless. 

Argh.

Epiphanies are few and far between these days. Why are they never good ones, like they used to be?

Early winter walks

The thing about living in a city that people like to visit is that inevitably, everyone who was ever anyone in your life drops by at some point. Neither the chilly wind of the Tasman gliding over the port in winter nor the melting heat in summer seems to stop them. There’s always a reason to be in Melbourne, if you want there to be.

Example: R.G., the primary school classmate from back in New Zealand I hadn’t seen for almost a decade. Imagine a conversation out of the blue with someone you weren’t that close with, but thought a lot of when you were ten years old.

There she was, brown coat, chocolate boots, turquoise scarf. Longer face, but the same mousy hair, sparce freckles, English looking nose. When I was little I thought she had the best hand writing in the world, the prettiest hair, and that she was good at everything. I’d memorise her signature, which was in cursive, and write it half unthinkingly over scraps of paper. She came to my birthday once. We went to the observatory because I had been going  through an astronomy phase. We weren’t particularly close.

“I told my room-mate that I was worried I wouldn’t recognise you,” she said. “It’s been, what, ten years?”

“Well you look exactly the same.”

She didn’t say the same about me.

Stray memories kept popping up out of the blue, like when she talked about her younger sister. “When we were little, she used to want to be a investigatory journalist,” R. said. “And now she is the top of her business school at UNSW. And I’m the one going to the US and India and spending my time surfing at the beach.”

“Is your sister’s name Felicity?” I asked.

“Yes! How do you remember that?”

How did I remember that? I have no idea either - it seemed so long ago that I was ten. Like harbouring the memories of another person, almost — is this what it’s like to have an alternate life, or a past life remembered? All these facts that come out of nowhere, like when I pick up a violin and can play parts of pieces I used to know.

Before we left to go to drinks with some of her embryology friends up the river, she asked me to take her to the beach the next morning. Sadly I couldn’t. Unsaid was how much I wanted to go too. Maybe I will this weekend, if the weather is alright. If I finish my cover letters.

“I hope it’s not ten years before we see each other again,” she said as she stepped off the tram.

How different we are now compared to who we were as kids. In your 20s, the distinction becomes a lot clearer than when you’re in your late teens.

It’s winter now, but it feels more like spring - bright sunlight, warmth in the air. The last few weeks before, there had been frost on my window every day of the morning but now it’s only fresh morning air on the glass. Sometimes I miss Aspendale, and tutoring there. Between trains, I’d wander down afterwards to the empty shore and trace the peninsula beneath my eyelashes.

Since leaving Surgery exactly one week ago, I’ve been thrust in the world of blood diseases. More specifically: bleeding and clotting disorders with the rove-around registrar. The ward teams seem less friendly, more intense and Dr V. and I have met before anyway, during my research. Until Paediatrics, Haematology had been my great love. Perhaps it still is — I’m not sure yet.

Being without a ward feels like being without a home. There are never any odd jobs to do - just climbing stairs up and down endlessly. There are 7 floors at this hospital. The other medical student on the unit (the one with the ward teams) told me how when she did Anaesthetics here they had to attend all the emergency ward calls and, due to the slowness of the lifts, dashed up flights of stairs to get to the patient every time.

I’ve been driving to South Yarra all week and it’s so expensive. Perhaps I should start walking, doing the cut through Faulkner Park that one should only do in good, sturdy gum boots. I used to walk across the wet lawns all the time last year on the way to meetings and turn up with leaves all over white flats, not caring at all. Now that it’s winter again, I miss them.

Prof R. works at this hospital. I past the old office all the time. Once, I came out of the stairwell just as he had walked past it but arrested, feeling like I’d dodged a bullet. I heard from his research assistant (a lovely woman from Ireland) that he’s only working 4 days a week now - what sounds like a slow weaning off from duties. When I was waiting for her in the corridor I saw a portrait that must have been taken over twenty years ago. There he was, still one of the team. Still with the network.

It feels like coming out of a bad relationship - when all the old antagonism isn’t so acute anymore and you can smile at some of the other person’s peculiarities. Retrospective appreciation. One day next week I will have to work up the nerve to go see him; I will need try and fight against being manipulated to do extraordinarily unfruitful amounts of work with no help and for no gain.

But that’s next week. For now, I have this glass of wine, this sourdough, this tomato soup and the rest of a beautiful day in June.

Salutations! :)

P.S. Been, I went to the post office last weekend and they couldn’t find a box correctly sized to fit this package thing in… so sorry about the delay! I have been looking all week and none of the post offices have it. I might give up and send it to you in a too-big box :(. It’ll be super weird, but.

The unbelievable privilege of reading something great for the first time

Last night in a black armchair at Borders, waiting for an old flatmate’s party in East Richmond to begin, I read The Great Gatsby for the first time:

Myrtle pulled her chair close to mine, and suddenly her warm breath poured over me the story of her first meeting with Tom.

“It was on the two little seats facing each other that are always the last ones left on the train. I was going up to New York to see my sister and spend the night. He had on a dress suit and patent leather shoes, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off him, but every time he looked at me I had to pretend to be looking at the advertisement over his head. When we came into the station he was next to me, and his white shirt-front pressed against my arm, and so I told him I’d have to call a policeman, but he knew I lied. I was so excited that when I got into a taxi with him I didn’t hardly know I wasn’t getting into a subway train. All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.’”

- Chapter 2, “The Great Gatsby” — F. Scott Fitzgerald


I couldn’t put it down in my mind, even on the train to East Richmond where I’d in fact been only hours before. It was nearly 8 in the evening and the sun hadn’t even half finished setting. The smell of rain was in the air, because it had been pouring on and off, between the florid spurts of sunshine.

A teacher once said to me, when I told her I was reading Virginia Woolf, “You lucky thing. To be reading Woolf for the first time.” That memory kept echoing in my mind.

So strange. I’d avoided studying it in high school — nobody in my high school took it up, really. We had Blake, and Frame. Atwood. Amy Tan (oh, Amy Tan, whose novels became a reference book for anyone not second generation Chinese about what it was like to be second generation Chinese in a Western society). Never this, and never Thomas Hardy (although I read Tess of the d’Urbervilles voluntarily at a young age and liked it). It must be an American thing.

Gatsby had yet to appear, but already the disquiet in the novel was unbearably familiar. I’d later become trapped in the passages after he meets Daisy. His re-evaluating his entire house by her eyes, his nervousness. The ugliness of the other characters (and society), in a profound way, and his transformation from that in what is revealed about him. The image of him floating in his summer pool on the first day of autumn, trying to force the past back.

Aren’t we all looking for something that redeems us?

But this story’s about the loss of the American dream, something that you sense as soon as you pick the thing up. There’s something rotten about everyone in it, the kind of rotteness that comes from the inside. A critic wrote, “What else is there for Gatsby to do but to _____” (don’t want to ruin the ending for people who haven’t read it). It’s sad that it’s the only thing that makes sense in the book world — a perfect, beautiful prose world. In real life, we have to pick ourselves up somehow and carry on somehow. Also, what if we’re never transformed? What if rotten is all we ever are? How are rotten people meant to get over themselves?

…I guess Daisy answers that question quite early on in the piece.

How could I have missed this book? I think I will come to love it :))