Chapter 13
It was starting to feel like Groundhog Day.
I’d wake up, debate the merits of bothering to get dressed when I was going nowhere, seeing no one, doing nothing.
The isolation didn’t bother me as much as it did others.
I’d always been a little on the homebody side, so not being able to go into town or visit with the few people I still knew in the area wasn’t really a problem.
My social meter was easily filled up by regularly video-chatting with Becka, or less regularly with Jihoon, who very rarely had a whole day with nothing on.
No, the isolation was fine.
It was the lack of absolutely everything else.
I read books, I helped around the house, I played my old acoustic guitar. I watched telly.
I was bored out of my mind.
Dad was working from home now that his term of compassionate leave was over, but on his lunch breaks we went for walks.
This was the highlight of our days now that the Government had allowed everyone to leave their homes for “periods of outdoor recreation”.
Dad made so many prison jokes about inmates being allowed in the yard, even Mum got sick of it and told him to pipe down.
Sometimes we went to the local reserve and played ‘red squirrel, my point’. Sometimes we walked down to the local village and listened to the librarian in the tiny library as she read poetry from an open window.
Dad had gotten it into his head that now the weather was warming up, we should spend more time in the garden. He’d gone online and purchased all sorts of garden games, like giant connect-four, horseshoes, and perhaps most disastrously; swing ball. The less said about the latter, the better.
But the essence of my day remained the same. Empty.
All my life, I’d had some kind of occupation. From college I went to university, and even when I’d graduated, I’d had a crappy job that I got out of bed for.
Then I moved to LA.
Then Korea. I’d been antsy there, too, until I’d started working at ENT.
It wasn’t the work so much that I missed, but doing nothing, day in and day out… it kept at the forefront of my mind how utterly rudderless my life had become. I was beginning to feel like a plot device in someone else’s story.
The devoted daughter. The quirky flat mate. The secret girlfriend.
These days of endless non-occupation were making me feel… abstract, vague and undefined.
There was absolutely nowhere to hide from the things I’d been resolutely not thinking about.
Hiding from.
Becka was working from home, and living with Ben, and while that was still a very unresolved, strange situation, there was a narrative there. Her life was moving.
Jihoon was as busy as he’d ever been. Even though the tour was cancelled, there was now a whole slew of other activities he, and the group, were focusing on.
GVibes were still putting out a new album this year, despite having only releasing their latest studio album Tracks of Transition late last year. This newest album was originally going to be released at the conclusion of the world tour. Now it was going to be released this summer.
Jihoon had also finally been given the green light to release the mini solo album he’d been working on for the past year. It was all but done, but ENT had delayed any marketing for it so as to not coincide with any of the group’s timeline.
Now his album – still untitled – was going to release in January 2021.
I couldn’t help comparing his life to mine. It was a bad habit, I knew, but when his life was so different from mine, I couldn’t seem to stop seeing all the ways his was better. More important. It was a scab I couldn’t stop picking at.
Even now, I could recite his itinerary because I was more involved in his life than I was my own. I was substituting myself, again.
I didn’t know how to be static. I didn’t know how to be at peace in the cracks of life’s big events.
The rest of the world was a ticking time bomb. Gone were the news articles about sourdough starters, and drone footage of dolphins in the Venetian canals. Instead, it was one long stream of numbers:
Hospital admissions.
Current number of infected.
Deaths.
And even when the headlines weren’t about the virus, it didn’t get better.
People were marching in streets all over the world.
Masks covering their faces, but the placards they waved screamed louder than their voices ever could have, crying out for justice, social equality.
Raging against a system that had gone unchecked for too long.
It seemed that when the world was locked away, we couldn’t help but peek under the rug we’d swept things under, and we didn’t like what we saw.
Everything filled me with such a feeling of uselessness.
Even here, at home, I wasn’t really much help. Sure, I helped with the chores, and I liked to think I provided a modicum of emotional support, but past that?
I couldn’t take away Mum’s nausea with each new cycle of chemo.
I tried giving her a foot rub last time she said she ached, and the pressure just made it worse.
I couldn’t even drive her to the clinic, because Dad wanted to take her.
He wasn’t allowed to go in with her, but he wanted to be close. Just in case.
If I wasn’t being useful, what was I?
It was that thought that drove me to the uncomfortable realisation that I had never learned how to be still, because I had always been striving for something. Which probably explained why I’d spent so long pursuing the music industry. I couldn’t do nothing. I couldn’t be nothing.
But I was never quite good enough.
I’ve never felt more surplus to requirement in my whole life.
Social media was a trap. A scrolling window into inadequacy.
Everyone else in the world seemed to be doing something – even outside of marching for social justice – people were using the lockdown to learn new instruments, discovering they were actually really good at sculpting with scrap metal, or doing makeup tutorials and getting sponsorship deals.
I tried making sourdough. The jar exploded. I already knew guitar, and I didn’t have any children to teach colour-coded life lessons to. Not that I should be teaching anyone life lessons.
The one thing I did that gave my days any kind of variety that didn’t involve doom-scrolling was the two mornings a week where my Korean tutor from Seoul and I had class over Zoom. Twice a week, I got up at 6 am to practice, and because I didn’t have much else going on these days, I was improving.
The world might be imploding, but I could now do a passable job at ordering dinner in another language.
So, that was pretty cool.
June
The crows eyed me from their perch along the fence. They’d retreated up there when I’d come outside, silencing their cacophony of caws that had seemed to bounce off the garden fences.
The truce wouldn’t last long. Eventually they’d either figure out I wouldn’t try to prevent them from reaching the food in the feeders, or they’d come to the conclusion that I was no match for them.
They were spookily clever birds – you could see in their eyes they were thinking it through.
There was a smaller one, who seemed to be the ring leader.
A brief Google search told me the smaller ones were usually females.
She seemed to stare at me, assessing my threat level.
The way she looked at you, you could see she was working things out.
Interrupting my suspicious train of thought, the sliding door hissed behind me, and I turned to watch my dad step through. Even that quiet sound shot through the stillness of the early morning. The sun had barely crested over the trees
From the now-open kitchen door, I could hear the faint whir of the coffee machine.
It had been a birthday present from my dad to my mum.
At first, she’d resisted, defending the long-suffering kettle, and the merits of instant coffee, but had switched to the ‘fancy’ beans almost immediately after Dad made her a coffee using it.
“Morning, love.” His voice was quiet. The words sounded muffled by the slightly hazy morning air, like marbles dropped on carpet. Fog clung to the edges of the garden, not yet beaten back by the oncoming sun.
“Morning Dad. Where’s Mum?”
Dad leaned against the door frame, looking out over the quiet garden.
“In the bath.”
“She couldn’t sleep?”
“Never can at this stage.”
The lines around his mouth tightened, the only indication that his words bothered him.
At least it had become almost predictable. Today was the third day of her chemo cycle, and it was always the worst, not least of all because she couldn’t sleep. She said it was a combination of a pounding headache and a fluttering feeling of anxiety with no discernible root cause.
That she was already in the bath told me she was feeling the full-body ache from the white blood cell booster medication.
In some ways it was a benefit, because she was so photosensitive at the moment that the only way she could continue her morning ritual of sitting outside with a cup of coffee, was to be up early enough that they sun wasn’t high in the sky.
It was the extreme silver lining of such a horrible side-effect, and if Dad and I didn’t look at the silver linings, we’d only ever see the despair.
“Why are you up so early?” Dad asked, bringing my attention back to him.
I hadn’t meant to get up so early, but the thoughts in my head were so deafening, I couldn’t sleep through them.
It had reminded me of all the times Jihoon had complained that my thoughts were so loud they’d woken him up.
Once my mind had drifted to Jihoon, to the life we’d so briefly shared, I knew I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep.
But it had also been because of-
My shoulders jerked up, the sudden, deafening chorus of the crows finding their courage as they jumped off the fence and began having a noisy scrap, feathers flying as wings collided.
Dad sighed, and in unintentional unison, we chorused-
“Those bastard crows.”
It was a phrase we muttered, or bemoaned, several times a day now that we’d amassed such a large following. It had to be every crow from miles around that flocked to our garden each morning.
“Noisy blighters,” my dad grumbled.
“It’s mum’s fault,” I concurred, “she won’t stop putting the suet balls out. The little birds don’t get a look in anymore.”
We both winced as the metal bird feeder fell to the ground. Again.
“Every sodding morning,” he groaned, rubbing a hand over his forehead.
“I keep telling her not to put suet out, but will she listen?” I suppressed a wry grin, watching in begrudging admiration as the big birds went at the now grounded feeder.
It hadn’t taken them long to figure out how to knock it to the ground to make raiding it easier.
We were going through five suet balls a day, it was costing a fortune.
Dad moved to sit beside me.
“It makes her laugh watching them go at it. She likes thinking she’s saving the local rabbit population from hungry crows. It brings her joy.”
Dad and I both thought this was a little ridiculous, but it went without saying that no matter how ridiculous, how annoying, if it brought her any measure of joy, we would go along with it.
We were both silent for a while, until-
“I’ve never really thought about that too much,” he said, “joy, I mean. It always seemed like a natural thing. Something that just happened. I never realised how lucky we were, because I always had it with your mum. With you.” He nudged me gently with his shoulder.
I nodded, silent, unsure what to say in the face of such a serious conversation.
“But I’ve not seen much of it with you, kiddo. It seemed like you were always chasing after it.”
Wow. Okay. We were doing this conversation now, I guess.
I opened my mouth to protest, the knee-jerk reaction as instinctual as breathing. But just as quickly as my mouth opened, it closed again, because I suddenly found myself without any argument.
I had to force myself to look over at Dad as he started talking again.
“I thought you might find it at uni. You know, kids have always gone off to ‘find’ themselves at uni’,” he chuckled, “but not you. You just seemed to replace it with determination. Don’t get me wrong,” he said quickly, “I’ve always admired how you throw yourself into things, but sometimes it seems like you do that because you feel like you ought to, not because you want to. ”
I felt like I was being peeled open. All of a sudden, the early morning light felt too abrasive.
“When you told me about your fella, I thought, ‘this is it, she’s found it’. But I don’t see much joy in you.”
“That’s not fair, pops.” I had to interject. “He’s there, I’m here, it’s…the world is….” I gestured wildly.
He waved my dramatic gesture away with a ‘pah’ sound.
“I’m not saying he doesn’t make you happy,” Dad said in a conciliatory tone, “and I know the world is a bit buggered just now, but… I’m your dad.
Blood, or no, I’m your dad, and if anyone can say it, surely I’ve earned the right to.
” He paused, taking a breath while I tried desperately not to fiddle with the hem of my hoodie.
“I just don’t think you’ve figured your joy out yet,” he said. “I’m not saying Jihoon doesn’t bring joy to your life, I’m sure he does – but I worry you don’t know how to find it for yourself yet. It's like that Ru Paul says–”
“If you can’t love yourself…” we chorused together, each of us grinning stupidly.
We chuckled quietly for a few moments, until I took a breath, thinking through my response.
“I know what you’re trying to say, pops,” I said eventually. “I’ve been trying so hard to find it…”
“That’s just it though, love. I don’t think you need to work so hard.
Joy is a thing you have inside yourself.
You keep looking for it. I see how hard you work.
But I think you need to find out what it is that makes you happiest. Look at your life, kiddo.
What do you want it to look like in five years?
Ten? I think you need to figure out how to make yourself happy, before finding someone to do it for you. ”
He fell silent, and I waited for him to continue, but he didn’t, and I’m left with a lingering silence I want to fill with some kind of excuse, denial, a justification. Anything. But I can’t.
I turned to look at my dad, but he only gave my knee a quick pat, and stood up. I watched as he walked back into the kitchen to make Mum her morning coffee, leaving me there, watching as a few magpies joined the fight over the last, crumbling suet ball.