Chapter 1
The birds are up but the sun is yet to rise.
Here, the afternoon birds are blissful, serene – a meditation app soundscape in real time, whereas the morning birds are a cacophony of loud-mouthed arseholes – kookaburras shouting at other kookaburras to stay off their lawn, and the unholy trinity of lorikeets, noisy miners, and butcherbirds making their search for breakfast everyone else’s problem.
I am unsure if the birds have gotten louder, perhaps due to evolution and climate change, or if I am simply more affected in my current state.
Either way, if I could mute them all and leave only the whipbird, my day would start very differently.
As it stands, I am awake because, I mean, how could I not be, but also because this is the only time of not-quite-day I seem to be able to breathe.
There is scope to unfurl before other people rise to claim dominance over sound and space.
If I were a bird, I know now, despite dreams of grander status, I would be a brush turkey, more specifically the male of the species, the quiet loner, clumsy in any attempt at flight, but happiest when scratching around the forest floor, mound-making a singular focus – expert compost-creators, specialising in maintaining optimum temperature for egg incubation.
They might be considered a joke in urban environments, adapting with blunt rudeness by robbing picnickers and stealing scraps, or ruining orderly gardens with their scratch-scratch-scratching, but in the wilds of the forest where they belong, they are masters of their task.
Even with the threats of predators, and ridicule, and diminishing habitat, it seems a more comfortable existence.
And black-red-yellow is a bold fashion choice, which I admire.
These are some new facts I have absorbed since arriving, what limited attention I possess being almost wholly committed to the monitoring of and relearning about local avifauna.
I have also been trying my hand at reading books, which I have not yet achieved, switching to vapes, a ghastly necessity, eating regularly, with limited success, sleeping, with great improvement in this area, and walking, which I suppose I never really needed to relearn.
I have also been talking to my psychologist – easy, since ‘why am I like this?’ has long been my favourite game, equipped as I am with so much data.
The unfortunate outcome of this particular pastime is how obsessively focused on myself I am being, perhaps have always been, but then, what good am I to other people when I cannot even read a book, make a meal, recognise my own face?
Basic, human things. I like to think I am slowly working my way towards being someone for other people, eventually.
Until then, every turkey is I and I am every turkey.
This has all been more than enough to be getting on with, though now the happiest season has arrived to make us all miserable.
No, that is not fair; I do love Christmas, in theory.
I love the decorations and the pomp and the rituals and the twinkly lights and the wrapping of presents – beauty for beauty’s sake.
In a world that seems to want everything to be faster, cheaper, busier, more efficient, it feels like an opportunity to pause and take stock, to appreciate things.
If I were in charge, Christmas would be my favourite day of the year.
It is more a question of capacity, and expectations, I suppose.
This is why in practice, I tend to find the dawn before the thing more gratifying than whatever main event the collective cultural anticipation is building towards.
And this is never truer than at this time of year.
The after can be nice in its own way, too.
The right kind of memory becomes a diamond – a gift I give my future self by enduring whatever pressure or intensity the big thing might bring.
Memories, by their nature, have been processed, and can be revisited in my own time, at my own pace, without the physical elements that bring about so much stress.
If I could live in a memory, in my head, I absolutely would.
I have certainly given it my best try. There is something else stirring, though, uncontrolled – a backlog of processing that has clogged the system and triggered the alarm, now demanding attention – since I began waking in my childhood bed.
It is hard not to panic; peace of mind already a scarcity, and now a new threat looming.
So, I focus on my breath. Here is one rare hour where I can turn off the night-time air-conditioning, a protective measure against fluctuating humidity, and crack the window to let cool air rush in.
It moves around the room like water, fresh and not yet weighed down.
It is the time for being in my body, breathing this air.
If I could store it, I would. Instead, I have to exist for the rest of the day in a mild state of hypoxia because the air isn’t right, or I forget how to properly breathe.
Based on my current trajectory, I do wonder if I might genuinely asphyxiate in the coming months.
It would not happen in my sleep; it would happen at the supermarket self-service check-out while the screen flashes at me to wait for an attendant because I have made some kind of weight-based error.
That is where I feel it the most, this lack of air.
Of course, I am already thinking too far ahead, when I have only been home recovering for a few weeks, and about dying a bizarre and unlikely public death, because I am struggling with the adjustment, and hyperbole is baked in, unfortunately.
As a child, Mum would call me a hypochondriac, while Dad preferred ‘drama queen’, and this says a lot, I think, about the way I existed in Elsie and Chris’ eyes.
Disordered? Artistic? Two sides of the same coin, perhaps.
Perception is everything, only I don’t seem to be able to perceive myself without the guidance of other people at all.
I am amorphous, waiting – mirrored glass reflecting back whatever fragments of themselves they wish to see.
It is also possible I travelled home via time machine – my parents having organised everything from the taxi to the airport and the flight to the real estate agent who took on the rubbish removal and bond clean, just leave the keys in the letterbox, happy to do that, not a problem at all – so who knows what else went on beyond my understanding.
This makes it even harder to conceptualise a new and present version of myself, which will only become more apparent once my siblings arrive.
I no longer wish to be youngest daughter problem child?, which is a problem, especially for me.
It is hard to think about them, barely aware of myself as I currently am, but when I try, I imagine them as children, all of us children.
Luke, a lot of performance for our parents – eldest child, only boy – but he could be gentle in his quiet moments.
Olivia, the opposite – performing kindness towards me in their presence, but less soft when we are alone.
These facts are olives, of course, fragments of which I can be sure, but not of their scope in comparison to anything else.
For now, they make the whole. My mind, in any state, likes to have a place for everything, and everything in its place.
And it feels a bit late in the game to be trying to change that.
Or at least, this is not the week for the fixing of oneself.
If I can avoid a backslide into complete psychological breakdown, I will count that as a win.
Upstairs, the good plates are out, and the worst cushions are away, because heaven forbid anyone bear witness to the sequin cushion with the few missing sequins, or the big corduroy one with fringing that is slightly frayed.
We could not possibly have that. No, Christmas is a time when everything is perfect, and no one says the wrong thing.
My siblings will be flawless, my mother will be stressed, my father will be busy, and I will offset all of this by being the main cause and/or focus of everyone’s distress.
I am the pressure valve, the safety mechanism that allows frustrations to be controlled.
Who knows what will happen when that mechanism is itself faulty, malfunctioning.
As a child, I could be relied on to draw those frustrations by waking too early, or opening the wrong presents, or refusing to eat the food Elsie had painstakingly prepared, or not being adequately grateful, or refusing to hug a distant relative on cue.
These are the memories that have stuck. I was difficult, though back then this was less deliberate.
In recent, adult years, I have found new ways to embody that word.
I have tried to make it easy for others to get where they need to go, emotionally; everything in its place, you know – overindulging in drinking, or being too hungover to eat, or not showing up, or giving my younger cousin a cigarette that she pretended was her first one to avoid becoming her family’s own safety mechanism.
And this year, well, I have no energy and no idea how to be a person, so I am sure I will not disappoint, though perhaps in unprecedented ways.
It is almost thrilling to consider. My plan is to spend the week either sedated or dissociated.
Either way, minimal speaking is the goal.