Untitled

A while ago, I was visiting a beach. I had come there to write. And I did, sitting on a lichen crusted bench. I was looking down as the little flies gathered around my docs, and the gravel, clawing up from the dirt, had ricocheted itself past the timber frame surrounding the bench, and into the lawn it’s carved itself into. I should probably describe where I am. I’ve been told that I lose myself to details. But I hear a Mum cheering behind me, so I can’t help but pay attention. She’s with her kid, and he’s on a bike twice his size, it’s blue or green or red, and he’s just ridden it alone.  I didn’t see their faces, so I can’t describe them – but I smile, without teeth, without them noticing me. I’m a dot against the sea’s horizon, on a bench concreted into a hill shaped lawn, at three in the afternoon. With the flies, you look out to point danger, over cozy corner, over the beach in front of you, over the tips of the trees, and you stare as I did. 

I saw the sea birds duck below the clouds, black cutouts on the canvas. Think about the frames made in films, the stills of motion one after the other, the wings extend, bend down, and down, then straighten below and repeat upwards and downwards, on and on until they land. See these frames laid out next to one another in a grid, spaces emerge around them, connected as tubes, in a web holding their being.

I’ve collected shells for as long as I remember. Jars upon jars of them. Some were gifted, turns out my family collected these spiralling exoskeletons too. I had a granny who collected things too, but her things were owl things. I speak of her in past tense, because she is dead, in my mind at least. I don’t think I’ll speak with her again.  And I don’t like owls anymore.

Everyone in the house was tucked away in their nests, and a barn owl had just run into the glass sliding door to our backyard. We had been living in Victoria for a year at this point. It was dusk, the light trickling in with a navy hue, and the barn owl had its orbs fixed on me between the pillows of the mouldy patio couch. Two mirrors of the void, enshrined with a heart of feathers. They still don’t believe it happened, because nobody saw its face but me.

On bikes I could escape. My legs shifting peddles, up and down, on and on until Mum shouted at me to come back. I wouldn’t, I would just wait for them to catch up again and fly again.

“Fly you fools!”

 I don’t think I would be able to go on if I were Frodo. And as I watch this scene for the millionth time, I can’t believe that I would ever mistake Gandalf’s line as “run you fools!”.

I heard that the billionaires are building doomsday bunkers, you’d think they’d try a more subtle admission of guilt, but I suppose they’ve offset all of their brains to AI and their underlings by this point. Nothingness must feel filling when money seeps from their bloody hands, like the empty shaft of a loaded gun, residue tacky against the metal, waiting to be used against the ones who made them. Children in suits, pigs with ties, boys and bullets and beaten immigrants. Smaug is so much cooler than these tiny men, plus he’s a dragon! And on top of that, played by Benedict Cumberbatch.

A meditation exercise: As you lie down, arms out, palms open to the sky, legs relaxed, feel as your body dissipates into root. Down down in spiral tendrils, down down into the earth…

Now as your body is vanished into energy, focus on your head. Expand your mind to the building…then to the town…then to the country…the planet…then finally to nothing.

It’s a painful thing to see the family you once loved, decide that yours is inadequate. Something to be stomped out and lefthomeless, little flies crushed into gravel. I can’t say much, but imagine my child hands crossed, at the front door to my old house on the property, my granny behind the mesh threshold. Her face had gotten wrinklier in the past year, her personality sour, that mind of hers disappearing, but she had somehow remembered that I was now thirteen. I didn’t let her in, so we spoke at the door, her on the outside looking in. Happy Birthday.  I didn’t smile. She gave me a gift. Thanks Patricia. She left. No hug.

The empire looks evil on film, so how come everyone loves to suck them off in real life.

When I look back to the objects, I see their porcelain eyes. I see how their value is abstracted in this collection of things. Their old frames colliding against the new. Mostly though, I see how they found stillness. A resolve, I guess. You might think, that I think, that they are lonely away from ‘home’. And I do. And the tips of trees are, but they have the wind with them. And the wind picks up the feathers in their wings. The tides sweep the seaweed on shore. The gum trees drop their gumnuts. And the collection of things, find collections of things in a collection of things in nothing. Stars eat stars, eat stars eat stars, and feathers find themselves a place in my collection.

I threw the gift in the bin, I don’t know if I opened it. Before she knocked on the door, before she drove up to the property over the hills and bridges, I had decided that she didn’t deserve her title anymore. I don’t like owls anymore.

Sometimes I yearn to be a speck of dust. At least then I could travel the world for free. Moneyless and happy in the arms of earth herself.

I want to say that I have hope that the world will be okay, but it’s hard to believe that when the children are burning, and as the lead punctures flesh. Maybe the bunkers are a protection from a reset. One red button away from nothing. They don’t deserve a reset though.

Did you know my middle name is hope?

It’s my 18th birthday and no one is talking to me, eyes gloss over me as I try to sneak in a sentence, anywhere I can, anywhere. Words bubble up and disappear as they reach their ears. I’ve been drinking, but alcohol tends to do this thing where it hits me all at once and I want to cry and scratch at my acne scabs and drink more and throw up. I don’t want to throw up. Three friends leave to go clubbing, my birthday was their pregame apparently. Two more are picked up. They all pat me on my back as I hunch over the toilet seat, hair tied back, water bottle on the ground. On the sticky ground from layers and layers of room mist and maybe piss spray from my younger brothers’         shitty aiming.

I count the ‘Pam the birds’ when I head to the city. The artists use the scaffolding on the bridges as canvases. The birds move up and down ever so slightly as I move with the train. I imagine it is a collaboration of artists doing this. Do they know why they do it?

I count the rusted cars when I head to the city. Skeletons of amber metal left across the plains of seemingly endless yellow grassland. Through the space where window’s left, miniature paintings emerge. Angles of the world captured in the frame of these old cars. If this land belongs to the government, do these cars belong as well? Like my name, written on paper, scattered across databases on and on. Do I belong to my name or does my name belong to them?

There’s no countdown for 1.5 degrees anymore and Nepal has just been water boarded. A few videos fell on my for-you page, for about 3 days, and then nothing. My algorithm went back to climate change doomerism, Pauline Hanson and theories on the new Spiderman movie. Mass surveillance is good if you are good. So if peter parker catches the bad guy with it so can they, because they are supposedly good.

Palantir and Coles are going through a break-up right now. Their relationship was a co-dependant mess. Maybe it’ll be good for them (us). But fuck, it better now be a ‘taking a break’ type situation.

On Sunday I ran into the sea. 11 degrees, overcast, sand squeaking under my heels as I close the distance with the ocean and me. I ran and ran and the water could not restrict me. I want to say I dived, but I think I stumbled. The cold is painful. And I still feel it now under my skin, rippling. Heat sinks into muscle but skin cools. There’s an in-between, a transition, so that when my skin finally warms once again it feels, different. Heat sinks, I sink and the cold forms a barrier — and it’s moving.

Trees blur on moving trains and the canola fields are pools of sulphuric yellow. Rows and rows of buds on buds.

At one of my high-schools we did a meditation exercise before class. And in the gallery I sit and feel the sit a feel the sound creating sonical waves in the vision of my minds eye. Expanding, sinking, upwards, downwards, outwards, inwards. I sit and watch the flies/birds/moths on the screen in the dark room. I’m falling asleep so I sit with the museum of objects. The artist calls it the museum of loneliness, but they aren’t lonely because I’m with them.

I have a friend that sees their memories as files to be recalled and archived. She can recall them at will and remembers almost everything. She has aphantasia — she has no mind’s eye — so they are just… thoughts? I can’t conceptualise it, but I’m she can conceptualise memories being conceptualised in their complete paintings. I see my mind as a web.

I tilt my head at the objects, I stare back at them, to the door, to the receptionist, to the road and the other roads and the NGV and the clouds, stars, nothing. And Nepal. And the people in private jets. Land with corpses and buildings with no roofs. And the nuclear weapons. And the flies back home. And the sound rippling, waves rippling the cold is under my skin and I can feel it breathing for me. And I feel sick now, I feel sick and I see them all moving upwards, downwards, outwards, inwards, everywhere as the collection. The universe runs away and the stars squeak as they are ripped apart by black holes.

Apparently Einstein theorised the possibility of white holes. Like black holes, but they at throwing things back into our universe. That would mean that black holes are a portal to other worlds and theoretically we could travel to them. A new collection of things. But I wouldn’t trust any of this information because I think I got this from a YouTube video.

I have hope that the good-good will ‘win’. But before that the sea will take some more with her. But I don’t hate her for it, it’s not her fault.

There’s rain on the train window and the clouds creep in over the gallery and back home, in NSW, the sun decided that September would be summer. The birds wings go up up up, down down down. Frames are still on the gallery floor. My granny drives away from the property for the last time. And the graffiti tells me to smile. I do, with my teeth, at the stars because I feel them rippling under my skin.

And I find myself in a collection of things in things, and my memories hold my hand as I step out onto the concrete pavement outside the gallery.