Category: non-fiction

Steal time. A letter to my fellow creatives

To my fellow artists, writers, and creatives, I implore you:

that this is what we must do, so as not to die while our hearts are still pulsing and our breath still escapes our mouths in laboured gasps disguised as whispers,

this is what we must do:

steal time.

Yes, this is a particular type of thievery, but in this world, what other choice do we have?

Steal time from whomever demands your lifeforce at minimum wage, from whomever leaves you feeling more machine than organism, from whomever leaves you trudging rather than dancing.

Steal time because the moment we are born into adulthood, time is stolen from us,

and you can always earn money, shag someone on Tinder, binge-watch that Netflix series. There will always be more groceries to bag, or data to input or reports to write.

Time is the most precious natural commodity there is and if they could, they’d float in on the stock exchange like water, or power or other things that should never be

monetised.

I implore you, this is not merely a moral imperative, it is an act of resistance, to…

steal time from your employer, who won’t give you sick pay, won’t give you time off with a dying loved one, who won’t pay you what you’re worth

because it offends their sensibilities, their new religion, their worship of the bottom line.

And this is how you steal time, call it what you like, quiet quitting or just retrieving your humanity from a machine that assigns you a number that’s not a unique datapoint:

write stories in your lunchbreak, compose symphonies in endless meetings, imagine landscapes during the back-to-back shifts you’ve been asked to work,

write on the backs of report templates, on the backs of invoices, on the front of student exam papers, reclaim what it is that makes you human,

resist because the world needs your light,

 more than it needs company men and women, marketing gurus and hedge-fund managers, more than it needs people who only see living beings

as resources to exploit.

What they don’t tell you

Prose poetry in three movements

What they don’t tell you (movement one)

…is that you’ll be clutching at the edges of life, ripping nails clean from your nail bed, leaving bloodied fingertips too wet to grasp ledges. What they don’t tell you is that it’s a loss, nobody tells you that you’ll rake the fur lined, dust coated carpets for powdered residue, that you’ll sneak into friends’ bedrooms just to hold their prescription Endone in your hands, just because…

because there is hope in the holding.

What they don’t tell you is that instead of poppy seeds, you’ll be downing opened bottles of Jacob’s Creek Chardonnay, three months opened and more vinegar than wine, that you’ll be eating when your body is not hungry, grease drenched burgers and cardboard fries, but that there is more than one type of hunger. And you’ll run by the river, through muddy, waterlogged grass, around and around soccer fields until your knees lock in protest and the lactic acid paralyses your calves.

That when you can no longer run, you will crawl home and lie on your rug weeping, that the weeping will collect in a pool around your foetal form. What they don’t tell you is that sobriety is grief-stricken, a period of mourning.

That gear was a life partner that held you,

and that person is no longer there.

What they don’t tell you (movement two)

….is that your skin will curl and break, that wounds will weep, and an infection will break, that the compulsion to create will seep from your body. Boils will open and pus will leak, and you will write in a way that you have never written,

in between students and clients, on office note pads, with scratchy ballpoint pens, on pizza take away menus and envelopes screaming overdue bills,

you’ll write

in a grasping, clutching way, and you’ll be driven to sound, to rhythm, to the edges of life, that your ears will sharpen to your violin, attune to the hidden notes on that fretless instrument you play. That your ears will recognise that B is shrill, stern like an old school ma’am, that D is resonant but calm, a yogi and

these are moments you don’t crave opiates,

moments of softness or heart, your cat’s paws on your chest for instance, a friend who buys you Thai chilli basil tofu and steamed rice for lunch, and laughter,

yes laughter, untethered.

What they don’t tell you (movement three)

They use the word clean, but that’s a misnomer, as though passing a drug test means your body is free of the impurities and that’s not true,

the body remembers.

cells remember.

And how can they not remember flesh breaking and heart calcifying and a child running to the corners of breathing so nobody can break her further

Flesh and bone hold your own trauma and the cells your parents’ and grandparents’ trauma. And what do you do with this epigenetic fate?

You pick up your violin and play the saddest of scales, D minor, the musical key for dirges and laments until your neighbour bangs on your ceiling and you stop, but the knowledge is there. You’re working out how to live with the library of knowledge trapped in subcutaneous fat, you’re working out how to hold yourself when gear was the only love who knew how to hold you.

folklore

listen, a bowl of raw rice mixed with salt keeps the slighted spirits away, or the unsavoury sort of ancestor, the kind that raped himself into the family tree, and if you’re living in lean times save the rice grains and bribe the local Tom to wait at the door

forgo the pedigrees, the Siberian, Norwegian, Persian!

listen, Filipino cats are good Christians and dutiful, they’ll trick the devil, and if the devil comes to your doorstep, the cat is your sentinel, all riddle speech and slight of paw-

you can enter if you count all the hairs on my body

and when the cat won’t freeze for the fur count,

the lore demands Satan seeks souls elsewhere, perhaps in a household that keeps dogs-

you’ve got cats, of course you do, you’re single and forty and therefore an unquantifiable threat and yes you could manage the devil yourself, haven’t you always sorted these things out? You could coax the tuxedo to the window,

place the calico at the door.

today you’re wanting white rice, and you’ll share some with the errant spirits because life is hard on any astral plane, besides you’ll all feel better for some fat rice, high GI short grain or jasmine, soft grain clouds, starch bowls that feel like love instead of satiety, and this is what you think love is,

carbs that switch to sugar and nestle in the forever belly, and

when you lived with your aunt who was not really your aunt but your mother’s lover, the rice cooker sat pride of place, electronic hearth, and heart

and that night before your mother took you to the Philippines to murder your stepfather’s girlfriend, you ate at the Australian Chinese take away that sold crinkled McCains Frozen chips deep fried in lukewarm oil, but you chose the egg fried rice with salted ham and tinned corn and peas, because your mother was too livid to cook, and you were eleven and this counted as a treat in a regional Australian town.

Fat Rice (non-fiction in progress)

I am craving white rice.

Fatty rice. Fat rice.

Happy rice.

High GI magic filled with carbohydrates and calories and sugar. When we lived with my aunt who was not really my aunt but your lover, there was always a pot of cooked rice. There is a joke circling the internet currently, an Asian man runs out of rice and though there is other food to eat, he has failed his family.

Despite countless diets, low carb, high protein, low fat, it is white rice that spreads inside me like a warm hug. The hipster European in me says eat the brown rice, the quinoa, the zucchini noodles. But white rice feels like home.

Fear and guilt also feel like home, but these days I’m all for harm minimisation. This is what I’ve learned after years of therapy, after training as a therapist myself. Eat the fatty rice.

….And about potatoes, and meat.

When I was a child, I thought that potatoes were an expensive food. You rarely bought them. On those rare occasions that you did buy them, you would buy a single potato, chopping it finely to put it in a casserole dish. Or there would be mashed potatoes, a treat and not a staple side dish. It didn’t occur to me that potatoes were not a Filipino staple.

I always liked vegetables and rice, a symbol of poverty in the Philippines. And yes I liked meat that didn’t taste like meat. I remember watching you fry bloodied meat or boil pink chicken legs with blue veins turning black in the boiling pot. It seemed counter-intuitive to eat what was once alive. Perhaps these thoughts are a mark of my privilege. When you are hungry, you will eat anything that is edible, and things that are also inedible.

These days I am vegan, another choice that might leave you aghast.

Children can be disappointing, one of my colleagues told me.

Excerpt from “A debt that cannot be repaid.”

Voice binding (non fiction in progress)

I talk for a living, but I cannot speak. I’m not mute, my voice box can form sounds, and the relevant areas of my brain (Broca and Wernke’s) function perfectly well. But I cannot speak.

I haven’t spoken to you in twelve years.

Neither of us is dead.

I am a writer, and it is only through my hands that words become true. The sounds that I make are rarely true sounds. They are scripted, declarative, procedural. I can lecture and teach, but I cannot use my mouth to form the right words. When I like a person, I cannot tell them that I like them, and instead I use my mouth to fill the air with ideas that filter through me but are not from me. I can talk about the history of criminology, baroque music, renaissance art, the current geo-political situation. But I cannot speak the truth inside of me.

So, I haven’t spoken to you in twelve years. For those who don’t know my why, I am at best, a gullible child influenced by nefarious elements, or at worst, a cruel and ungrateful daughter.

Evil.

We are all born with such potentiality, an encoding so once we are ready to walk, we walk. And then we run, and then there are the fine motor skills. I was born able to speak, but my voice was bound before I could ever learn the resonance of my spoken words. Yes, not foot binding but voice binding. This is the best way to describe it.

By using this phrase, ‘voice binding,’ I can explain why I haven’t spoken to you for over ten years. I am not being spiteful. I am afraid. I am an educated woman, reliant on only herself.

But you terrify me, and I cannot speak.

Excerpt from “A debt that can’t be repaid” (Non fiction work in progress)

The options after return ( non-fiction in progress)

Suicide is always an option for me. It is certainly not the most favourable. But I am a woman who likes to anticipate all possibilities, I must note the points of ingress and egress. Yes, I need an escape route. I am cursing myself for returning here, to this place of jagged, curved beauty, to this place of fear. Only a person inflicted by Thanatos, the death instinct, enters a poem into a competition in her hometown. A town she has avoided for 12 years, because of her mother and all that her mother entails. What am I, but someone who flirts with liminality? The hometown writer’s centre publishes my poem; I agree to read at the launch. Rather than using my pen name, they publish my actual name on their website. I don’t blame them; the Arts is not funded in this country. They are understaffed by overworked volunteers. A quick google search and you could trace me.

Thinking of you makes me suicidal.

Feeling hunted, I return to the place that birthed me in fear. It is a narrow place, nature dictating where intruders can settle, a strip of land between escarpment, between mountains and the Pacific Ocean. I have learned from the fearful place that there is always an escape. The sea will always take me, and the headlands will oblige, if I ask. A few loose rocks and the cliff will release its cargo.

This strip of land is beautiful, in the same way that the violin is beautiful, with its curvatures and jagged edges, depth and tone. If I stand in the correct space, I’ll find the natural harmonics, the precise piece of earth that vibrates. And here is the hope. If you find me, let the earth take me instead. This is my plan. I will walk past the Norfolk Pines, those pencil point ones denuded of needles, those ones that house generations of cockatoos, trained in the art of fried food thievery by the incorrigible seagulls. I will press wet sand between my toes and watch the patches of sea twist brown and green and blue. The water will have me before I ever return to you.

What is wrong with me that I am terrified of you? We share DNA. You birthed me. How can I fear a person who is half of myself?