yumiwords

[yumiwords]

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (1975)

https://vocal.media/geeks/picnic-at-hanging-rock-1975

[yumiwords]

LOGAN (2017), REVIEWED

https://vocal.media/geeks/why-logan-2017-is-the-best-superhero-movie-of-the-2010s

[yumiwords]

INFERNAL AFFAIRS (2002), REVIEWED

https://vocal.media/geeks/film-review-infernal-affairs

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nineninesix

[yumiwords]

MY FIRST SUMMER (2020), REVIEWED

https://vocal.media/geeks/film-review-my-first-summer

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THE HARRY POTTER FILMS - RANKED

https://vocal.media/geeks/the-harry-potter-films-ranked

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WHICH OSCAR WINNERS ARE ACTUALLY WORTH SEEING

https://vocal.media/geeks/which-oscar-winners-are-actually-worth-seeing

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3 FILM TO WATCH INSTEAD OF WONDER WOMAN 1984

https://vocal.media/geeks/3-films-to-watch-instead-of-wonder-woman-1984

[yumiwords]

BAZ LUHRMANN’S FILMS - RANKED

https://vocal.media/geeks/baz-luhrmann-s-films-ranked

[yumiwords]

5 AUSTRALIAN COMING-OF-AGE FILMS YOU MUST SEE

https://vocal.media/geeks/the-5-australian-coming-of-age-films-you-must-see

[yumiwords]

turn on the light

I never read the Harry Potter books growing up. I flat out refused, adamantly opposed to spending years of my young life dedicated to one single story. My sister read all seven books in only a couple of months. I admired her, like little sisters do, as she timed it perfectly to start the series a few weeks before the last one came out. But my admiration soon gave way to envy as I watched her finish the seventh book. It wasn’t the ease with which she devoured the series that I was jealous of, but the sheer comradery she was able to share with what felt like the rest of the world in 2007.

It’s not that I am a bad reader, or that I don’t enjoy reading. I’m just s l o w. If I don’t give my upmost attention to every word, doing the right voices for the right characters, reading sentences with their required breaths and punctuation, I’m lost. Storytelling is to be savoured; it must never be rushed.

I watched all of the movies, of course, just like every other kid growing up in the mid 2000s, but I was no fanatic. I mean, I loved them, I truly did. If I were to compare my affection of these films against myself, it would prove vast and expansive, a love rich with devotion to the trials and tribulations of the three best friends I’d never meet. But in a world in which accepts the existence of Harry Potter like it accepts that the earth is round, my affection wilted compared to those of any other kid who claimed to be a Potter fan.

In my early years of high school, I’d trot along with my new friends to the library at lunchtime and watch as other kids would compete in Harry Potter trivia competitions. (Because that’s the world we live in, right? Harry Potter trivia competitions are a totally normalised high school experience.) Having watched the films enough times to distinguish one elf from the next, I thought that maybe I’d be one of those quiet trivia champions, knowing the answers to rare questions of the Potter-verse that these book nerds had no idea of.

I got quite the shock in finding out that no, it was indeed I who had no idea. I can name the four houses, easily, and the three Deathly Hallows, that’s for sure, but what was all this nonsense of a poltergeist? And whatever was a SPEW? I had no idea, and I frankly didn’t care. After this, I came to terms pretty easily with the fact that many of the intricacies of the wizarding world would remain mysterious to me for the rest of my non Potter-reading life.

Nevertheless, a considerable proportion of my adolescence still managed to revolve through the rotating doors of Potter-related experiences, including an unfathomable amount of Potter movie-marathon sleepovers. My friends and I would bravely attempt to stay awake an entire night and watch all, seven – no, Olivia, there’s eight! remember! – eight movies, promising each other – seriously, Bella, you have to promise this time! – to not fall asleep. We’d be fuelled by sugar and excitement and the kind of energy that comes from weekend friendships in high school. That is to say, the sheer novelty of staying up all night more often than not proved a little more the point than actually paying attention to the chronicles of the boy with the scar.

Recently, I’ve been missing that sugar and excitement and sheer naivety of teenager-hood more than ever. I’ve found myself reaching for the bubble-gum pop albums that sound-tracked my early years of high school, and I’ve been re-discovering a lot of the YA books that used to accompany me on tram rides to school. But I’ve found little in the way of filmic entertainment that’s done it for me. My brain’s a little too fuzzy to concentrate on something new, my emotion’s a little too fried to care for something old. Film has always played a massive role in my life, a way for me to have a sneaky-peaky into the outside world while I stay firmly tucked in bed. For once though, I don’t really want to know about the world outside right now. I don’t want to have a peak into what’s going on. It’s all a bit scary and confusing and kind of exhausting.

So I don’t know what has prompted me to scour the internet tonight, after I’ve already turned out the lights and shut my bedroom door. I had the full intention of sleeping, my mouse systemically closing every Facebook, email and university lecture tab, watching the little windows shut up shop for the night, closing the blinds to the world outside. But I’ve found myself pulling a pair of those blinds back open, this time looking into a different world.

I haven’t watched all eight Harry Potter films chronologically since those sleepovers in high school. In fact, I don’t know if I’ve even seen a single one of the films since those weekends of new friendship and sugar-fuelled all-nighters. But tonight, I’ve found myself reaching for a world of fantasy that feels a little more like home than the reality we’re existing in right now does.

I don’t know why I’ve reached out and reeled back into the Potter films. Maybe it’s the part of me that misses my friends and the tight squeezes on greetings, the kisses on both cheeks and I-missed-yous, even if it had only been a couple of days. Or maybe it’s a part of me that reaches for my own sort of Potter comradery that evolved in those sleepovers, the endless battles against sleep that four thirteen-year-old girls could never win, yet they would forever go down trying. Or maybe it’s just the familiarity of the story itself, the knowing of how things will end, knowing that no matter how many times it surprises me and has me rooting for Hermione, the story never changes.

So tonight, I’ve crawled a little deeper under the doona, tucked the edges a little tighter. I’ve cast my eyes to my laptop nestling on my bed, and I welcome each note of that bell-piano warmly. I welcome the sound of coming home. This comfort I’ve found in stealing myself away to a familiar world of war and corruption, of villains and heroes, of good and evil, of utter and pure magic, is one I never would have imagined three teenage wizards to afford adult-me.

Finding hope in a world that is imaginary feels silly when I put it into words. The story of Harry, his lightning-bolt scar and his two misfit friends exists only as a coincidence of words that his author happened to place together. His whole actuality is merely letters on a page, cast from thin air. So maybe it is silly to garner hope for this tragic world I live in from a fictional fantasy story for kids.

But watching these films again, I am reminded not that I must conjure hope; not that I must, like Harry with his wand, craft something out of thin air. But I am reminded that hope is in fact always there. I just need to look.

Re-watching these films now brings new meaning to the stories that echo my youth. This tale of growing up and staying hopeful, of losing and grieving, but of always, always loving throughout, ricochets the type of hope I needed when I was young, when everyday spent as a teenager felt like the end of the world. And now that hope continues to echo into my adulthood, into a world that maybe actually is ending.

There’s this one line in the third Harry Potter film that seems to hold continuous rent in the back of my mind, a little nook in my head that I crawl into when the world outside gets too dark. I feel like I’ve carried it with me forever, replaying it a little louder when the light outside becomes a little dimmer.

At the beginning of Harry’s third year at Hogwarts, Headmaster Albus Dumbledore addresses the student body of young witches and wizards. Whilst dishing out some ol’ magic wisdom for the troubling times that he can sense coming ahead, Dumbledore firmly assures his students, myself included, with exactly what we need to hear:

Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.

This singular moment has stayed with me forever. It has stayed with me through the sleepovers and through the growing up and through the disasters of the world outside today. Dumbledore speaks these words at the beginning of the third film, but their meaning is constant throughout all eight.

I’ve never read the Harry Potter books, not a single one, but I’ve seen all eight, yes eight, of the films. The devoted Potter fans with their theories and their trivia will keep their heads in their books, but I think I’ll choose to cast my eyes toward Professor Dumbledore as he speaks to the young witches and wizards of Hogwarts. With the flick of a wrist, I escape through my computer into Harry’s world for comfort. With the flick of his words, Dumbledore reminds me that maybe there is comfort to be found in my own world. I just need to find it.

[yumiwords]

the ladies in this house

Four.

There are four people in this family. One two three four. Four is the amount of times my sister closes her bedroom window before bed. Four soft thumps of the glass collapsing against the windowsill, every single night. Then it’s the back door (three), the front door (also three), and then her bedroom window again (another four times). Just to be sure, I guess, that no mosquitos nor monsters nor bad-intentioned men sneak through.

Fourteen.

That’s how many times windows and doors need to be closed before this house can fall back into the silence that screams from the walls. I listen to this routine of window shutting and door closing each night whilst I watch the cracks in the roof of my bedroom grow. Fourteen is often the age that the monsters under the bed start to seem a little less scary than the ones in real life. Fourteen is how old I am now, with my freshly braced teeth and recently developed acne. Fourteen was the age of my sister when she started this ritual of hers, doing what she can to protect this house from the monsters outside.

Four.

That’s how many glasses of wine my mother drinks when she says she isn’t drinking. Four is most nights now, four has been most nights since my sister started her window shutting. It’s a dance they do, my sister and my mother, a dance they do that only I can see. My sister counts her windows and doors; my mother doesn’t count her glasses and bottles. I can see both, I can see the windowpanes chipping from an excessive amount of shutting, I can see the empty bottles of chardonnay from an excessive amount of worrying. My mother worries about my sister and my sister worries about herself, and my father doesn’t pay enough attention to notice.

Fourteen is how old I am now, watching the ceiling above my bed grow wrinkles and frowns. Like every other night, I watch this map of veins as I listen to the symphony of this house. Doors shutting, windows closing, bottles opening. I remind myself that I should tell my parents about the cracks, how they grow whilst I sleep. I wonder if that means something, if maybe this house is falling apart. I wonder if that did happen, if maybe then we would talk. Maybe then we would we talk about the collapsed home at our feet, or maybe we would continue to step over it blindly. Genuine ignorance for the sake of artificial bliss. I decide that we probably wouldn’t talk about it, that this roof will close in and the walls will crumble before my parents talk about anything.

The next morning, I stay in bed instead of rising with the sun like I normally do. I don’t brush my teeth as my sister opens the bathroom window twice, nor pour milk into my cornflakes as my mum slugs into the kitchen with deep bags under her eyes. I don’t eat my breakfast self-consciously across the table from my dad, the crunching sound between my teeth somehow the loudest noise in this house. Instead I stay in bed, not to sleep but just to see, to see if anyone would notice if I did.

Staying home from school was something I revelled in as a kid. A quiet house with a ticking clock was a cheeky reminder of all the things the rest of the world was doing whilst I watched daytime TV. But today I stay in bed. The novelty of being socially isolated from the word on those sick days has worn off, replaced by the desire to remain physically isolated from my own world. This desire is only bolstered by the simple fact that no one knows I’m here.

The silence that pervades the space between the rooms of this house is less obvious in the day. When there’s only me existing in this space, the lack of verbal conversation remains more of an assumption than a defiance. A defiance is when four people manage to survive under the same cracking roof with the inability to converse.

The ladies in this house arrive home first. My sister slips silently through the front door, school bag tow. Although we attend the same school, my tendency to waffle in the corridor after the final bell means we don’t normally catch the same tram home. As I daydream at my locker, my sister would already be at the tram stop, a few steps away from the rest of the kids. For this reason, I know that she doesn’t think it weird that she didn’t see me on the tram today.

My mother’s entrance to this house is loud in the most dysfunctional sense. The slamming of the door, the dumping of the groceries, the clinking of glass wine bottles. No words need to leave her mouth for her to announce her presence home from work. She makes dinner and eats it alone. She leaves three bowls in the fridge. One two three. Three bowls for us to claim when we too eat our dinners alone.

My father arrives home much later, usually directly from some undisclosed meeting or corporate dinner or after-work drinks. If it’s a dinner, my mum will scream at him that he should’ve told her, that she wouldn’t’ve bothered slaving away for hours in the kitchen for him. And instead of saying sorry, instead of saying thank you, he tells her that she would’ve been in the kitchen anyway.

Tonight though, my father arrives home not from a dinner but from drinks. A drunken head-start that brings him up to speed with the ground my mother has already covered in his absence. Eventually, after window shutting, door closing, bottle opening, bottle disposing, the house again falls silent. This house is silent, the occupants are sleeping, and I haven’t moved all day.

Twenty-four.

I contemplate my existence, contemplate the reality of my being in a world that for twenty-four hours hasn’t acknowledged my being. I could maybe live here, maybe cease all movement outside of these four walls and wait for the roof to crumble. It’s not a powerful urge of mine to stay here, to bury myself in pillows and plaster, yet it feels an easier course of survival than rolling out of bed each morning into a house that burns with silence. The fire under these floorboards was lit many years ago, fuelled by weird habits and unspoken vices, ignored for the sake of familial tolerance and civil co-inhabitancy. Even as the flames have grown louder, engulfed the space between door slamming and screaming, not a single one of us four is willing to cool the heat. This house burns with silence and will burn until it crumbles.

The silence has become more tolerable my way, by way of staying in bed. Fourteen is how old I am now, how old I am for one more week, then I will be fifteen. One five. Five is how many weeks it has been since I was last at school, since I last spoke to a person, blood relation or otherwise. Five is how many weeks I have watched these cracks above me grow, grow deeper and wider and longer and thicker. Grow until I can’t tell if there’s any roof left in these cracks.

Four.

Four is how many times my sister closes her window before bed tonight. She’s already closed the back door, and the front door, and her window four times before that. I listen as she opens it again, and pulls it closed. One. Between each motion of pushing and pulling, of opening and closing, I hear the clink of a bottle from down the hall, the clink of a bottle against a wine glass, two, against the recycling bin, three. Meanwhile, with each numerical jump, the cracks above me shake. It’s almost like they’re laughing, they’re laughing and they’re crying and they’re doing so together. They whisper their secrets and giggle at jokes, and they do all the things that this house has not known. Four. That’s the last pull of the window, as the glass hits the sill, as the glass hits the bottle, as the cracks hit the floor.

Plaster buries me in my bed, buries me under my doona and under this house forever. I hear the finality of my existence. I hear the fire burning and the silence screaming. I hear my family standing at my bedroom door, watching. Yet still, I hear no talking.

I almost laugh, I truly almost do, because for every night doors and windows were closed fourteen times, my sister believed she was protecting this house from the monsters outside. And maybe if we opened our mouths, maybe if we talked and maybe if we listened, we would’ve realised that the monsters were inside all along, living right beside us under this crumbled ceiling.

https://odyssey.org.au/short-story-competition-winners-2020/ 

[yumiwords]

best of times / worst of times

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

I’ve never read A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, and although I’d like to think that one day I’ll get around to it, Charles and I both know this probably isn’t going to happen.

When I was about thirteen I did a drama class after school on Wednesdays, the humble beginnings of my (very, very) short-lived acting career. Each term, I, alongside a scraggly bunch of stereotypical theatre kids – think jazz hands and randomly bursting into song – would learn and rehearse and then finally perform a play, usually based on some random piece of literature that was so ancient it would guarantee no one could be sued for copyright. This particular term we were given a dumbed-down theatrical copy of A Tale of Two Cities, each of us cast as either a character from the original story or as a completely made up character that probably had no place being in a Dickens universe. I could not tell you which character I played nor what the story is vaguely about (a revolution perhaps ?), but I could to this day almost certainly stand on a stage and scream at you the first lines of Dickens’ story.

IT WAS THE BEST OF TIMES IT WAS THE WORST OF TIMES

I’ve thought about these lines a lot lately. This idea of remembering something as the best or the worst. I think we tend to look back on things in this way. Through the nature of good storytelling and the distance between recounting events and actually living through them, the pointy bits of history always seem to stick out a bit sharper. The most good bits and the most bad bits are easy ways of remembering the course of events, of remembering when we felt at our worst, dealt with our most lost, suffered the most trauma. These pointy bits are the easiest to grab onto, are the ones we love hearing most about. They’re the pandemics and the bushfires and the protests and the deaths; I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that maybe right now is the worst of times.

But much of our lives belong to neither end of the spectrum of good and bad. We tend to do most of our living in between. Having an ok nights sleep and going for an uneventful walk down the street and eating a very average toasted sandwich are things we normally leave out of our storytelling. In the scheme of things, these things won’t matter when we look back from the future. I’m definitely not going to be thinking back on this year as the year of the rona and that below average psychological thriller I watched on Netflix last night. A global pandemic kind of assumes centre stage to the everything else hanging about. The movies and the dinners and the car trips and the grocery shoppings all take a bit of a back seat in their authority to call shotgun to our importance. These things are just things and they’re neither the best nor the worst, but that doesn’t mean they don’t matter.

These are pretty strange times we’re living in (you could almost say - unprecedented - but I’ll spare you). Now it’s beginning to seem like the strangeness has accompanied us long enough for things not to be strange anymore. Are we becoming used to the strangeness? Is absurdity something we’ve accepted as normality? But even so, we’re still just being. Within the strangeness and the absurdity and the utter peculiarity, we still are just being. Since the day the rona was declared a pandemic by WHO, I still have fed my dog and listened to podcasts and brushed my teeth before bed. I still have done all the normal life things that would never have crossed my mind as an option of not doing, no matter how strange things got. Even as social isolation hit pretty hard, and sometimes I’d only breathe within the walls of my bedroom for consecutive days, living still had to be done. No matter how bad the times are, we are simultaneously living a normality. We still breathe and eat and sleep and shit and swear and laugh and cut our toenails.

The curiosity with how we will regard these times in hindsight has seeped into reflections of everything I do. Will I look back on this day as the day I decided to attempt a zine… in a pandemic? Will every time someone mentions Amanda Bynes I’ll think of how I watched What A Girl Wants for the first time… in a pandemic? Will Harry Potter forever be tainted in my mind because of how I’ve devoured the audio books… in a pandemic? These are things I may or may not have done whether the rona decided to pay us a visit or not. These are things that have no relevance to a virus infecting the world, they’re simply just things that are relevant to my existing in this time.

It's only halfway through this shit show of a year but I, like a lot of people, am well keen to get to the finale. I’m pretty happy with labelling twenty-twenty as The Worst Of Times. But just because this is officially the winter of despair, doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to feel anything but. It’s a weird dance in trying to understand that the category of right now is Officially Shit, but the nuances and single steps and the filler to the cracks of the entirety are all pretty beautiful in their own rights. We can live in the best and the worst of times at the same time. Sometimes one does feel a bit bigger than the other, but surviving the worst doesn’t have to mean discounting all of the small goods.

This is probably an incredibly obvious point to make, but it took me a long time to get here. I found it pretty easy to feel complacent in accepting that this year just isn’t my year and there’s nothing I can do to change that. Because that might true. Maybe as soon as I get to the first second of 2021 I’ll write off the past twelve months and pretend none of this ever happened. But I think that in accepting that things are bad, and that we feel bad, and that things might take a little while to feel good, is ok. And it’s ok to feel good when things are bad. It’s ok to have the small wins and triumphs and laughs and joys, whilst still functioning in the worst of times.

All of these things, these small existences and livings and goings ons that fill the space between the bestest and the worstest, will probably all be well and truly forgotten when I’m old and grey and trying to remember what living through this year was like. I probably won’t be forgetting the rona and the way it’s stunned the world. I might remember the cloud of smoke from the bush that blanketed our city. I hope I don’t forget walking in solidarity with our black and Aboriginal Australians. I’ll definitely forget the threat of the Murder Hornets that never came to fruition.

I think what I’m trying to say is that these things, and the ones in between, are the things that make up the space that we’re living in right now. Even in the worst of times, and the best, we’re still just trying to figure out how to be, how to kill time. If we forget the specifics of the little things, I hope we remember that they were still there.

[yumiwords]

spoiler alert

I’m kind of obsessed with the idea of a spoiler alert. That thing that one declares like a siren of warning, a fire alarm beeping before you can even smell the smoke. (Wait, did I say fire? Sorry, I think I spoiled the ending.)

This thing, this idea of alerting someone so as not to potentially ruin a story, is frankly hilarious, but, quite seriously, not to be underestimated. A spoiler alert means business, it means don’t fuck with me. It means hands over ears and humming in high pitch as I get up and make my way to the furthest corner of the room.

I think the thing that fascinates me most about this well-known warning siren is the idea that it protects the knowing of an ending of something that is completely and utterly made up. Like both the beginning and the middle, the end of a story is created just as much out of thin air; it exists only as a coincidence of words that the creator happened to put together on a page. Yet we protect it like there’s no tomorrow. Or maybe, more like there is a tomorrow, a tomorrow in which we will finally sit down and watch Fight Club (so don’t you dare spoil it). Spoiler alerts are dramatic, the weight they carry sometimes just as heavy as the story itself. Spoiler alerts are silly, they’re ludicrous, inane! And that’s why I love them.

A spoiler alert is ridiculous, when you think about it, the way that we fret and we worry about a nugget of a story being revealed in a way that isn’t in its story. Knowing an ending doesn’t change the narrative, the story will still exist as it did before you knew the plot twist.

The words on a page or the voices on TV will not be rewritten based on your friend accidentally slipping you the ending. But you’re probably a human being with feelings, and you probably enjoy the suspense and surprise of watching something for the first time more than watching it again with the ending in mind. We take the time out of the doings and beings of our lives to sit in front of a phone or a TV or a book or what-have-you so we can feel something. We get to know the ins and outs, the ups and downs, the heroes and villains of, no, not our own lives or that of people we know, but of fictional lives of people who we not only do not know, but who don’t even exist.

We invest time, yes, and sometimes money (I’m looking at all you pirates out there), into hearing or watching or listening to stories, but what we invest the most is ourselves, into worlds of fantasy and lives that are imaginary. We grow attached to a story and its characters because we allow ourselves to rest our faith in its creator. There is an unspoken contract of trust created from the beginning moments of every story, an invisible handshake with the consumer and the creator, that they will be the one, the only one, to guide us through to the end. So fuck anyone else for trying.

Emotionally, these stories have us by the leash. What’s that you say? Dumbledore is your favourite character, being the epidemy of all that is hopeful? He’s dead. Oh, and that evil helmet-wearing, deep-voiced hunk that Luke has spent his whole life hating? Well, that’s actually his father.

“What’s the point?” You scream with your arms in the air. “What’s the point of investing another two seasons, of investing any more emotional labour, hours of interest and attention, now that someone just told me who Gossip Girl is?”

And maybe there is no point. Maybe the mystery is as good as the show itself, and once spoiled, so too is the story. Spoiler alerts are silly, and, practically speaking, they don’t change any endings nor alter any fates. But we consume not only characters and actions in our stories, but relationships and feelings and surprises and twists. Emotionally speaking, a spoiler alert is a sacred ritual to be honoured and to be respected. And yeah, Romeo and Juliet both kill themselves in the end. Whoops.

[yumiwords]

memory

I heard this thing the other day that whenever you remember a memory, you’re not only remembering the contents of the memory itself, but also each previous time that memory takes a visit to the forefront of your mind. I just can’t stop thinking about this.

Does this mean that our memories are only a pure memory the first time we remember them? Because each subsequent remembering would mean that we have an added nuance to the original memory, a new spin on the story that is being shaped by the remembering itself, right?

I don’t think I’ve ever used my memory as much as I have in these past few months, during all these unprecedented times. Before 2020, memory was a place in my brain consisting of nothing but vegan replacements for eggs in pancakes and Rebecca Black lyrics from 2011. Well, I mean, it consisted of a little more than that (duh), but the occasional visits to this place in my mind were mainly for reasons of practicality or amusement.

But things are a changing. I’m leaving the house less now; sometimes I’m barely leaving my bedroom. There’s a high chance that at any given time in the day I’ll be in bed, scrolling the UberEats website, selecting where to binge my government-help money under the guise of supporting local business. When my laptop runs out of canned laughter and sitcom theme songs to keep me on the right side of sane, I let its mirror turn black and instead turn inside to my other screen.

These days, my memory isn’t just that, isn’t just a place to file away the highest and the lowest occasions of my past selves. My memory is the ticket out of my bedroom, the door that leads me out of these four walls that have been recycling the same oxygen for days. I can always breathe better when I’m anywhere that this body isn’t.

Human interaction lately has been sparse. I live at home with my parents, so I’m lucky I don’t have to pay rent, but every conversation I want to have with someone in this house seems to result in yelling or in silence. It’s best just to skip straight to the silence. I lay in bed and think about the last time I spoke to someone that wasn’t a blood relation. I then stop trying to think about this because it makes me sad how far back I have to go. Sometimes I see people looking at me on the street, in the rare moments of my making use of the allotted one-hour-a-day of outside time. But there’s no people. I turn to see only a post-box, or a lamp post, or just the flappy part of my face mask that keeps popping into my peripheral. Maybe my brain is compensating for the lack of human contact I’ve been subject to. Maybe I’m going insane.

My memory has been playing tricks on me lately. So much so that it would probably pose an inconvenience if I was actually participating in normal life, talking to people and socialising and what not. But I’m not, so I let it clown around. I let it convince me that I’ve said this or thought that. Sometimes I don’t even bother to work out if these are memories from life or memories from dreams. Memories from dreams are pretty meta, when you think about it. You’re remembering something that your brain has thought happened, because it did happen, but it happened only in the confines of your brain. Maybe it’s not that meta. I don’t know.

I’ve become weirdly cautious of remembering things too many times. If for every time I remember something, I am adding a new layer of remembering, how many times can I remember something before it is no longer a true memory? I kind of freak out a bit when I think like this. How many memories aren’t true? I mean, my brain might have quite possibly twisted some of my most sacred memories into shapes that are nothing like their original, and I would be none the wiser. Moments that I hold close to my heart may as well just be fabricated fairy tales implanted into my skull, fictional stories that are just the result of chemicals and hormones and an idle mind making use of the replay button.

Have I even seen snow? Or swam in the ocean? My body knows what it is to feel sand between my toes and salt threading through my hair, but does it really?

But does it matter, I guess. If I have thought something to be true, what’s to say I can’t just let my brain believe it. Ignorance is bliss, and knowledge is power, but what if the two are intertwined just so, and now they both feel the same? Maybe I could find a power in ignorance? Or at least, find a sanity.

My memories seem to serve no purpose these days, save for entertainment. Birthday dates and travel plans have fallen into the oblivion of the mind, where I suppose they’ll stay put for a little while longer. I’ve substituted shopping to-do lists and when my next shift starts, replaced these with that time in primary school that I convinced my best friend I was adopted, and that time when I got an orange pip stuck up my nose. I’ve parroted these memories to friends and family over the years in search for comedic validation of my childhood antics, but for all they know I could have been making them up. For all I know, I suppose, I could have been making them up. Still, I leave them on replay in my mind, and I’ll happily remain blissful with the ignorance of not wanting to know.

[yumiwords]

over the indian ocean

I should be somewhere over the Indian Ocean right now.

I should be strapped into a flying death cabin that rattles so much every now and again that the thought of dying shifts lanes in my brain from fantasy to possibility. And – whoop – another rattle, one just violent enough to remind me that maybe I don’t welcome death like I always thought I would; my arms are neither open wide nor waving in long-awaited enthusiasm, but clutching the armrest I have spent the better half of the flight asserting dominance over. Maybe falling from the sky in the company of a hundred other strangers, one of which leans too far back in their seat, one of which makes the little hairs dance around the perimeter of their nose when they snore, isn’t the complete and utter essence of comfort I thought it could be. And for all the times that I’ve wished I was dead, none of them included being on my way to Europe.

But I’m not about to die on that plane. Die at home, possibly. Die in the supermarket, maybe. But the world in which an international flight could whisk me away from this biscuit-shaped island to another, bigger, better, more biscuit-shaped European island, is a world as far away as handshakes and hugs. I wonder if the same people who worry about planes crashing and bombs exploding are as equally freaking out at the potential death that now surrounds the air around them. Because the 7 o’clock news has traded in terrorist attacks for overflowing hospital morgues, traded in freak shark attacks for record virus infections.

I can’t even remember what the news was like before all of this. What on earth was worthy enough to make headlines before the world started to – slowly and in the most boring fashion – end?

I can’t even remember what life was like before all of this. Before the world started ending, that is. Parties? Did I go to those? I mean, I have memories, but they’re surely not from this lifetime. The girl who sits on the edge of her bed tonight with greasy hair and pants that don’t fit cannot possibly be the same girl who once drank too much cask wine and threw up on an empty stomach.

Is it me that has changed? Is it the world? Can one change without the other?

The weapons that we’ve calmed battles with, the artillery that we’ve used to save grace, are finally our un-comings. The handshakes and hugs, the kisses on both cheeks. No, please sir, one point five meters, take a step back. The space we now leave between ourselves and each other may help us defeat the enemy, but what about our sanity?

What sort of world have we kidded ourselves into believing we live in if our final un-coming is neither the climate nor the nukes, neither the aliens nor the sun? I guess our final un-coming is ourselves. The ultimate plot twist.

Plot twists are fun and all, but ideally when they involve Keanu Reeves and hunky bank-robbing surfers. Not exclusively, but ideally.

All of these we are the virus memes that have littered the internet in recent months kind of encapsulates this perfectly; this category of meme is fodder to the current brand of millennial existentialism. Normally we’d find this brand hand in hand with some idealised, romanticised, wholesome version of ourselves, in bed with one another somewhere in Europe. But all of a sudden, for Australians anyway, Europe has become just that little further away. I won’t be finding myself there for a while now.

Apparently, you’re more likely to die in a plane crash than in the company of a shark. Europe, for me, has been postponed exponentially, so I’ve got no way of escaping this island by flight for quite a while now, and these surrounding oceans aren’t looking so inviting with their Jaws themed music and single fins weaving through the water and all. Any potential death-cabin sky trips feel so far away that I’ll probably start fantasising again about what it’s like to drop from the sky - a place where humans do not belong, in my humble opinion (where are our wings?). Potential shark attacks are also exponentially off the agenda for myself. Even if statistically I’m more likely to suffer death by plane crash than death by shark, you won’t be finding me waddling about in the ocean (where are my gills?).

And even with all the ridiculous ways I’ve imagined my death, all of the fantasised plane crashes and ill-fated swims, death by airplane and death by shark still feel a little closer to reality than death by handshake. But the reality right now is that my body carries the potential for both your death and mine, and all we have to do is to be at the mercy of its touch. The oceans nor the skies hold the sentence to finish my living these days, but rather the everyday reality of the spaces in-between.

And in between the sky and the sea, you can find me in my home, or in the supermarket. The two most interesting, and two of the only destinations that I am allowed to exist in these days. Physically-speaking, this is where you can expect to find me. Spiritually-speaking, however, I don’t think I’ll be finding myself in either of these places. I guess the part of me that is still hiding someplace in Europe, with all the answers to my existential quarter-life millennial dread, will have to wait a little while longer until I can go looking; until this un-coming of ours stops becoming, and miss rona finally releases us from her grip of plot twists. Because I’m not enjoying this movie anymore.

[yumiwords]

choc a bloc

sometimes i am

so choc a bloc

choc a bloc with love

/

the light is thinner

reaches every corner

i follow what it does

/

dancing on my fingertips

combing through my hair

i really hope it stays

/

but i understand

almost all too well

that it’ll eventually dance away

/

my friends, my dog,

movies in bed

fill me to the top

/

fill me with love

i’m so choc a bloc

please oh never stop.