Jane Symonds

wordsmith and mongrel

permanence

I have a favourite knife, which a young me would at first be delighted to hear and then disgusted to know that I keep it in a drawer, not a sheath, and wield it against carrots rather than injustice. These are the things no one tells you about your thirties: you will have a favourite knife, and using it to slice vegetables will bring you quiet happiness.

My tiny studio apartment was furnished when I moved into it, stuffed full of furniture that was all wrong for its dimensions, heavy wooden meubles that selfishly squatted in precious space, and enough kitchenware to host an army even though just one guest would be uncomfortably too many. It was sensible, though: I had no idea how long this Paris project of mine would last, so investing in furnishings was impractical. I didn’t much like any of it, but it was there. I would make do.

I never intended to buy a knife. The flat had knives, knives that were too long and slightly dull, so in the spirit of making do I added “sharpening stone” to my shopping list. When I found one in the kitchen section of a cheap department store, it was next to The Knife. The Knife was elegantly shaped, consequential, its broad blade seemingly glowing with an immense capacity to chop.

I brought The Knife home and slid it into my kitchen drawer and felt a little more grown up.

Permanence was a mainstay of my childhood. Everything was built to endure: the creaky old house around me, my parents’ loving marriage, the hellfire to which I would be eternally damned if I slipped into sin. And whatever you had, you took care of so that it would last, or you saved in case you needed it. In case something changed.

There were no candles in our home, for fear of burning it down.

I knew a bit about roots, saw how deeply they burrowed beneath ancient gum trees, how distressed the grey earth looked when they were torn out by rare floods. At his desk, my father traced our family back generations upon generations, tying us to Queensland, to South Australia, to England and Ireland. To kings, he said proudly.

In our rural community, I had the sense that change was an unwelcome visitor, usually heralded by sadness or suspicion. Did you hear the so-and-sos have sold up? Did you see the people who bought that block? To my young eyes, there was a comfortable certainty not only to the present – the same people, the same events year on year – but to the future also. I would go to town for school, and then I would go to university, and then I would meet a nice man and marry, and I would have children, and I would have a house and a nice life. The act of settling had no pejorative connotations; it was the only and natural goal.

I would grow up, and then I would be still.

In the third round of covid lockdown, I am cutting a carrot on a Tuesday night, thinking about a man I had dated – he liked to cook more than I did, and liked The Knife too, until he became overly familiar with it and it sliced deep into his forefinger – and how I had ruined a decent casual fling by turning it into a relationship because I was incapable of comprehending a love that did not last.

A thought crystallises: I would very much like a casual fling right now, a man who stopped by when I wanted him to but who took up no other space in my life. A temporary, inconstant man. A man with whom I had no intention of or desire for permanence.

I put The Knife down carefully. It is not safe to have epiphanies while chopping.

Back before we knew how bad covid was, I go to visit my colleague who has just moved. A dining table lies on the floor, still flatpacked. Do you need help setting it up? I ask.

Oh, no, she says, I’m sending it back. It’s a darker brown than it was in the picture, and it doesn’t go with the walls.

It has never occurred to me that you are allowed to reject a piece of furniture because it is not aesthetically pleasing.

In August I sneak to London between lockdowns to visit my friends. I have always envied the reassuring permanency of their love, but this time I find myself envying their rented home, its clean white lines, its display case, its spare bed and absence of mice. I tell myself it’s a question of money, that one day I’ll be able to afford that too. If I were in a relationship and could split the rent. If I had a different job. I just need to wait.

In December a friend in Paris moves into a new apartment and slowly begins filling it with furniture of her choosing. She pores over chair options, revisits a favourite store to acquire a tiny clay figurine, accidentally orders a pouffe that ships all the way from Morocco and arrives smelling strongly of goat. She spends all her available income, waits a month, spends it all again. Her living room becomes beautiful. Becomes her.

A deep, jealous hunger unfolds in my chest, and a doubt surfaces in my mind.

Maybe it’s not a question of money at all.

Unsurprisingly, when you’re raised on a diet of permanence, you spend your adulthood craving it, and constantly destabilised by its scarcity.

First it was the love that was much harder to find than I had been led to expect, and when it did appear it flared up and was quickly doused, ending not in death do us part but in incompatibility and heartbreak. The marital finish line, initially so tantalisingly near, seemed to shift further and further out of focus as each year passed. I watched my friends go in and out of relationships, love, leave, love again, come out, love people of the same gender, of many genders, date without loving, love without marrying, fuck, marry, divorce, cheat, separate, stay together, none of the above. What I had been sold as singular was in fact multiple and fluid and profoundly changeable.

Then it was the home, a concept which was deeply entangled in monogamy: when I grow up and get married, we’ll buy a forever home. Until then it would be share houses and second-hand furniture, low-cost options, living conditions that could be packed up or left behind without much trouble. After all, this was all temporary. Houses, not homes. The real thing was yet to come. I made do.

After I turned 30, I learned that even my body was impermanent. The long, lean shape that had been constant, that had barely batted an eyelid at puberty, that had remained stoically unmoved through years of disordered eating and fluctuating activity, suddenly began to change, first making space above my pelvis for a baby I was increasingly sure would never inhabit it, and then expanding with increasing rapidity. I no longer felt at home in my skin, began to hate this unfamiliar body, this body that bulged and softened, this body that became fat and made me aware how much I had unconsciously internalised an aversion to fatness almost as strong as my aversion to change. My second summer in Paris, I started wearing bikeshorts under all my dresses because my thighs rubbed painfully together. A year later, I took out one of my suitcases and tucked into it the clothes that no longer fit, putting them aside for when I would get back to normal, for when this temporary lapse would be rectified. Year on year the suitcase filled to overflowing as I outgrew more and more but could not bear to part with any of it. To accept that my body had changed, and would never be the same.

But perhaps the most confronting was the impermanence of beliefs: in my twenties I pulled apart a lot of what I had been given by my family, holding it up to the light of the world around me, finding it wanting. At university I discovered feminism, the first way of perceiving the world that had ever truly made sense to me, and my entry point to nearly everything else that would come to make up my value system. And even that was constantly shifting, constantly being questioned and rebuilt. White, Lean-In feminism shivered and crumbled to make way for intersectionality, only to find a host of “sections” jostling for attention. The more I learned, the less I knew. I was never going to be sure.

I was searching for stillness, but everything I landed on moved.

Over drinks in her newly furnished lounge, my friend confesses she hasn’t signed a lease on her apartment.

You what, I splutter. I am terrified for her. She is not secure.

It’s too much, she says. I need to feel like I can leave whenever I want. For her, a lease would be the opposite of safety.

But, I say, uncomprehending. You own furniture?

About the time I started realising that permanence was not as easy to come by as I had expected, I began to find tightly tucked bedcovers unbearable. I would get into well-made beds and kick and kick until everything came loose and I could lie awake with one foot uncovered, calculating timeframes and budgets, trying to work out what I needed to fix about myself in order to transform into someone capable of – worthy of? – a real life.

I felt compelled to get tattoos but began to feel my throat close over when I thought about raising a child, about belonging to another person for the rest of my life.

I craved a great and lasting love, while beginning to understand and respect my resounding need for solitude.

My anxiety fell in love with exit strategies, and soothed itself with plan Bs.

And then began to worry all over again: what if, in fact, permanence was not for me?

On the first anniversary of the first covid lockdown, a Friday, I come home from work and have a sudden urge to read a book. I’ve been having trouble concentrating, not even able to watch a new show, finding refuge in the comfort of stories I’ve already seen play out, of endings I can safely predict. But for some reason, tonight, it’s time to read.

I pour a glass of wine and light a candle beside my bed and read a whole Liane Moriarty from cover to cover in a single sitting. The candle burns all the way down and flickers out.

I feel a deeply illicit, adult pleasure. Alone, in my home, using things up for no reason other than my own contentment.

Locked up in an apartment where I could only slide around sideways if it was a laundry drying day, and where my feet bumped into the walls during my one-legged downward dog, it became impossible to avoid seeing my life as it actually was, because for the first time in more than a decade it was no longer changing.

I had spent so long in limbo, trying to reach the life in which I could settle and be safe, that this unsatisfying, unchosen stillness was unbearable. I was desperately unhappy, and my progress towards my happiness had stalled. A year of my life slipped by with me no closer to my goal.

But what was the goal? What was I waiting for?

The great pause brought on by the pandemic brought me unavoidably and unpleasantly face to face with the question I did not know how to answer: if it’s not the marriage and the backyard, what is your real life going to look like?

When will you be still?

I don’t know what triggered it, in the end. I would love to say it was The Knife, that I glanced down at that blade that I had bought just for me, to make my life infinitesimally better, and suddenly saw it multiply out to an entire home, spawning beds and desks and lamps and ficuses and line-art drawings of women reading paperback novels.

But I’m fairly sure The Knife was in the sink, smudged with cheese, when I had my revelation.

Nothing is permanent, which means that the only thing that can be permanent is whatever I have right now. My actual, grown-up, real life is not ahead of me, waiting for me to find a husband or get a mortgage; it is happening right here.

Much like furniture I’ve built myself, it’s uncertain and looks nothing like the instructions I was given.

It’s temporary, but not because it’s a layover on the way to a final destination; because everything is temporary. The very impermanence of it is what makes it real.

And – most importantly, most bafflingly – I am allowed to live it as it is.

So this year I’m going to stop waiting for my life to start. And to start, I’m going to invest in some company for The Knife.

I’m going to make myself a Home.

the club and all its boys

It is not that I would set fire to you.

It is that I would plait the rope with hair torn
from my own head
before I bound your wrists

I would take my axe to the oldest tree and
bite out its heart to make
a stake to tie you to

and I would claw at the earth with my nails down
deep enough to liberate the oil to
season your skin

It is that I would strike stone to stone
again and
again
and
again
until I found a spark to catch myself alight and I would
charge my flaming bones into your cobbled altar

It is not that I would set fire to you, it is that I would
burn
you
down

And rise up just to spite your ashes with
my dancing feet

a city of two tales

Three nights a week, marauders set out from behind the Église Saint-Étienne-du-Mont in groups of three or four, clad in sensible khaki with reflective patches and myriad pockets, carrying backpacks full of biscuits and toothbrushes and jackets and thermoses of coffee and soup. For two hours they walk the streets of the Latin Quarter, stopping to chat, to listen, to check in. By ten pm their backpacks are lighter, their thermoses empty, the chief marauder’s notebook filled with notes: names, familiar and new; titbits of intel for the next night’s team; requests for shoes, socks, and jackets in specific sizes.

I haven’t been able to determine whether the word maraude has always had an antithetical definition in French, or whether it was at some point reclaimed by someone of heavy-handed poetical bent : we’ll charge into the night, alright, to hunt disadvantage and attack isolation. Either way, going out with the intention of offering support to people living in the streets is, here, called marauding.

Homelessness in Paris is as ubiquitous as pastry. You cannot spend any time here, even if you limit yourself to the most gentrified neighbourhoods, without seeing people living in the streets, sleeping over metro gratings and under awnings and on train platforms, sheltering under tents, often asking passersby for a little help. Feeling useless against the world’s problems and short on money, I decide to try giving time close to home.

In early October I join my first maraude, masked, disinfected and squeezed uncomfortably into a borrowed uniform sized for the stereotypical French frame. I carry the coffee, a task deemed appropriate for the fledgling marauder, an easy entrypoint into conversation. Can I offer you a hot drink? We make a purposeful loop down to Port Royal and back, encountering – my fellow marauders tell me – far fewer people than usual. It poured rain an hour earlier, most likely sending them into the metro stations in search of shelter. Still, my thermos steadily lightens as I put names to faces I have been passing for years, faces I have smiled at and said hello to when it felt like humanity was all I had to offer.

I still only have humanity and coffee, but it feels like a step in the right direction.

The night before my initiation as a marauder, I venture far from the Left Bank to the northernmost part of the city, leaving the metro at Porte de la Villette to walk to my friend’s apartment. I’m running badly late and have factored in neither the autumn rain nor the neighbourhood. Too long living in my comfortable bubble has made me forget that “walking distance” means different things in different environments, for different people.

The streetlights become few and far between and then disappear altogether as I follow the canal. I disturb rats the size of my feet that seek refuge in rubbish strewn by the path. The fact that there are groups of people here and there becomes less reassuring and more threatening. By the time I reach an underpass I have convinced myself I am being followed. I measure the distance to the brightly lit intersection, consider making a phone call, decide talking aloud will only draw attention to my accent, and hurry on through the dark, berating myself for being alone, berating myself for dressing up, berating myself for the unchecked privilege with which I marched into this night.

As the lights of the intersection approach, my tail – whether real or imagined – evaporates, and my friend’s building looms to my left.

Later, I catch an Uber home with two friends, waiting behind the six-foot metal gate until it arrives, assiduously checking the licence plate and following our progress on my phone until I reach the perceived safety of my street.

The same weekend, the new US-made series Emily in Paris sashays onto Netflix and into a hailstorm of opinion pieces. I’d been seeing the advertising for weeks, and felt myself drawn to it against my will by that powerful wonder at watching one’s home on screen (the scene in Mission Impossible: Fallout where Tom Cruise crashes a truck into the Seine along one of my favourite running routes fills me with unspeakable joy). I’ve been watching a lot of light, nonsense TV lately, and I harbour a gentle affection toward Darren Star for giving us Sex and the City when we needed it, without holding him responsible for how badly it has aged.

I made it exactly 11 minutes into the first episode of Emily before I turned her off with a disgust so physical I felt it drive my hand to the remote control.

Was it the clichés, I wondered, that revolted me so? The perfect opportunity falling into her lap, the beautiful men falling at her feet, her lazily caricatured French colleagues, the glossy, soulless, amusement-park version of Paris she flitted through in her inappropriate shoes?

Was it frustration at Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu, so brilliant in Call My Agent, for lowering herself to this level for an anglophone audience?

Was it a complete lack of empathy for Emily herself, the brunette foreigner with the good job, living in the Fifth and going running in the Jardin de Luxembourg?

Or was it envy of her, for making it all look so easy?

The primary objective of marauding is not to offer material support – although we do, to everyone we meet – but rather to be social. To ask a person living in a vulnerable state whether they’d like to chat, ask them how they’re going, listen to what they have to say, with interest, without judgement.

Some people do not want to talk, and we leave them in peace. Others ask for what they need and then indicate we can move on.

But some conversations bulge and overflow, words pouring urgently from mouths, stories piling up on the pavement around us. One man walks us through the labyrinthine corridors of the French social system, using acronyms for departments and services I have never had to learn, his shoulders hunching in frustration at the times he has existed, then not, then existed again. Another man hops us from country to country with the speed of a Concorde, whirring us through his life to date, throwing out names and locations with a casualness that suggests we were there. These are the moments I like best, the listening moments.

It starts to rain again before ten pm. We store our backpacks, shed our uniforms, and go home to warm beds.

It turns out I am far from alone in my visceral rejection of Emily in Paris. Since it premiered, the French have devoured and then decried it, filling the internet with criticism that ranges from gently sarcastic to clinically scathing. There’s an undercurrent of anger, of how dare you, to much of the commentary; I recognise it because I feel it too, but can’t quite put my finger on why. It is, after all, in the grand tradition of television to gloss over, to dress up, to oversimplify.

I’ve always felt uncomfortable with idealised visions of Paris, because of everything that they erase: people, experiences, even entire suburbs.

But if I’m honest, they sit uneasily, too, because of how close my life veers to them at times: the cobbled streets and wicker chairs and limestone buildings of Instagram are my walks, my lunchtimes, my meetings. And when you sit so far towards idyllic on the spectrum, what right do you have to struggle, to have bad days, or weeks, or years?

You went to the Louvre last weekend, what on earth would you have to be sad about?

There’s nothing like a global pandemic to remind us that we’re all living someone else’s dream.

A week after Emily’s appearance, I find myself rewatching The Bold Type for the third time since discovering it in March. Clicking play feels like sinking into a warm, safe bath of progressive values, intersectional feminism, acknowledged privilege, and women supporting women. It also feels suitably escapist: everyone is very beautiful, and very talented, and lives in a fictionalised New York where Brooklyn and Midtown are equidistant from Union Square. It’s also made by the USA, about the USA.

The line from Hamilton pops into my head: who tells your story? Maybe that’s the difference. Watching Emily in Paris is being forced to participate in someone else’s fantasy about my life. It’s not anger I’ve been feeling; it’s a sense of intrusion, a loss of agency.

I go out for dinner and walk home across the Pont d’Arcole. Here, the rats sit and watch me pass. It is cold and grey and the second wave is threatening to engulf us.

But I still like my Paris best.

nouvel ordre

May is traditionally full of days off in France – Labour Day, VE Day, Ascension, the 31 May deadline by which last year’s unused paid leave must be used up – making the month essentially one big long weekend. It’s somehow fitting that it’s now home, too, to the big Day On. 11 May: déconfinement.

As COVID-19 took its stranglehold in March, signs began appearing in shop and restaurant windows, often crookedly hand-lettered. Fermé jusqu’à nouvel ordre.  

And although at the time it seemed Gallicly melodramatic, today does feel like it marks the arrival of the new order, the beginning of the end of confinement and the end of the beginning of the post-COVID world. As of 00:01 this morning, we can leave our homes without filling in a form, gather in groups of up to 10 people, travel up to 100km as the crow flies. These seem like exceptional liberties after nearly eight weeks at home. I text a friend, feeling breathless. Maybe next weekend we can go to the forest? She replies, Or even just a walk along the river. And I picture it with the same romanticised anticipation that a year ago I might have imagined a Cycladean beach: the long sweep of a bike path, the hair-ruffle of a gentle breeze, the unease of post-boat water.

It’s amazing how quickly just about anything can become normal. The beginning of the lockdown scared me, because it was all so unknown; now the end of it scares me almost as much. I tell my boss I’m in no hurry to come back to the office, and am secretly not sure I’ll ever do a full week without télétravail again. I’ve become accustomed to being able to start and finish later, play Dvořák all day without headphones, cook myself lunch, occasionally stop for a mid-afternoon dance session to relieve stress.

Having been in the immensely privileged position to be able to continue working full-time from home, and to go shopping once a week for more than I could possibly need to eat (and drink), I’ve leaned into confinement in the most cliched way possible. I’ve taken up yoga. I learned to play a song on the guitar, tried to study economics, cleaned out my wardrobe. I’ve spent entire blissful afternoons in bed with a book, often with my shirt rolled up and my window wide open so that the unseasonably warm sun could toast my soft winter belly. I’ve made numerous potato bakes, four loaves of bread, and – over many hours one memorable Saturday – 18 wonky but perfectly textured croissants.

I’ve shared breakfasts over Skype and wine over Whatsapp and I’ve reconnected with people I haven’t spoken to in years. The people I speak to often have been more present than ever, messaging, phoning, laughing, commiserating. We finally have a family group chat, filled with heart emojis and photos of chooks. Confined in Bretagne with her parents, my friend invites her father to our Thursday drinks and he tells us stories of sailing the world and youthful mischief. I begin to look forward to weekly instalments of Papa Jean-Marie almost more than anything else. Across Paris, another friend’s children clamber into view during a videocall; I swear they’ve grown in confinement.

I feel flashes guilt of how much beauty there is in all this, the staying in, the reaching out, my good fortune.

Having no one to share them with and no self-control, I ate all 18 of the croissants over a 24-hour period and then fell into a chasm of self-loathing. Spending hours a day in Zoom meetings and Whatsapp afterworks has kept me employed and connected but has also meant that I have seen more of my own face in two months than I had in perhaps the two preceding years, and had a lot of ugly thoughts about my appearance.

I’ve spent nights lying awake, heart pounding, worried about everything and nothing. One night at 11pm I packed a backpack and left it sitting by the door for a month, just in case coronavirus hit me hard and I had to get myself to hospital. I Googled how to get myself to hospital. Another night I thought about making a death box, a neat kit that would allow my family to clean up my French life with the least amount of administrative trauma in the case of my rapid demise. The loneliness that was constant but manageable before the pandemic overtook me from time to time, knocking me to the floor in a ball.

My friends are forced to delay their wedding by a year. Others are laid off, furloughed, have their hours cut or see their safety nets disappear altogether. People I know (and so many I don’t) are trying to navigate grief and funerals in a time of isolation. I am lucky, I tell myself over and over, staring at the ceiling. I am so lucky.

A new manager has taken over the laundromat I frequent once a fortnight. I meet him for the first time on day 33, when a machine stalls mid-wash, holding my clothes hostage until I call for backup and he arrives, tall and curly-haired, optimistically dressed for summer in bare arms and thongs. He expertly defuses the situation, gives me a new wash and dry cycle for free, phones me an hour later to check we’ve all got home safely.

On the 11th, he is mopping the floors as I turn up to empty a dryer and waits patiently for me to traipse across the clean wet floor, offers to spot me another cycle if my clothes aren’t dry, checks I haven’t forgotten anything. Disconcerted by his kindness, I mispronounce my thanks and run for the door.

Scurrying home, I spot my next-door neighbour smoking with his friends outside the bar he runs underneath our building. After more than three and a half years of living five feet from one another we still share nothing more than a thankfully soundproof wall and the occasional bonjour on the stairs. I am overcome with a longing not to be invited to join their tiny deconfinement party but to have the social chutzpah to make it happen.

Back in the last months BC – Before Coronavirus – I felt like I was evolving, working some things out about my life and my purpose, what mattered and what didn’t, what needed to change. I was making some headway with my social anxiety, developing tactics to trick myself out of near-constant terror and into something approaching healthy interaction with strangers and acquaintances. After two months of next to no in-person interaction, it feels a bit like I’m starting from somewhere in the negatives again.

In the two days before deconfinement, thunderstorms lash Paris, growling and flashing and soaking. Storms are so rare here that when the smell of ozone floods the city, people take to Twitter wondering, what’s going on? There’s a feeling we’re all just waiting for the next catastrophe, and it seems inevitable: the second wave, the economic downturn. Natural disaster?

But I find them strangely comforting, these Brisbanesque storms. We may be in the new normal, but some things feel the same. I sleep better than I have in weeks with the rain pounding on my windows.

The sun comes out of confinement with us on the 11th, and Paris gleams.

Here we go.

the safety and security of porridge

My cousin evokes
the safety and security of porridge
and I know she means the warmth of the thing, the fibrous resistance
to an invading spoon,
the comforting weight in a winter stomach, the possibility
of walking many cold miles if needed

But what I think of is the early-morning croak
of iron scraping ash
of match scraping phosphorous
the begrudging crackle of flame swallowing pine as my father
lit the morning’s fire

And the night before: my mother measuring oats
into stoneware, setting them carefully aside to soak

and falling asleep, knowing
tomorrow must surely come because
there is porridge waiting to be cooked.

skin hunger

In many ways I am innately prepared for isolation. A lifelong introvert and recent vegetarian, I am nourished by lentils and my own company. Having nowhere to be, not needing to wear pants, no longer required to find excuses to stay home when I am drained from social interaction: these are rare pleasures. I have made a career out of the kind of work that, with a bit of ingenuity and a good internet connection, can be done from home. I have a flat full of books I haven’t read, a head full of stories I haven’t written, and enough (but not too much) toilet paper.

For more than a third of my life, my dearest friends have lived in other cities, in other countries, in other hemispheres. At any given moment I can tell you what time of day or night it is in Minneapolis, in Canberra, in London, in Brisbane. Despite – or maybe because of – a staunch dislike of speaking on the phone to anyone who isn’t my mother, I’m a virtuoso of the WhatsApp voice message, the witty text, the lazy Sunday-morning video chat from bed. Even – at times – the poignant handwritten letter. Distance, I maintain, is just a state of mind.

Except, of course, for one critical thing.

Mid July, 2018. The carpark in front of the Biarritz train station bakes under a hot, slow sun. I am waiting for a bus and then another bus to take me to Saint-Sebastien, three hours into a six-hour journey. I rest my backpack on a bench but don’t sit down; I have a woman’s innate hesitance to look too static in a public place.  

I watch two men nearby, first as a precaution, then out of interest, and pass the time by imagining how they met. On a rugby field, maybe, judging by the look of them. I try to overhear which language they’re speaking in case I can offer some assistance. Maybe we’re going the same way.

I’m on my way to meet a friend who has just met the love of her life at a festival. It’s surely not impossible that I could meet mine in a parking lot.

A tall man emerges from the train station with a duffel bag slung across his back, his long strides eating up the space between the door and my two companions. They come together in a flurry of handshakes and backslaps, voices booming in welcome, careless of the cars around them. Then quickly to logistics: bags up off the tarmac, the shortest leads the way to the bus stop.

One of the remaining two turns back to his friend, reaches out for another handshake. I can feel the grip from across the carpark. It says: It’s so good to see you, mate.

It says: I love you.

It says: I missed you, and I need to touch you.

I absentmindedly lift a hand to the back of my favourite earring, bent from the time my friend hugged me so hard she drove it into my neck and made me bleed. We’ve only been apart for a few weeks, this time. Still, she will kiss me welcome and we will walk along the beach arm in arm, skin to skin, the Latina and the gringa.

We humans have a primal need to touch one another. It’s well documented that babies need to be held not just to be calm, but to grow, to thrive, to survive. Skin-to-skin time is encouraged for new parents. Cuddle carers are a common and angelic presence in paediatric wards, holding babies when their parents need to run an errand or take a desperately deserved break.

But it’s not a need we grow out of, even as we grow out of our parents’ arms. Touch deprivation, they sometimes call it, but I’ve always preferred skin hunger. It’s more potent, and more accurate. In my family, when we were kids, we ran on “hug juice”: it was entirely normal for me to walk up to a parent or a sibling, engulf them, and say, I was running low. We’d never read the science, but we knew the feeling.

These days, as a chronically single person who lives alone, I am almost constantly skin hungry. I survive on handshakes and cheek kisses. A clasping of hands with a friend is a hearty meal; a hug is a banquet. I have an unconscious habit of gently touching colleagues and acquaintances on the upper arm when I speak to them. It’s the least intrusive way to get tiny sustaining doses.

But I do get these doses every day. Even far from my family, I rarely go more than a few days without a hug from someone if I need it. Research is starting to show just how much of an impact skin hunger can have on those who are severely deprived: elderly people in institutional care; people who are housebound; heterosexual men in some cultures.

When the first social distancing measures were announced, they began with the most fragile, the elderly, the ill. Stay home, they said. Limit contact. Limit risk.

And it was good advice. Sound. People started to buy up long-life goods, out of fear of going hungry.

I, too, was afraid of hunger. Who’s going to touch them, I thought?

With particularly cruel timing, the first sunshine for the year arrived in Paris just after Covid-19. In a northern winter, sunshine hunger might be even more dangerous than skin hunger: after months of rain and cold, Parisians resoundingly ignore the advice on social distancing to fill parks and pathways on the first clear Sunday of the year.

The next day, the President takes to the television again to scold them, and to announce an enforced 15 days of confinement.

I am prepared, even a little pleased: it seems the only effective way to bring this madness to an end. Besides, I’ve got plenty of food, and a good excuse to dance wildly along to Zumba videos on YouTube if I can no longer go running. People are rushing to leave Paris and a friend offers me a bedroom in the countryside, but I feel somehow safer, more comfortable, in my own home.

But still.

In a moment of weakness I go looking for the small stuffed hedgehog an ex-boyfriend gave me and that I kept for much longer, and with much more fondness, than I did him, but then remember it was thrown away in the Terrible Bedbug Incident of 2019. Nothing to hug, then, besides my doona and myself. Perhaps by the time I get back to my office I’ll even be pleased to see the neighbourhood cat that wanders in, claws at our windows and occasionally vomits on our desks.

This is not a cry for help. If anything, it’s a warning. If you’re the first person I get to embrace when this is all over, you might not come out with your bones intact.

fever dream

You used to say she had a smile like Queensland sunshine, so bright
it hurt to look right at it

She wakes up now and looks for smoke
the way she used to look for water,
early-morning fingers divining for the news:
it never rains but it burns.
They’re donning yellow jackets in the bush, now, too,
the everyman and everywoman suiting up
to charge into the smoke
and they’re asking how we got here, and
what we’re going to change

Her phone has always had this glitch where it thinks
she’s in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean at all times
and she wonders now if it’s
less a bug and more
a warning: your kind will finally learn just how it feels
to push your children out to sea

It’s been a lifetime since she flew away, and she’s
all grown now. These days she’s got a smile like
Mallacoota sunshine:
a red threat
smoke-filled and deadly
and they’re worried she’s been drinking to forget, but it takes
an awful lot to slake thirty-odd years of
antipodean thirst

Words for her have always been like breathing but the fire
has sucked the oxygen right out of her, she’s been silent
sitting vigil in her distant nest for every acre
every wombat
every sacred site
too far away to hold a hose or fill an esky she’s been tempted by
those f—— thoughts and prayers
and she’s been mourning for
her fever dream of a country

les sirènes de Naoussa

The sirens of Naoussa flew in on
low-cost wings to perch above the Aegean,
rockhopping in sensible shoes and dancing
through flowers shaped like fireworks

They’ve been swiping, not singing, to lure in
young men with boats and sleeve tattoos on
sunwarmed skin and the lifespan
of a single summer

Everyone forgets the myths these days, forgets
that sirens are half bird, not fish,
forgets she might still drown if you hold her under
too long

The sirens of Naoussa washed up on
a park bench in the Buttes Chaumont, drinking
Greek wine from stolen glasses and
mourning the sea

The siren forgets she is half
girl, that the only heart she shatters on the rocks might be
her own, that her only shiny tail is the kind
that starts with
remember when?

[withheld]

I’m not designed for
first times, I’ve got a body built for
growing old, for
affectionate decay,
for building fences and surviving winters

The second time, we were sherbet on a summer tongue,
a sweet fizz of nothing that stayed with me, like
the taste of a grain of rice
in a starving mind

But I’d grown out of carnivals by the third time and you looked like
you might not taste as good
as I remembered.

The fourth time we kissed so hard you couldn’t see
through the fog on your glasses, and by the fifth time I couldn’t see
anything but you

And I walked into the sixth time like I owned it, and I
checked my armour at the door and you said,
my father never liked the killing
, so of course
I didn’t see the knife in your hand until after you had made damn sure

there would be no seventh time.

uneaten

You like to tell yourself,
when it gets dark,
that you’re here because you came down from
the runners
the evaders
the survivors
that your veins rush with the blood of those who managed,
by hard work or
sheer dumb luck
not to end up eaten, and so you,
though your unchewed bones are aching,
must be able to hang on.

But what if.

Maybe your ancestors were the sabre-toothed tigers.
Maybe you are descended not from the fearful but from
the fearsome, maybe your ragged nails
are not those of prey clinging to life, but of a hunter
clawing to its rightful altitude

Maybe,
daughter of tigers,
you are here to do more than survive.

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