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.