My Year Without Matches

by Claire Dunn

  A male figure walks calmly towards the mother, taking her hand. He looks vaguely familiar. He turns to face me. I do know him – it’s my first boyfriend from primary school. How I adored this boy, worshipped him with the intensity of first love. The scene takes on an unreal quality, as if I have walked into a movie that I auditioned for but didn’t get the part. I watch them drive away with the eyes of the girl who was unceremoniously dumped in the school playground.

  That night I can’t bear the thought of being alone. I wander the beach, begging for scraps of conversation from the fishermen, grateful if they care to swap platitudes with me. I stalk the caravan park at dusk, staring through cracks in awnings and porthole windows at couples etched in sunken seats, eating mashed potato and drinking beer. Right now I want to be them, heavy-set with routine, telling the same joke day after day about the bream running hotter than the missus. The belt of tension wrapped around my chest pulls in tighter. Cadging a ride to the pub, I order a large meatlovers pizza and a bottle of wine, and set myself down in front of the television. Halfway through the bottle, I stumble outside and shove a few coins into the public phone.

  “Hey, guess who?” Despite six months of almost no contact, my close friend Amie miraculously answers her phone. I pour the story out to her.

  “… and now I’m not sure what’s wrong with me, Ames. I’m just flat and empty and have no idea why. The judge is so loud in my ear. I just constantly feel like I’m failing.”

  “Whoa, whoa … just back up a bit to that thing about your family friend. That’s pretty big stuff. Are you sure you don’t have any feelings about that?” Amie says.

  I pause, about to assure her it really isn’t that big a deal, when something rumbles within. I begin shaking. A flood of tears surges up through my chest, erupting with earthquake intensity. I squat on the phonebooth floor, my body racked with sobs, vaguely listening to Amie’s soothing sounds encouraging them out. I pull myself together enough to persuade her that I’m okay, hang up the phone, get a lift back to my tent and, the following day, to The Block.

  *

  Back home, the earthquake continues to heave and pitch the ground under me. I move between shelter and forest in a blur of tears. Day after day, I ride waves of grief. Like a flood, the waves rise out of nowhere and subside just as fast, leaving no trace of story, just clear puddles, in their wake. I am in the caught in the eye of a storm, and all I can do is let it pick me up and toss me, while I wait for it to pass.

  Instead, the storm grows, changing direction, bringing with it fierce gusts of hot wind. Grief turns into red-hot anger that spits and froths. It simmers inside me, a lava threatening to break the surface. I strangle the sound that wants to come out, scared, but it rises in my throat and chest. There is no stopping it. I wail. I howl.

  I scratch and hiss and claw, animated by an alien energy that has overtaken my body. I screech. I kick and punch the air, as if trying to beat an assailant back, desperately trying to create space around me. The waves come in sets, my voice rising in crescendo as each one breaks. I don’t know who or what this is. My body is a stranger to me, a repository of secrets that it is no longer willing to conceal. I am embarrassed for it. I try to reason with it, distract it, get on with other things. Instead, another seam of steaming anger builds. I curl up on the ground tighter and tighter, trying to squeeze it out.

  Whatever you resist, persists. Malcolm’s words float in. Emotion is just energy in motion.

  Let the emotion be your soundtrack, and let your body do the rest.

  I begin to soften, my shoulders dropping, cheekbones heavy against the dirt. I imperceptibly drop further, sinking into the earth, allowing it to envelop me. My plates of armour crack and crumble. A wave of exhaustion ripples through me, and I give my all to the solid bones of the ground beneath me. Fear and dread flood my veins like mercury, holding me in a cold metallic embrace, sharp fingernails clawing at my skin. The judge walks along my back, pinning me down with her heels, looking for a fight. I offer no resistance. She trembles, and I sense gaps in her form, empty spaces, black holes so vast that nothing could ever fill them. A pulsing heat fills my limbs. It draws me up on my hands, my knees, picks up my feet, marching them on the spot.

  The stamp of my feet deepens, my thighs burning as I drive hot stakes of anger into the earth. My head and neck begin to loosen, roll and wobble, and when my spine gives in, my entire body surrenders to the moves of a fierce choreographer. My eyes close, all thoughts lost to the volition of a body possessed by the pure white heat of emotion. My form twists and flickers like flame, reaching out hungrily, spiralling and writhing. I stretch and contort into ever-changing shapes, strung out on wires of staccato energy. Tears mix with sweat as I wheel and turn, careening through space as if I’m a bird riding the winds of a storm front.

  As I rise and fall, I become aware of a pattern to the emotions, a sense that they are arising with the urgency of a breath held underwater for a time longer than my life, larger than my experience. Faces of women flash in front of me: those of my mother, grandmother and others unknown. What if this is not just my pain? My limbs respond with a fresh burst of energy as if in agreement. That’s right, it isn’t just my dirty laundry – I’m doing the washing for a line of women who came before me. I don’t know who, and it doesn’t matter. I just know with sudden clarity that this rage is more than just mine. It is rage for all the ways our wings have been clipped, our wild places burnt, tamed and cut down. It is a grief for all the ways we have been led in the opposite direction of our real selves, lost in the thickets of others’ expectations. It is the culmination of years of simmering resentment at being kept running on the treadmill of ambition and striving. It is a rebellion against the abuse of the collective soul. It has waited, collecting, until such time as it could be released, my body now a channel to transmute some measure of oppression into this raw material, to play a role in some larger healing.

  Gradually, in a time measured only by the depth of my tracks in the sand, the wind gusts abate. My arms circle slowly, lifting on the in-breath, and dropping on the out. A spring of grief bubbles up and douses the last flames of fire with tears, the mourning needing no words, no explanation. It soon quells to quietness and slowly, slowly, to stillness. To peace. I lie on the ground, scoured and cleansed like a storm-ravaged beach.

  When I eventually open my eyes and look around, the forest springs out at me with technicolour vividness. It, too, feels washed clean, luminous and alive. I nuzzle the powdery petals of a flannel flower, tickle my cheek on a melaleuca blossom. A swamp wallaby lopes out onto the path in front of me, feeding on the grassy verge. It’s the first time I have seen more than the disappearing tail of one. I breathe in the full-bodied warmth of it.

  Dragging my swag outside, I watch as the moon slips between silently shifting clouds. Night fliers follow their trajectories. Moonshadow and moonshine dance across my face. I drift in and out of sleep. In a dream, I search for my grandmother’s precious moonstone necklace. Have the stones been lost? I must find them. I wake to find the moon is a stone pendant suspended over me; the stars are millions of shards shattered from the stone. Leaves above rustle and whisper. Something lost must be found.

  The powerful owl hoots nearby. My eyes snap open. I suddenly know what I must find. My power.

  *

  The next day, my hunt begins.

  I walk, one foot in front of the other, along the forest trails, but travel backwards, back through the days, months and years of my life – searching for where I lost my power, scanning for signs of it dropped or hidden in some crevice. The land guides me through the contours of my stories: the tributaries, saddles and ridges, the sheer rock walls and dead ends. I let the memories rise and fall on the breath of the wind, surfacing spontaneously like the bubbles on the creek I walk beside. Starting as a trickle, they pour forth in the wide-open catchment of my attention.

 
I come across snapshots frozen in time, where I played nice, smiled pretty, placated, pretended. Moments when I busied myself, turned my back on the moon, on a friend, on my heart, in pursuit of some false treasure. I’m a huntress on the trail of inadequacy, of failure, sniffing out where it seeded, where it first took root. I turn the soil, unearthing the times when my feelings were bulldozed by others, when I learnt to take the wheel myself and ride roughshod over whimsy, over weakness, over what I really desired, over what I deemed inappropriate. I remember when I willingly strapped the goals of others to my back and lugged them with tenacity along paths that were not of my choosing. My pursuit continues at night, tracking back through years of journals, my dreams taking me to muddy schoolyards and classroom, faces long forgotten. It’s a recapitulation, piecing together patterns, seeing the compression shapes of my life’s wanderings. Each memory is a moonstone dropped, which I now collect again, reclaiming it from where it had been lodged, threading it back around my neck and cutting the cord that tied it to the past.

  The next day, I continue, following my life’s footprints as they grew, into offices and boardrooms, kitchen tables and bedrooms, backtracking for where my jewels were pirated, squandered, or carelessly dropped through holes in my pockets. As I walk, the land is my confidante and my canvas, the dots and dashes that I mark with a stick painting the passage of my life into a long snake.

  Pretty soon, I know I’m not alone. There is a presence walking alongside me. She is calm, steadfast, compassionate. She falls in step easily, knows the path well. She has been there before, was there all along. She was there when I peddled my original power on the street for the best price and bought a cheap imitation. She was there when I tried to outrun her, when I didn’t have time to play. She was there when I gave away my sealskin, and it was she who retrieved it. She has always been there, unchanging, essential. With her as my companion, the painting changes, the dots not just holes where I lost myself, but necessary landmarks by which I can now find myself again. She reminds me that the same path on which I lost my power is the very one that allows me to find it, to know it by its absence, to make a fierce promise never to let it go again.

  On the final day of my hunt, a storm threatens. I scratch in the last few landmarks before the clouds break. I watch the splash of raindrops make rivers of my dots and dashes, like a fresh memory laid on the earth, washing the canvas clean.

  As the gentle rain falls, I send a question out into the forest. Is there anything else I need to know? I let my body be my radar, my feet the steering wheel. They guide me upwards towards the boulders, where a grove of old casuarinas stand in a circle. Wisha wisha wisha. They whisper as I step into the centre. Wisha wisha wisha. I look up. A pair of tawny frogmouths huddles together in a tree fork, the grey mottle of their feathers almost indistinct from the bark. Suddenly one opens its eyes, turning its head in my direction. The heat from the glare of its firebrand eyes nearly throws me backwards. I hold its gaze, though, both of us unblinking. Who are you? It demands to know. Who are you not to be powerful? What arrogance! Claim what is rightfully yours and be on your way.

  The storm circles around again. I look down at my bare brown feet, the ligaments strong and supple, raised like a sinewy runner’s. A clap of thunder sends down a fresh deluge, and I begin to dance, slowly at first and then furiously, as the rain turns into a waterfall. Stripping off layers, I dance naked, hair slapping against my face, until I lose sense of where I begin and end. Until I am just skin, just water, just tracks in the sand.

  *

  On dusk at my shelter, I fetch my firestick from its hook and settle in beside the board. The habitual tension is already straining my neck, the performance anxiety stiffening my jaw. I pause.

  No, there is another way. Where does power come from? What would water do?

  My blindfold hangs on the rafters overhead. I reach up for it, and tie it around my eyes. I begin to spin the stalk slowly, focusing on the sensation of it moving from fingertip to fingertip, evenly, steadily. My shoulders relax into the rhythm. As my arms tire, I take deep breaths, visualising free-flowing water in a river. A fresh burst of energy floods in. I hear the sweet sound of biting through glaze, wood grinding on wood, becoming dust. I drop to a fast, fluid stroke, power coursing through my core and down into my arms. I’m barely puffing. I could keep going, but I sense it. I remove my blindfold to find an ember glowing at my feet.

  Snuggled around my fire that night, I am not alone. There is a solid beating entity inside me, so alive with feeling that it aches. It is my hub, my sun, my compass. It sends shivers of delight up and through my back and arms. It talks. I ask it questions and it answers. I feel like I’ve just discovered a best friend, one that has always been there, waiting for me to notice it. It is not perfect nor always amiable. It is a relationship like any other, with all its pushes and pulls, its arguments and intimacy. It is not grand, just extraordinarily ordinary.

  I reach out to my journal lying open on the blanket. Today needs only one line.

  Now I have my heart.

  SPRING

  *

  Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

  Harold Thurman

  *

  The sacred order of survival:

  1. Shelter

  2. Water

  3. Fire

  4. Food

  1.

  Wallaby bullets out of the scrub towards us, its body tense and hunched. Beach sand sprays up into my face from the force of its tail thump. I catch one raspy breath and the distinct smell of terror. We are invisible to wallaby, its crazed eyes fixed on the last spear of amber sun angling into the choppy waves. Dingo is seconds behind and faster, gums peeled back in a hungry snarl. It pulls up ankle-deep, watching wallaby struggle against the relentless waves. Wallaby turns to face its hunter.

  “Should we do something?” Nikki asks. We rise, our knives sandy and slack by our sides, abandoning the half-skinned shark we’ve been crouched over. Ryan extends an answer in the form of one silently raised arm, but we all know the question was rhetorical. There is nothing to do but watch death dance.

  Dingo lunges, taking a sharp nip at wallaby’s back leg. Wallaby tries heroically to fend it off with a tail swipe but instead falls under a surge of whitewater. Wallaby springs back up like a boxer from the count. It falters, looking desperately from side to side for escape routes. Dingo lunges in for another go, again just a nip, the incoming wave again taking wallaby to the ocean floor, and this time it takes longer to surface. Dingo dances around its prey, pawing and taunting it like a cat. With sinking dread I realise this is going to be no quick execution, but the cruellest of deaths by a thousand cuts, dingo calculating precisely the least amount of energy expenditure necessary to aid wallaby’s inevitable fall. I can’t bear to watch but am simultaneously transfixed. Excruciating minutes pass, a thin red gruel lapping at the wallaby, now swaying on its haunches. Dingo waits with a slack jaw, its hanging tongue dripping with saliva. Just as the dark is about to rob us of the final scene, the wallaby lifts its head above the waves one last time, the muscles in its neck bulging from the strain. Even when it hits the sand, water gushing up its red nostrils and into its lungs, its tail continues to thump the shallows in death throes, slower and slower. With a final swipe, a wave rolls its lifeless body towards the waiting fangs of the dog. Dingo wastes no time now, seizing it by the scruff of the neck like a kitten and dragging it silently into the shadows of the banksia scrub.

  The onshore wind blows in a wintery dusk. I walk shaky-legged back to our camp, leaving the other two staring as the waves make red frothy chalk outlines on the shore. The half-skinned wobbegong in my hand flaps open like the loose sole of a shoe, and is just as tough. Washed up, or discarded by fishermen, it took us a couple of hours to get it this far, its hide more exoskele
ton than skin. The others return, spin up a fire and quietly cuddle together. Ryan tenses slightly as Nikki leans in. I enter the cast of light tentatively, not quite trusting the sudden easy warmth of flame and company, and my own pull towards it, as if I’m expecting it to turn around and bite me. But tonight I’m relieved to have a buffer against the rawness of the hungry night. I take a seat across from the couple, flick open my knife and begin to sharpen the barbs on my fish spear. The spear’s probably more for aesthetics than anything else. Thwarted by big seas and inexperience, our two-day fishing trip has so far amounted to three pippies. I perched for what seemed like hours on a slippery rock in the rain with my newly carved fish spear, thrusting it in towards the tail of the fish to account for the refraction of water, like I’d been told to do. The one and only fish, that is. To claim that it was the one that got away would be a gross exaggeration. Ryan and Nik’s fishing line met with equal success.

  I rotate my spear over the coals to harden the barbs. The bubbling beans and rice gradually revive us from our shocked quiet, our vicarious brush with death fast becoming a thing of legend, as Nikki and Ryan replay it scene by scene. Rubbing a smooth beach stone over the spear, I compress and further harden the wood fibres. I touch my finger to the point. It’s sharp, alright. Now it just needs a fish intent on suicide to prove it.

  “Community-minded, fun, sporty, enthusiastic, obsessed with fairness.” Ryan and Nikki are in full campfire mode now, playing the “How would you describe me to a friend?” game. “Afraid of weakness,” Ryan adds, as an afterthought. Nikki looks up at him questioningly before continuing to peel the outer skin from the roots of a bungwall fern. She lays a long white rhizome on the coals, and it sizzles on contact.