Subject: Your trip is confirmed
’Course we have to do Glenorchy.
You know, I couldn’t stop thinking about you when Uncle Bill and I were up there on Saturday for our photo-safari. I guess it’s ’cause every time we used to drive out there with my fam, and our car would sweep around the corner and the teeny town came into sight, you’d shout-read the signpost to the whole car: ‘Welcome to Glenorchy – Gateway to Paradise!’ with a big grin on your face.
Uncle Bill and I stayed out there for ages, getting all kinds of shots, and the whole time all I could think was: Something’s missing.
You, of course.
Cheesy as, but Paradise ain’t paradise without you, Goldie ;)
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Monday 25 February, 8:47pm
Subject: RE: Your trip is confirmed
Even though I acknowledge the major cheese-supreme- i-ness of the sign-off, your last email kind of killed me, just so you know.
June’s too far away. I just want to hang out with you – NOW.
Xx
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Tuesday 26 February, 6:17pm
Subject: June needs to get its arse into gear
And be here already.
Ninety sleeps this coming Monday till we’re reunited.
MARCH
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Friday 15 March, 9:00am
Subject: Feel like seeing a movie with me tonight?
Not sure what’s new on Netflix, but I’m sure we can find a rom-com to make fun of.
Taylor
Saturday 16 March
We don’t hang up when the movie finishes – even though it’s after midnight. We listen to music instead. I put Issy on speaker phone and I play her my latest favourite song via my iPad.
‘Wonderwall’ – Ryan Adams. It’s a cover of the original Oasis tune, but this version doesn’t feel like a cover, it feels like a completely new song.
Issy’s never heard it, so we’re both quiet as we listen. The fibres around my heart always get tangled up in the chorus, even though my head knows that no-one can save you. Life doesn’t work like that. But who doesn’t like to imagine a wonderwall all the same?
When the song finishes, I hit ‘pause’.
‘What do you think of it?’
She’s quiet for a second, and I wonder if she hasn’t liked it at all.
‘I think that’s my future wedding song,’ she says.
‘There might be an issue with that,’ I say, grinning.
‘What’s that?’
‘Three days ago, I decided “Wonderwall” was my future wedding song.’
There’s a pause.
I love her pauses. Other people launch into their replies, scared of leaving spaces in the conversation. They’ll have their words ready to go the second you stop speaking, like their brain was busily preparing them the whole time. It makes me feel like the other person hasn’t really been listening. Issy always takes a beat, like she’s running your words over her tongue, tasting them twice before she responds.
‘We’ve got a real problem, then,’ she says seriously. ‘And only two options.’
‘Lay them on me.’ I lie back, my head on my pillow, getting comfy.
‘Either one of us gives up the song, or . . .’
She’s pausing again. But I can tell this isn’t her usual pause. I can hear in the little hover over her last word that she knows what she wants to say. She just isn’t saying it.
‘Or what?’
‘Or we marry each other.’
‘Oh.’
That’s the other thing I love about her pauses – you can’t predict what she’s going to come back with.
We marry each other.
I’m staring up at the ceiling, like her words have been scrawled there. My brain can’t find a signal – it’s running through stations, scanning for a reply, but anything that comes through is just a fuzzy, distorted jumble.
Finally, I land on humour FM. ‘Stuck with me for life, hey?’
‘Right?!’
‘So, what’s your new wedding song going to be, Goldie?’ I ask, and I start laughing, and she does too. I press ‘play’ again, setting it to shuffle.
‘I guess we’ll work the whole thing out later.’ Her words hum through the phone, down into my ribcage.
Spotify lands on ‘Young Blood’, The Naked and Famous.
‘This is an old song,’ she says.
‘Super old.’
We both go quiet. I know she’s thinking of how I used to make Dad play The Art of Flight soundtrack every time he drove Goldie and me up to the ski fields.
Or maybe she’s remembering how we used to sit on my bed, watching Travis Rice and co climb out of helicopters in Patagonia and launch their snowboards off the side of a mountain face. Carve lines for kilometres, letting out whoops of excitement that echoed through the valleys below.
I must have watched the film a hundred times. Most boarders have – it’s pretty much THE snowboarding doco. Even though Goldie wasn’t a boarder, she’d loved it too – for the mountains and the kick-arse soundtrack, and the way you felt like you were right there with Travis and the other riders, pushing the limits, living the high.
‘Do you miss it?’
She doesn’t have to spell it out. I know she means snowboarding.
‘Yeah, I do.’
‘Can I ask you a question?’
I say yes, even though I want to say no. Maybe I just want this convo out of the way before she gets here in June.
‘I never asked you if you tried again . . . after the accident.’
‘I did.’ I close my eyes. ‘I tried last June. Up at Cardrona. They have an Adaptive Snow Sports program there. The coaches were great . . . it was just . . .’
I don’t know how to explain it to her because part of me still doesn’t understand some of the emotions I’d felt up on the mountain that week.
‘It wasn’t the same,’ I say. ‘It wasn’t like before the accident. I know I shouldn’t have expected it to be, but I guess some part of me didn’t want to think about that reality.’ I clear my throat. ‘In the hospital, when I was in pain and then in rehab, when I was trying to learn how to walk again, my head was pretty much a screaming mess the whole time. The only thing I felt like I could hold on to was I have to get back up on the mountain. You know, so I could get back to feeling like ME again.’
‘And what happened?’
‘And then winter rolled around, and I headed up there and . . . I struggled with some stuff. It’s different, boarding with a prosthesis. You know how you always talk about your toe shoes feeling “right”?’
‘Yeah, of course,’ Isolde says without hesitation. ‘It’s funny, a lot of people don’t believe me when I tell them prepping my toe shoes is that crucial. But you can injure yourself otherwise. I’m sure it’s the same with your boots, right? They need to feel like they’re an extension of your body.’
‘Yeah, that’s exactly it,’ I reply. ‘I was used to feeling like my boot was a part of me, that it would respond – and the board would respond as well – to any tiny shift in pressure from my toes or my heel.’
‘Intuitive stuff,’ Isolde says.
‘Yeah. So imagine you go from that, to suddenly having a prosthetic foot. You can’t feel the ground any more through one of your boots. And rather than an ankle that can twist and turn, there’re only ten to twelve degrees of rotation. All the muscles in my ankle and my calf that used to read the terrain and react to it – you know, make a sudden turn, correct myself – they weren’t there any more. Instead of just moving my foot to make a turn, I had to transfer the energy from my body, all the way through the prosthesis to the end of my snowboard boot. Even the way I’d always positioned myself – you know, my stance on the board, tha
t fundamental – it wasn’t right any more because my centre of gravity had shifted.’
I don’t know if I’m explaining any of this right – I’m barely pausing for breath – but I’ve been holding on to this story for so long that it’s like a dam has burst inside me.
‘All that stuff – it made me feel like I didn’t have control over my board any more. And then I started doing the I’m- terrified stance – you know, leaning all the way back, away from the mountain, rather than attacking it. It was just . . . a mess, really. I started thinking, Taylor, if you can’t even manage a green run any more, you’re going to kill yourself going off the Big Air kicker.’
I’d been scared before the accident, of course. Despite being Hellfire Hellemann.
When people learn what Big Air snowboarding is, or they see it for the first time on TV, the assumption’s always the same: Those boarders must be fearless to do something that crazy.
We’re not, obviously. We’re human, and any human being is going to feel scared staring down an 85-foot jump, let alone the Olympic-level jumps, which are 160-foot monsters. That insanely steep ramp gives you the speed and amplitude to launch yourself like a supernova off the jump, but travelling that fast comes with risks.
You need to come out of the trick the right way. After all, even if the landing area is a downward slope, you’re still slamming down on hard-packed snow. Get it wrong and the consequences aren’t great. Torn anterior cruciate ligaments. Broken bones. Back injuries.
There’s the stuff you bury way back in your mind because it’s too horrible to think of: even with a helmet on, you can still die from a brain injury.
So at comps, when you’re up the top waiting for your run, you have to find a way to work through that fear. Some riders do breathing exercises. Others think about how many times they’ve nailed the trick before. Me? I’d use fear to pump myself up – after all, adrenaline had a way of making me feel alive.
If something goes wrong after you go off the kicker, it goes wrong fast. There’s not a lot you can do. I always found a sense of calm in that. A surrender, of sorts, to what will be will be.
But that was before the accident. Now I know what it feels like to have your body break. So the old shrugged- shoulders naivety of ‘if I fall, I fall’ – that was gone. So was the confidence of ‘I’ve got this’.
I can feel my palms sweating just thinking about it. Issy’s still quiet, and that’s the only thing that allows me to keep going.
It all comes rushing out over the phone. The internal pressure. How up on that mountain, last June, when I was sweating buckets and so freaking frustrated that I wanted to scream every four-letter word I knew – I felt like I had to smile instead. Be the type of athlete that ‘rose above adversity’.
I had to pretend that I was okay with everything when I didn’t feel A-okay with a lot of what I was going through a year after losing a leg.
I tell Issy that that week was the point when snowboarding – the thing that had always been my saviour – became something else. It couldn’t be a coping strategy for anxiety because I felt anxious the whole time I was doing it. It wasn’t a distraction, or my own version of meditation any more, because my body didn’t go into autopilot the second I pushed off down the slope.
Instead, every time I tried a move and my new leg didn’t do what I wanted it to, I’d remember my old one.
How good I had been.
Every second I was up on that mountain, all I could think was: You’ll never get back to that.
‘So, seven days later, I decided I didn’t want to do it any more. Not if it made me feel like crap. So I put my board and boots in the cupboard and haven’t really looked at them since.’
Isolde doesn’t say, Why didn’t you try harder? The question I ask myself all the time. Seven days, Taylor. Did you really give it a shot?
Maybe you’re just a coward, my brain throws in, like it always does when I’m at my absolute lowest.
Isolde says, ‘It must have been really hard to give it up.’
There’s a lump in my throat and I can’t talk for a moment. I stare up at the ceiling until I can get something out.
‘Yeah, it was.’
‘Do you think about it much?’
‘I try not to. I dream I’m up there in the mountains sometimes.’ I don’t tell her that I always wake up crying from those dreams.
‘Do you ever think you’ll try again? I don’t mean professionally. I mean, just for you. Just for fun?’
Sometimes Issy freaks me out with the mind-reading. She finds the pinprick of a feeling that I haven’t wanted to acknowledge to myself yet.
The way I’ve started to feel this last month when I point my camera towards the Remarks and they feel like a friend waving to me in the distance. How I can tell that Queenstown’s edging a little further into autumn, every single day – just from the air. The way it’s crisper and colder, as if rather than breathing it in, you’re drinking it, like a glass of iced water. How the sky’s so blue that it almost makes your head spin. All these little changes around me are kickstarting the old feelings that I’d get in my bones this time of year.
Excitement. Anticipation. Restlessness.
Because I know: Winter is coming. Snow is coming.
‘Sometimes,’ I admit to Isolde. ‘Maybe a bit more lately.’
I don’t need to tell Issy I don’t want to talk any more – she knows. So we lie there, in different bedrooms, in countries an ocean apart, listening to the same songs in the middle of the night. When we finally hang up, I think about what she said some more.
‘Do you ever think you’ll try again? Just for you. Just for fun?’
I’m not ready to answer that question yet.
I’ll see how I feel in the winter.
Isolde
Saturday 16 March
I can’t fall asleep after we say goodnight. Normally talking to Taylor helps me sleep better, but tonight is the exact opposite.
Maybe it’s because I feel like after what he trusted me with just then – the honest words, rough around the edges, like he hadn’t tested them out with anyone else, except me – that it’s wrong to be here in my room, alone. It feels like I should be lying there, next to him, holding his hand like a pact.
I have that feeling – the uneasy one that comes over you when you’re on your way to the airport, and you’re sure you’ve left something behind, even though your suitcase is next to you, your passport’s in your backpack, and your phone is right there in your hand.
I know that the something I’m missing is him. And I can’t sleep because of it. So I play ‘Wonderwall’ on repeat until I do.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Sunday 17 March, 1:15pm
Subject: Thank you
You know what for.
I’m kind of out of words today after the deluge of them last night. Or maybe I just don’t have the right ones to tell you what our middle-of-the-night convos mean to me.
I made you a playlist instead.
Or really, I made us a playlist.
The Issy and Taylor Middle of the Night playlist.
Issy and Taylor Middle of the Night
Half of You Leland & Bram Inscore
Honey and Milk Andrew Belle
Up All Night Matt DiMona
Hewlett’s Comet Dustin Tebbutt
TALK ME DOWN Troye Sivan
Next 2 U Matt DiMona & Kiki Halliday
Atlas Shannon Saunders
When the Night Is Over Lord Huron
Change It All Harrison Storm
Empty Streets (Acoustic Version) Kota Banks & MOZA
Cologne Haux
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Sunday 17 March, 7:27pm
Subject: RE: Thank you
Tay, you know our talks mean everything to me too, right?
I should be the one saying thank you to you
– for sharing what you did with me. Like you, I’m a little short on words today to try to express how I felt after our call last night.
The playlist you sent me is my favourite one so far. Standout track? Matt DiMona’s ‘Up All Night’.
Maybe it’s a love song, but it just sounds – and feels – like us.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Sunday 17 March, 11:04pm
Subject: Love song, hey? ;)
For real though, Issy, that song is . . . well, as you said, it’s us.
APRIL
Taylor’s Mobile
Finn
Sunday 7 April, 4:12pm
Are you in town, Finn?
I am. Dad’s office. Want a lift home from work?
I can be there in five. Come meet me by the shoreline wall before he finishes.
Hell no. It’s a biting wind out. Just come to the office, the heat’s on.
Can you meet me outside?
WHY?? I forgot my scarf. I don’t want to stand outside :( :(
I’ll give you my scarf, you precious baby. Just get out here.
Give me one good reason.
Ellie showed up at work today. She asked me out. Or I think she asked me out. Maybe it was just a friendly thing.
ON MY WAY NOW.
Skype Conversation, Mid-Gaming Session
Monday 8 April, 8pm
Finn Williams: Have you messaged Ellie?
Taylor Hellemann: Not yet.
Finn Williams: She gave you her number over twenty-four hours ago. If you want to go out with her, there’s a finite window to make contact.
Taylor Hellemann: Says who?
Finn Williams: Says the Finn Williams dating program.
Taylor Hellemann: Success rate of that program? ;)
Finn Williams: Shut up. For real though, man, Ellie’s got guts. She gave you her number, so respect that. If you want to go out with her, text her. If you don’t, tell her thanks but no thanks. I don’t get why you’re stalling.
The Long Distance Playlist Page 15