Sunday 20 September 2020

Yarra

Paid a visit to the confluence last evening; the water was slamming itself unusually hard over the weir like it couldn't wait to get the fuck out of Melbourne. HA! HA! Ha more fool it if that's what it thinks is going to happen, Melbourne is like The Doors now, don't you know that Mr Water? No one gets out of here alive. As we watched the water slam misguidedly away a soccer ball came to the edge and rolled over. It was a few minutes after sunset and I had a torch pointed at the ball, which seemed to be mostly dark with white patches (I don't know the technical name for what those bits on soccer balls are, and I don't want to know, it's of no interest to me & I'm confident I will never agayne have occasion to talk about the surfaces of soccer balls even if I live to be nine thousand years old) and the white patches were wet and they shone in the torchlight like big starey bunyip eyes. So when the ball sank into the rapids and bobbed up a couple of times before disappearing for good it was a bit creepy, although admittedly not as creepy as a very small cadre of anti-lockdown protesters going to the postapocalyptic abandoned shopping mall of Chadstone today and singing 1.5 choruses of You're The Voice to the police who I suppose promptly arrested them right there outside of Coles (open) and Angus & Coote Jewellers (closed). The Age contacted Glenn Wheatley for comment afterwards which was also a standout creepy event even for these unprecedentedly creepy times.

The Yarra Trail delivered like it always does. Jeez but it is good. The day was over and there's no moon right now so the only lights came from streetlights a little way off, sometimes filtered through peppercorn trees or reflecting softly off the planes of concrete bridges spanning the river gorge, or from coming and going bike lights, or from serene and romantic-looking lit windows in the tall apartment buildings overlooking the Abbotsford loop of the river. There were lots of birds, not many bats, far fewer walkers and riders than I thought there'd be, and one immensely cheering possum staggering about in a tree and shoving branches up and down. So what you get from the river in the dark is the essentials: its movement and its coolness and its smell, and most of all, the space it's cleared for itself.

A few weeks ago I walked a bit further along that bit of the river with a work colleague who's having a very bad time. Before that I think the last time I was there was a weekday maybe two days after I moved out, when I was very shaky and raw, as one is when one has just done that, and I rode alone around the capital city trail. I stopped at Dights for a while, maybe half an hour, hard to say how long. I'm sitting here remembering that day and that ride and recognising, indeed understanding, what was happening there. The trail is a circle, 30 km, almost flat, varied but always exquisitely beautiful, and for long stretches it's quite deserted even as it threads you between built-up areas and busy roads. I had never lived alone before my marriage ended. Lenny had not come with me to my new place, he would be coming to me in a day or two, but until then,  I'd temporarily left him, and the phase of my life defined by him, the house, the cat, everything domestic and personal bar a few possessions, and some level not consciously accessible to me I knew that being alone was something I had to go into blind, no map, no going back. Money poured through my fingers like water in moving out and the establishment of this rented flat; I got a promotion and pay rise in November last year but at the point when I moved out and for a long time after that I had to be very frugal. On the ride round the Yarra trail I picked foliage and flowers out of municipal plantings to put in a vase at 'home'. There are nineteen potted plants in this room now.

I've learned how to live alone, or how to live the version of alone which you have when your child lives with you half of the time. It is very much okay. Time alone is not down time or dead time between livelier experiences. Sometimes it's glum and sometimes it's strange, and sometimes when the setting and atmosphere is nice I wish wistfully for a companion to be there and share that enjoyment. Most days I also wish my cats could talk, they seem to think they can but they cannot, it is all lies or at least, misinformation. What do they think of me? I was with my dearest friend last night by the river; it was not complicated, not overloaded, peaceful, simple, right. 

1 comment:

Helen Balcony said...

My dearest friend is also going through a horrible time. Her brother died, suddenly. She says she's gone to ground which I imagine is what I would do, but eventually there will be walking.