overwhelming

like fig foam

I write this on Ngunnawal country. A tiny part of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, here: “How could it be otherwise? That peoples possessed a land for sixty millennia and this sacred link disappears from world history in merely the last two hundred years?”

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You know that special trolley at the back of the plane with unlimited snacks? Who can I thank for that?

I come back to Australia once a year and for a month the light is mushy. In the fridge, there is lemon water. On my bed, a pack of new underwear. Outside my window, Lake Ginninderra is sparkling. All the ducks and way more interesting Australian birds are characters in a play.

Did you know? Gum trees often have armpit folds.

I’m not super sure how to breathe in the trees anymore. It feels greedy to sniff them or something. I’m also rusty at using my MyWay bus card. In a nutshell: I’m both impossibly relieved and permanently disoriented to be here.

As a grounding exercise, I make a clinkclinkclink toast. Tell my family that this is the first year I visit where I’m neither getting over an ex nor obsessing over a crush’s texts. This is kind of true. What is fully true (and what I don’t say) is that I want to be perfect at being present with them. The year Zo was truly here.

After a week, my skin is still dusty winter. And my sense of time? Unhinged. Still, a routine is coming along. There’s this one: where I ask to be Maman’s sous-chef and she asks me to move around the kitchen with more zeal and I spin away from her in a huff.

And this one: where I tiptap on my computer and use words like contracts and clients in conversation. And family friends are too busy trying to wrap their mouth around prosciutto and the singular they/them pronoun to notice. 

And this one: where I climb a spiderweb structure for kids and just sway there. Gently.

At one point, I re-pot Papa’s flowers. A solid, tangible action I take my time with. Papa makes me a cabbage pancake and mentions his last trip to Montréal. How it was good to meet a romantic partner of mine. How it was nice they liked the same crêpe toppings. How just because something ended doesn’t mean it was a mistake. 

Another week goes by. I borrow a book from the Belconnen library called “The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success” and wince the whole way through the first chapter. Here, the end is the mistake, right?

I walk the 9 km around the lake. I am so much taller than Maman. Just this tall asparagus she gave birth to crying tall asparagus tears. And Maman, in a very un-Maman way, does not solve the tears. Our shoes snap gum nuts open and the gum nuts go ahhhh like the sound of release and they tell me my prophecy.

Every year, on and on til forever, I will fly back to less snowy unceded lands. There, I will eat food and crunch with heartache and existential dread and sensory overload and have days where I feel guilty for all of it.

My sister comes over and we take turns cracking each other’s backs on Maman’s bed. I use too much crème fraîche in the gateau d’Eve* making it way less crispy than usual. Even so, my family and I agree it’s pretty delicious. 

I go on some more walks and sometimes I collect with my eyes, sometimes with my hands. This is what I collect: I collect the fidget spinners of the natural world. I collect butterfly wings (no longer flickering). I collect my favourite flower which is the yellow paper daisy (spiky). I collect feathers (glinting). I pick a fig from the fig tree and don’t see the white foam pouring out from the stem til it’s sticky on my hands.

The fig foam is too much for me to take and I put the fig down.

*Recently found out this three-generational Bailly recipe is also, in fact, a Tupperware recipe.

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Audio updates are: Talia introduced me to Nanna Hauge Kristensen’s work and I want to share this with you. It’s an audio doc about a woman who boils an egg and waits for death. It’s 8 minutes and stunning. I’m learning a lot from the way Nanna weaves in English translation and sparse narration in her pieces.

ALSO, I interviewed Hélène Bertin, the researcher-curator behind je dors, je travaille, for the audio doc I’m slowly making. I learnt about what prevented Hélène from including Valentine’s lovers, partners and queer community as she shared Valentine’s story.

Front cover of je dors, je travaille.

I’m piecing together how Valentine’s queer love seeped into her work in invisible and not so invisible ways. Largely inspired by Ursula Le Guin’s words: “Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”

— yr zo