Lessons in Letting Go (16 page)

When it was all over we gathered together once more and made our way back towards the car park. As we walked, Vy suddenly let out a little gasp and said, ‘You know what the worst bit about this is?’

Oh dear. Poor Vy. She patted me on the arm.

‘I don’t know how to call back to Australia on these Balinese telephones.’ She grabbed hold of the door handle of the waiting vehicle and puffed a bit as she pulled herself up. ‘So I can’t tell my husband what you girls told me until I get home.’ She shuffled over to make room for the rest of us. ‘Maybe I should get something pierced while I’m here and surprise him.’ And she grinned like an imp as we closed the car doors and started our silence challenge.

I stared out the car window all the way back to the retreat, smiling to myself. I hoped I grew up to be like Vy.

I woke up the next morning feeling edgy. Today wasn’t just about us not talking—we were not even allowed to listen to music or read. Instead, we were to focus on our inner selves and write down anything pertinent. It was going to be a long time on my own, and considering that my thoughts and I were not getting along at the moment, I reckoned it was probably going to feel a lot longer for me than for anyone else. I wished now that I hadn’t welshed on the temple ritual. It might have helped clear out the rubbish in my head. I was so wrapped up in hurt, anger, regret and guilt that I was like a pass-the-parcel no one wanted to be holding when the music stopped.

On my desk sat a notepad and a watercolour set. I picked up the notepad and started writing. I didn’t think about it, I just let my thoughts come out uncensored. I was hoping to pour my subconscious onto the page to see if I could make sense of it from a distance. I wrote for an hour without stopping and then went back and read it over.

It started off as anger at Thomas for hurting me. I frowned. I had thought I was feeling guilty but judging by the language on this page, I wasn’t so much filled with contrition as I was a potty-mouthed ball of fury. Then gradually, predictably, my anger turned to self-flagellation. Now I was reading that I deserved to be hurt because I had left him. In fact, I deserved this hurt for all the pain and distress I had caused every person I had ever met in my entire life: the Bastard Man, my dad, my sister, the turtle, the little girl in Waltons, Craig in the caravan, Shane Doltrey, the driver who picked me up at Denpasar airport and had to endure me when I was drunk. Then I circled back to Thomas again and another couple of pages were filled with a list of regrets, steadily becoming more and more ridiculous: I had probably hurt Thomas every time I had nagged him to make me a cup of tea; I had probably caused him undue stress by not doing my share of the washing-up; I had probably breathed in the wrong direction on a summer’s day in 2004, making a butterfly flap its wings in Sydney, causing a tornado in Paraguay. Of course Thomas hated me and wanted me out of his life: I was a mean, horrible, selfish person. After that I had written a lot of apologies to him and promised to find a way to make up for everything. It finished with: ‘When he’s happy, I’ll be happy.’

I dropped the notepad and stared with disbelief at what was in front of me. Did I really believe that I was responsible for his happiness? Here I was in this tropical paradise to learn how to let go of my own pain and I was wasting my time trying to figure out how I could make him let go of his. And if I stopped beating myself up for a second and really thought about it, I had no idea why Thomas had ended our friendship in the first place; I was only guessing that it was because I’d done something terrible. I chewed my bottom lip worriedly. It said a hell of a lot about me that all of my assumptions started with the belief that I was an awful person.

I stared out the window at the rice paddies. I was trying to control things over which I had no power. No wonder I was such a mess: I had a list of regrets and miseries in my head and I spent every spare moment cataloguing them, reliving them and finding ways to hurt myself with them. I wasn’t helping the people I believed I had damaged; I was damaging myself. I looked again at what I had written: ‘When he’s happy, I’ll be happy.’ I picked up my pen and scribbled it out. I wasn’t in control of Thomas. The only person I could control was myself.

I made a decision: because I would probably never know the real reason Thomas had ended things, the only thing I could do was let go. More to the point, the only thing I could do was let
him
go. Finally, here on a little island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, I got it. This was the ‘life’ that Adam was talking about. Shit happens. It’s how you deal with it that counts.

There was a pile of small squares of paper left in a corner of the writing desk. These were for a ritual that we were to perform on our final day. We were to write on each piece of paper one negative aspect of our lives that we wanted to free ourselves from, and on the final day, we were going to burn them. We could use as many of the pieces of paper as we liked. I used all of them, and when I ran out, I chopped up more to the same size and used those as well.

I wrote ‘guilt’, I wrote ‘regret’, I wrote ‘
Le Marchepied
’. It was like the earth had spun around and shown me the world that everyone—apart from myself—was living in. My father had forgiven me for
Le Marchepied
, why was I not forgiving myself? The little girl in Waltons department store had probably never thought of me again—and if by some slim chance she had, then she was even weirder than me. The Bastard Man was dead. I should be honouring his memory with more than guilt. I wrote ‘helplessness’ and ‘self-loathing’ and ‘grief ’. I wrote ‘Thomas’. I wrote until every spare scrap of paper I could find had a word on it. When I was finished there was a pile of twenty pieces of paper in front of me, each with only a single word or phrase written on it, but each representing countless memories and emotions that stretched all the way back to my childhood. I realised my hoarding hadn’t started with the physical objects at all; my head was more crowded than my house, and if I wanted to let go of the stuff, then I had to let go of what was inside me first. I had to forgive myself. Nothing would go until I did.

I looked at my watch. I still had some time left before dinner, so I decided to use the watercolours to paint pictures over the words; if I was going to rid myself of all these horrible feelings then I might as well send them off in style. I tried to paint little scenes that represented the emotions behind the words but as I have no artistic skills whatsoever, by the time I’d finished all my pieces of paper looked like they’d been attacked by a four-year-old. I folded each one in four so that no one else could see my handiwork, laughing as I did so at the birds and love-hearts and terrible impressions of people that I’d tried to produce. Then I stacked the pile on my desk where it would sit until it was time for them all to be burnt.

I couldn’t wait.

The next two days of yoga were much more enjoyable and, surprisingly, I could balance. I was a little freaked out to think that my mental instability had manifested itself physically. Adi laughed at me and said, ‘Yes, Corinne. That’s what yoga is all about.’ Oh. Well at least I knew now. It occurred to me that the only person who hadn’t lost their balance at all in the last four days was Vy.

On our final afternoon we made traditional offering baskets out of palm leaves. We then decorated them with flowers and set them aside. Adi lit a ceremonial fire in a woven basket in the middle of the yoga room and one at a time we threw in our pieces of paper. I had the most and the watercoloured pictures on them made them somewhat fire retardant. They took a long time to burn. I was too happy to feel self-conscious about it; I had not only spent a day really learning about myself, but I was now burning away all the parts I’d realised I shouldn’t be holding on to. It felt great. I had not even made a copy of what I’d written on those bits of paper as a memento. I was finally, truly and completely letting go of something. Everyone waited patiently while my thoughts turned to embers and I added another few centimetres to the diameter of the hole in the ozone layer.

Vy had the fewest pieces of paper. She threw in two, and asked us if she’d done it right. When we said ‘yes’, she shrugged happily and started chatting about meeting her son-in-law at the airport when she got home.

We climbed back up the pebbled steps, through the frangipani and past half a dozen stone gods. We were on our way to the retreat’s main altar to make our offerings. Vy was just in front of me, taking her time on the steep steps and stopping to inspect the plants as we passed. She fascinated me. Surely someone who was eighty years old had a million things in their life to let go of. Vy had only burnt two little pieces of paper. I tugged the sleeve of her kaftan.

‘Hey, Vy, can I ask you something?’

She stopped and smiled at me. Now I felt shy.

‘What did you do with your day of silence?’

‘Oh, I slept. All of that walking—and the yoga is quite tiring.’ She was still smiling at me.

‘You didn’t focus on getting rid of negative stuff, things you regret and so forth?’

‘No!’ She said it like I had just asked her if she was considering getting a boob job.

‘Good grief, if I spent my time rattling around inside my own head thinking about things that I regretted, I would have missed all the lovely things going on around me. And then I really would’ve had something to regret.’ She laughed and patted my hand like I was a simpleton. Which I guess I was.

Vy didn’t come to the altar with us. Instead, she wandered back to her room, humming to herself.

When we got to the top of the steps we placed our little baskets of flower offerings in front of the Balinese god and stood back. Adi told us that if we wanted to, we could pray.

‘Pray to this god, pray to your own god, pray to a butterfly called Brian if you like.’ Adi giggled. ‘What’s important is that you pray sincerely. Whoever is supposed to hear it will do so if it comes from your heart.’

I prayed every night when I was a child. I prayed for my family, for my extended family, I prayed for all the children in my class at school, I prayed for the little girl in Waltons, I prayed for everyone I could remember and then I prayed for all the people I had probably forgotten. I used my prayers to cover all my bases, and as I grew older those prayers became longer and longer. Eventually, the burden of trying to remember everyone became too much and I stopped praying altogether. Ever since I was little, I’ve been rattling around inside my own head, focusing on the things I regret.

Now, standing at this altar, in front of a foreign god in a foreign country, I closed my eyes, clasped my hands to my forehead, thought of the god of my childhood, and for the first time in my life, I prayed for myself. I asked for help. I didn’t feel guilty or selfish, I felt like it was about time. I opened my eyes and blinked. It felt like I had broken to the surface.

Chapter Fourteen

I had dinner on my own in Ubud that night, thinking over the last few days and congratulating myself on my decision to come to Bali. I felt light and free. I hadn’t even succumbed to my usual sentimentality when I said goodbye to the others. Some of them, like Vy, I hadn’t even seen before they left. I was okay with that. If I had learnt anything from Vy, I had learnt that the goodbye wasn’t the important part, it was the time spent together that counted.

When I got back to the retreat, I passed the only other balcony I could see on the way up to my room. Dael was sitting out the front. I hadn’t realised anyone else was staying on. As I made my way past, she waved me over.

She poured me a cup of ginger tea and I sat down awkwardly. Without Lucy or Vy or Adi to facilitate, I wasn’t sure we had anything in common. Dael was stunning, with a short black bob, deep brown skin and the kind of body that made Halle Berry look like a frump. She was confident—almost outspoken—stylish and immaculately dressed. She spoke better English than I did. I was struggling to find common ground until she pulled out some gossip magazines. I instantly relaxed; bitching about celebrities had to be a universal language.

‘Ugh.’ I pulled a face. ‘Britney Spears. What a bogan.’

Dael looked up from her magazine.

‘What is a bogan?’

Okay. Maybe it wasn’t as universal as I thought.

‘It’s an Australian term for someone who is uncultured. Sort of. It’s not always a bad thing to be a bogan. Aussies celebrate their bogan tendencies.’

Dael looked at me blankly.

‘Bogans wear T-shirts with pictures of Harley-–Davidsons or Bon Jovi on the front.’

She was still looking at me blankly.

‘They have mullets. You know, the hair that is short at the front and long at the back?’

‘Oh!’ She understood now. ‘Like what the Americans call “white trash”?’

‘Sort of.’ I was drowning here. ‘Sort of like white trash except bogans can be rich. They don’t often live in trailers either. It’s hard to explain. You’d have to see one to understand.’

‘I move down to Legian tomorrow for a week. Maybe you could come there one day and show me.’

‘Where’s Legian?’

‘It’s near Kuta.’

‘Oh. Okay. You’re going to see a lot of bogans then.’

‘Maybe I don’t know what you are talking about because we don’t have bogans at home.’

I doubted that. Every country has bogans, they just call them different things.

‘I think you do, Dael—there must be people in the Netherlands that the rest of you laugh at and think look a bit daggy.’

‘No.’ Dael shook her head decisively. ‘Every Dutch person has class. We don’t have bogans. What is “daggy”?’

Suddenly Lucy burst through the foliage, suitcase and sunhat in hand. Her fiancé had booked her on the wrong flight and she was stuck here for another two days. She admonished us for drinking tea instead of cocktails, sat down and regaled us with the story of her trip back into town.

‘The taxi driver kept asking me if I wanted to go to a bar with him. Can you imagine it? I said I was getting married and he just shrugged and said he was married too and it didn’t make any difference! Can you
imagine
that? So I panicked, and I’m sorry, Dael, but I told him that I was secretly a lesbian and I was coming back here to see you. That turned him off.’