Small Acts of Disappearance (15 page)

IN PASSING

 

 

 

 

 

I
received the news digitally, in a text from my old housemate, Kat.
Just to let you know,
the message said. I was curled on my couch, twisted up against my boyfriend, whom I was introducing to a trashy sci-fi series that I'd watched in the months after my first stint in the hospital program, when I still felt too fragile for the social world, too tentative in my new routines and thought patterns, to expose them too frequently to the world. It had been about a year since I'd left the house that I'd shared with Kat, the house in which I'd hit what I now call, when I talk about it, the crisis point. Where my weight had dropped to less than it had been when I was ten years old and I'd been unable to sit still for any time at all. When I was driven, constantly, by the restless, almost manic energy that acute hunger pushed through me, when I was most completely convinced that my tightly controlled, minimal eating was not a problem in and
of itself, but was simply what I needed to be doing in order to manage the rare physical illness that I'd been living with since I was nineteen – by that stage, for six or seven years. When I talk about that house now, I always mention how Kat and her girlfriend Michaela would spend two or three evenings each week knitted together on the old, brown sofa that we'd rescued from the street, eating the dinners that Kat had cooked, and watching awful movies that had them both in stitches. I always mention how I'd largely stayed out of the lounge room as a result, but had visited the kitchen after they'd both gone to bed, and eaten the vegetables out of the containers of leftovers Kat had kept to take to work for the next day.
Just to let you know,
the message said.
Michaela died of a heart attack in her sleep last night.
She was thirty years old. I'd fallen out of touch when I'd left that house, when I started trying to leave my hunger and the strange half-life that it propped up as well.

I hadn't seen Michaela in person for about five years. I hadn't been in touch with her wider circle either, even though we all still live within three suburbs of each other, even though, for a time, we spent almost every evening together. Kat had been, perhaps, my best friend, for a while: she'd moved into my sharehouse from Canberra, and after travelling across Europe for several months. She knew no one in Sydney and invited me along on all her outings. She was brashly funny, curious, intensely charming and wickedly outrageous. More importantly, perhaps, she was completely certain of herself and her own decisions in a way that I have never been and that
I have always admired. Later, that winter, she started dating Michaela, and I tried to cling to that same friendship, even though there wasn't the same space for me any more and I was really just third-wheeling along, wildly, blindly and a little furiously, as my body fell apart.

My friendship with Michaela, however, largely had developed because she and her circle spent a good three nights a week at the Warren View, a pub at the end of Enmore Road, the arterial road from which the street I lived on peeled away. I knew that if I went along I could drink vodka-sodas instead of having dinner, and avoid both empty time and an empty stomach until it was time to go to bed. When I knew Michaela best it was
my
heart that was at risk of failing, the muscle itself being slowly metabolised by my malnourished body.

I've been more present in her death, and in her mourning, than I ever really was in her life, even when I was physically sitting alongside her.

Hours before I received Kat's message, I'd been on Facebook, and noticed a mutual friend had changed her profile picture to an older photo, taken at a party in the house that Kat and I had shared. In the photo, she was standing in our old kitchen, clinking beers with Michaela, both of them dressed in mens' shirts, with false moustaches and aviator glasses
– the party had had a gender-bending theme, mostly so that I could wear the secondhand boy's waistcoat and suit pants that I'd found at an op shop one weekend. Michaela's moustache had been drawn on with eyeliner, and was pencilthin; our mutual friend's had been made by her boyfriend, who worked in a TV art department, and was a glorious and vaguely pornographic '70s-style brush. It was a great party, I remembered, and flipped back to looking at articles about misbehaving footballers, photos of cakes, and cat memes.

In the days that followed, after I received the news, I watched our other common friends do this too, change their own photos to shared shots, each of them standing next to, dancing with, winking at, toasting or passed out beside Michaela, slinging their arms across her shoulders, holding matching grimaces for the camera. They reposted old photos too, and all of these images from years ago, from the years I now think of as my lost years, as the years I don't like to remember, were suddenly a steady presence scrolling downwards on my computer screen. I was seeing Michaela far more frequently than I had in all the intervening years, precisely because I could now never see her again.

The man I'd been curled against that night called this frantic, almost instinctual reposting, this public, if mediated mourning, a digital ritual; he compared Facebook's wall to a wailing wall, against which my friends were lamenting, crying out their loss and pain. Our generation has no real rituals for grief, no way of publicly acknowledging private loss. But now we grieve as a community, because we are part
of a community that exists which is expressed online, and also because it is more vital, more important, than traditional family for Michaela and for so many of our common friends.

There's an uncanny aspect to this too, of course – these rituals are only possible because of the data that the site itself has stored, the documentation of so many of the small events and interactions that make up a life, in all its minute and mundane glory. My friends were sifting through these, digging out those tiny, routine gestures that we come to love in other people, and putting them back on display. Facebook was a mausoleum, or the accident site where they were placing their own small memorials. Photographs of particular expressions, a lifted eyebrow and sardonic grin. Recordings of mock-manic dance moves. Screen grabs of text message exchanges
(Wanna come to Centrelink with me on Valentine's Day? I'll buy you a beer and we'll call it a date.)
This, they were saying, this is what I've lost, what I will miss. These are the things that I loved.

And it seems that I am the only one who does not want to remember those days.

One of the first reposted photographs of Michaela that I saw was taken in the Domain, during one of the public festival performances held there in the long evenings of summer, a close shot of three faces, Kat's, Michaela's, my own, all of us big-grinned and quite obviously tipsy. I'm wearing a pair of over-sized earrings that I loved, and that I lost some months
later when I loaned them to an absent-minded friend, and a bright red jumper that doesn't hide the ridges of my collarbones. I remember those summer concerts; we'd always take picnics of cheeses, chicken, dips and bread, the pre-mixed sugar-free vodka cruisers I drank at the time, the occasional Scrabble board, once, a fondue pot. I'd almost always end up eating something that I knew I couldn't, and throwing up in the line for the portaloos that never moved quickly enough for me to hold my troublesome stomach at bay. I clicked on the photo, to see it in closer detail, and accidentally opened up Michaela's own, still active, Facebook page. No one, it turns out, knows her password. No one can shut it down.

Many of the photos that were suddenly recirculating were photos of Michaela at the pub, her local, close to Kat's and my house, but also halfway between Michaela's flat on the edge of Stanmore and the townhouse halfway to Marrickville that her best friend Naomi shared with two friends and an ancient, bedraggled dog. I don't know how many hours I spent there too, sitting in the beer garden that's the backdrop to these photos, in those strange and vaguely hazy months at the height of my illness. My own face, smiling wildly under dead-fish eyes and sheenless skin or staring absently at the drink in my hands, recurs again and again, near the edges of so many of these photos.

I was unsettled by this too because I had stopped going to the Warren View. When I started moving away from
Kat and Michaela, and began the long and awful process of distancing myself from the illness that had come to dominate each day of my life, I moved to a new house, with new places and venues in its orbit. I clung to different friends, with whom I could talk, however cautiously, about unspecified sadnesses and anxieties, and with whom, sometimes, I convalesced. I hadn't been to the Warren View for more than five years, until a few months before Michaela died, on Anzac Day. I went back, almost by accident, to meet up with another friend, a new friend, a young woman I met in the day program of the private psychiatric hospital in Western Sydney where I had my third admission; she was playing a few rounds of two-up at the pub before moving on to a bar that we'd be planning to try out together.

I walked up to the Warren View after eating my lunch at home, and sat again in that leafy garden with my friend and her strange assortment of companions – a colleague, a uni friend, an Army doctor, a soccer teammate, several of their partners. I had a drink and chatted and realised that I was no longer on edge, no longer sprung with that reckless energy that I was used to feeling in that place. I watched my new friend flirt and knock back gin-and-tonics, talk constantly and frantically, laugh with a tossedback head at jokes that weren't really that funny. I watched her steadfastly ignore the bowls of crisps that the boys bought for the table over the hours. She bought me another drink after I'd said that I didn't want any more; in the late afternoon I asked if she'd had lunch and she replied, with
obvious evasion and a vague hostility, that she'd been out for breakfast with her friends.

I watched her behave, that is, almost exactly as I used to, when I was desperate to push away my illness, when I was frantically trying to find a shape for myself, to hold myself together by clinging to the structures of other peoples' lives, when I moved around with Michaela and her circle. But I felt, that day, like I made a different peace with the place, and that by coming back to the Warren View I was able to see myself again, how much I'd changed, regardless of how much I'd lost, across the years, to my disease.

I didn't ask Kat for the details of Michaela's funeral, partly because I was unsure of the etiquette around it, partly because I didn't feel that I'd belong there, surrounded by our common friends who'd still been so deeply involved in her life, even though I'd moved away. But I kept watching Facebook, and eventually I saw a new series of posts: photographs taken in the backyard of Naomi's townhouse, unchanged in the golden afternoon light that I love in late autumn, that time of year. Our common friends playing frisbee on the tiny lawn, clutching longnecks and sitting on the wooden benches that line the fence, toasting the camera with raised eyebrows. The captions all tagged ‘…with Michaela Collins', even though she wasn't there, even though the photographs could never have been taken if she had been.

I wasn't there, but had been in Naomi's backyard so
many times in those months of acute illness, in that space too, alongside that circle of people. And looking at those images, from my bedroom, I still felt close to them, drawn into their common loss, a participant in their mourning every bit as vicarious, perhaps, as I had been when I sat beside them in that pub. Presence, just like connection, is always relative, and all that digitisation has done is blur lines that were never as clean-cut as we'd like to imagine. Loss a complex, multivalent thing: I know I'm mourning myself as much as I'm mourning Michaela, and the way our lives were tied together for a time.

IN HINDSIGHT

 

 

 

 

 

‘It begins quietly in certain female children'

LOUISE GLÜCK,
‘Dedication to Hunger'

I
resisted, for a long time, reading any anorexia memoirs, even though I'd been reading about the condition in fiction and textbooks. Partly, I think, this is because of my time as an editor – I'd read so many badly-written pieces of ‘sick lit', as I once heard the genre called, that I didn't think I'd find anything there besides excoriating descriptions of self-hatred and self-harm, all laid out in excruciating detail. Partly too, we were warned against such stories in the first hospital program that I attended. One of the psychologists there had curled her lip when another patient mentioned reading Portia de Rossi's terribly-titled
Unbearable Lightness,
then described it as a ‘how-to manual'. Another referred to Marya Hornbacker's
Wasted,
something of a cult book within this community of illness, as ‘triggering as fuck'. (I love this term, triggering, how it makes it sound like we're all packed tight with
emotional gunpowder and coiled, ever ready to misfire.)

I resisted too because I've been frustrated by so many of the narratives of mental illness I've seen in the media, in film, in literature too, which can't seem to hold together the complexities of recovering, of making mistakes and slipping backwards, of forgetting and relearning and forgetting again, of compromise and conditionality, or even the incredibly slow, repetitive and exhaustingly mundane nature of the process of getting better. The fall into illness, the difficulty of the illness itself, the realisation that something is wrong: these things can be accounted for, if not always easily, but everything that happens after we realise that we are ill and seek out help can't be tied up so neatly.

But my resistance softened recently, in part because I discovered a collection of essays – called
Going Hungry
– by writers who were writers before they became ill, not writers who become so because they had been ill. Many of them I already admired as writers, before knowing that we had our hungers in common: the poet Louise Glück, the novelist Jennifer Egan. Many wrote of lingering symptoms, of fears that their hunger might reassert itself at any time, some wrote of becoming well enough, though far from well. The poet Priscilla Becker writes of ‘sett[ing] into a kind of working anorexia, not careening towards death, but…[still] disciplined, self-contained'; she quotes a friend of hers as saying ‘It doesn't sound like you've been cured of anorexia, just that you've raised the bar a little.'