I went away for a long weekend thanks to cheap flights and a desire to be somewhere different while I did some writing. I found myself an apartment by the sea that had a balcony and a table so I could sit and watch the world go by while still feeling part of it. This was a little torturous, being so close to the ocean and having to refrain from touching it.
When I write I become a sponge, or maybe a tuning fork, for my own feelings and the world around me. This process is still very beguiling to me because often I go into the day with a plan only to end up writing something entirely unexpected. I had been sitting working on something that felt very much like work when I decided to give up for a moment and have a break. Opening the sliding door to the balcony I was met with the view of the palm trees moving on the beach and I remembered a few years ago when a thing happened, something that was so rich and dense in experience that I don’t even know what to call it, and I changed entirely. As I watched the movement of the palm leaves shimmering the next thing I knew I was at home watching TV and the trees outside the window weren’t just green and brown, they were purple round the edges, and orange, merging with the blue of the sky like a watercolour. The people on the TV began blurring too, into forms that weren’t men or women, they were both or neither. Their faces contorted on the screen and I saw them as the same fractal, multicoloured beings as the trees.
Things like this happened to me for days and weeks on end. I was in my room once standing by the window and I thought, what if my future might not be anything like the kind of life I had led up until now? This realisation piereced through me like white hot light and my head started to pang. The pain got worse the more these thoughts filled my head, as if all the possibilities of my life were suddenly so vast they couldn’t be contained inside my skull. I started to struggle to sleep each night as my brain attempted to solve the problem of time moving forward, the problem of aging, the problem of identity and destiny. I started to eat each of these impossible concepts with my brain, chewing on them, spitting them out, looking at them, and putting them back in my mouth to chew on them some more.
At the centre of it all I hoped to find something solid yet the more I thought, the more elusive each topic became. In my search for answers, books taught me that gender is constructed, sexuality is fluid, and personality is conditioning. I had this nagging feeling that things I had built my entire life around weren’t real or concrete and I began to panic that I wasn’t Rachael at all but some hideous new creature, devoid of everything that came before me, that no one would recognise or love in her true undefinable form.
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During my trip I read a book on the beach about a woman who was in an institute because she would only drink water and stand on her hands. She wanted to be a tree. Towards the end of the book her sister is so traumatised from this unravelling she starts to feel unstable as well and becomes sympathetic to her sister’s desires to leave her human form behind. It reminded me of a quote from a poem which says, ‘From my rotting body, flowers shall grow, and I am in them and that is eternity.’
Nowadays I have moments, for example if I think too much about the laws of physics or the vastness of space, where things get blurring again but for the most part I can bring myself back, to the charade of it all, to get through the day. Since my experience, my brain has come to the somewhat reluctant conclusion that most things in life cannot be pinned down using definitions unless the definitions can change to reflect their subjects. The trees are a good teacher in this regard, as they don’t require knowledge of what they are meant to be in order to be what they are. They show there is no real work to be done other than being, experiencing and letting time wash over them. This came first as a great relief to me, but soon morphed into grief for all the time I had spent trying to contain things. Today, I am grateful to spend my time with the palm trees, who I see now as me in a different form.
