The Body Remembers

Foreword:

As I'm writing this I'm experiencing one of the worst stomachaches and body aches of my life. Coincidentally, I had about 4 shots of coffee today, which burrowed a pit so deep in my stomach that I couldn't tell whether I was having an anxiety attack or whether I was just experiencing Digestion+ (Painful Edition). Maybe it was both.

After a long car ride yesterday, I had the chance to venture back up to the countryside and watch as all those familiar lines of olive groves, bushfire-kissed grasses and coughs of gravel congealed into a blurry painting from the window. As I stood on that ground again, big toe bandaged and still swollen, shirt dusty and well-worn, I breathed in the air and thought about how it must be true, the body keeps the score. Locations can act much like people - sometimes they are closer to a stranger you stumble towards in a bar who keeps you steady, sometimes the mere sight of them makes you ache. I guess I would produce two categories of my personal Pathetic Fallacy: Fragments from the Bay and Noble Hills.

Fragments from the Bay:

When I go back to my parent's place, which was my home only a few months ago, I am filled with this air of stagnancy and humidity. My mum ended up repurposing my old bedroom to become her office, and I once again noticed the lack of sunlight that came through the window, giving the inhabitant two options: turn on the big, piss yellow light and drown the space in acrid monochrome, or open the window and work in (mostly) darkness. Difficult decision to make. This is why I have collected so many lamps over the years.

When I think about the surrounds, I am reminded of a nearby river that served me well for a few months. I would dress uncharacteristically, puffer jacket and those scratchy, lightweight trackpants, and half-listen to an audiobook about electricity and neurobiology. But mostly, I was thinking about myself. I was thinking about the horrific nature of impulse, how it grazes you with premature warnings (feather, brick, truck) and then bites down, gnashing anything and everything you had expected for those coming days, months and years because just for a second, you were growing sick of the stagnancy. Nowadays I try to allow this guilt and shame to be productive, or at least write about it. But the river remembered better than me.

If you kept walking around this area, you'd cross over from brick buildings to well-manicured grasses, embraces of rocky ledges and sand, moats parallel like chopsticks on a placemat, and finally you'd find a place that is just darkness, motion-activated lanterns, and the intermittent pants of runners passing you by. It was there that I tried to do something "cinematic" and lay down, and think, and watch as the cumulus clouds chafed against the asphalt grey of the sky. I played my own game of hopscotch on the rocky projections into the water, sometimes catching glimpses of other people trying to photograph the skyline, which was usually well-lit and almost taunting from where I stood.

I always wondered to myself - why can't I just go over there? I could do something rational, like see an evening film, or grab a bite to eat, or even just share a space with other people my age. But sometimes I would put myself in these positions because I knew that it is easier to learn and marinate in your own untasty thoughts by building up lactic acid in your calves for an hour or two, and to battle against the free subscription of Audible parroting facts about Galvanism into your ears. Something I learn as time goes on is that locations have their own colours, tones of voice, different layers of wrinkles and sweat, and that sometimes you'll visit them in this sick Sisyphean fashion like the engagement between the Bay and I, and sometimes you'll ride on the back of a metaphorical stork and find new life wedged between red sand and fog.

Noble Hills:

If places could be Valentines, I would bury my heart in the dry summer heat of this specific slice of countryside. I was glad to exist there at a point in time where it was essentially liminal (now quite a few neighbours and properties are sprouting) and where my only companions were familiar landmark trees, a view of Google Maps sunbleached from the flimsy nature of my screen protector, and wild hopping masses of kangaroos (usually a mama Roo and her children crossing a field). When I was on my first dates with this place, I was in a perpetual state of waiting and countdown. A state of indecision and deliberation around relationships, and a painful sense of knowledge about my body and my mind and the aching discomfort felt in their dalliance. It seemed that I was in a period of goodbyes, both planned, unplanned, and forced by circumstance. This time in my life made me grateful for those brief excursions into the city (and now, still 3/4 mobile, missing rapid-fire drumming in the arcade. I think once everything is sorted, DDR is next on my plans). 

So I returned, around 7 weeks later, with this tough and sinuous feeling in my stomach, a feeling that echoes of me (a developing me, a waiting me) still paraded around and waved at me with familiarity. I felt a lack of recovery from that nervous animal that had burrowed inside me months before, one that skittered and questioned what was ahead. For the first time in ages since moving out, I had started developing a panic attack in reaction to a regular cup of coffee. Part of my body had forgotten it was 2025, January, and that the barbeque was finally painted red, and a fence now enwreathed the house. As I felt my heart beat and heave, I realized I had no reason to feel that way (besides obvious physiological influence from the caffeine), and that the flooring underneath me didn't tether me to an uncomfortable liminality but one that could be left for a stylish, light-flooded home of my own.

Yesterday I got to make the place into real art. I brought a lighting kit, my humble (and battery-deficient) Fuji XS10 camera, and a variety of props, and reflectors, and other curios from my high school photography experience. I felt like time was repeating itself in a way, though, the last time I did something like this, it was in a reserve just a few hops away from my house, and was a notoriously dark, fly-swarmed cave of burnt trees, members of the public strolling, and a good array of judgemental eyes wondering why someone has a budget Hollywood setup in a public park. I'm not sure if I miss that.

But as I was shooting, I think I heard a self-imposed leitmotif ripple through the grounds and my camera. As I focused a spotlight on a tree far away, I could see those Fragments from the Bay again, I could see the way the flash produced chalky strokes of light onto the branches and brief Vaseline touches on the healthy, green leaves. All of a sudden, it was August, and November, and January again, all at once. And I didn't really know what to think. All I knew is that my bones felt it.

So it is unsurprising that I woke with a characteristic crick in my shoulder, the type of thing that curses me when my body retains some shade of stress, or at least a question that prefers to tug at tendon and muscle rather than my mind. It is unsurprising that in this terrible, deep water beneath the iceberg, the smallest suggestion of a latte was enough to create staccato splashes and waves. I also suppose the fading of my countryside-specific muscle memory was enough to trip me. I didn't know where the ziploc bags were, I forgot the location of mugs, I wasn't sure where the laundry baskets were meant to be, and every charger was USB-C and not lightning cable. But despite all the new elasticity tailoring itself for my actual home, something deep in my viscera still knew this house and this land. As if the grass and I had a brief dalliance and the only thing that remained of it was brief visits, and echos of half-finished houses, and fog obscuring stars, and pitstops at McDonalds and KFC because of a lack of working kitchen.

The house feels like a cousin, or maybe a nephew, and I watched it grow, and lived beside it sometimes intermittently, and once devotedly, and now I visit with nothing in my hands but camera equipment and the desire to document. How do I even begin to physically document feelings like this?

If that house shares my DNA, then the Bay is more like a terrible roommate that I was forced to house with, who filled their sinks with diluted pasta sauces and still, still I sat by them to watch movies and still I sought them - the water, the twinkle of skyline, the ache that they brought me - to teach me something. To be like one of those yachts bobbing and drifting away from the shore.

And the body remembers, I can say that for sure. The brain leaves breadcrumbs of memories in every place you visit for you to tiptoe with complete, agonizing accuracy once you return. Now I feel it in my bones.