Shonan Beach FM 78.9

A recollection of a week with my flip phone, an unreasonable enthusiasm for political commentary on YouTube, a deepening pit of burrowing anxiety in my gut, and Sicilian lemon gelato.

Time is not as I remember it. Instead of unfurling into a great, bright path studded with increasing numbers and footsteps, it crouches at my feet like a tortured, hissing python, bloated and slow with blood. I have a month and a half until I submit my final Honours dissertation, something I have worked on from this very desk, from the postgrad rooms of a trauma-inducing library, and from the vast plein air landscapes of Noble Hills. This week I am paying homage to those countryside circuits of statistical spreadsheets and hiking shoes furred with ochre dust, by making a typical meal: chicken patties with zucchini and sharp cheddar, a pillow-soft bun, a miniature garden of leaves, and a slow, sinuous river of ketchup, aioli, and the venomous sting of hot sauce.

Late as ever, I am acclimatising to the light, searing sensation that receiving feedback brings. It feels less skinless this time, since the check-ins are not tethered to grades, yet I remain submerged in a dense, glutinous cloud of worry. Worry that I am not doing the right thing, not laying down the right kind of sentence. My most persistent fault is reading too many references, taking neat notes, and then tangling them when I write. I swap A for B, X for Y, and end up with a sentence dressed in another source’s clothes. For my discussion section I am trying the reverse: writing the statement first, then matching it to a reference. If none fits, I will dismantle and rework the statement. It sounds easier than it will be.

I think often of last August. Salt sprites drifting through the night air, damp grass slick underfoot near the docks, the deep bruise of inflamed fascia beneath fabric, the faint burn of notifications in my left pocket. At that point I was ravenous for escape. I would walk through the cold for hours until I reached some form of meaning. I never found it, not then. That would arrive months later. I remember looking over the river at the diamanté lattice of the city, wondering if some part of me was already living there, glass in hand, mouth open in laughter.

It is my brother’s eighteenth tomorrow. I think of my own eighteenth in ’22, wearing a floral green shirt with a Long Island Iced Tea in my grip, laughing that no one had carded me, feeling the singe of alcohol slide down my throat. I had already felt adult for years; the celebration, if it could be called that, was purely cosmetic. I will turn twenty-one this October. I do not know what a birthday means to me now. Perhaps just another page torn from the calendar and replaced with something else, the taste of whipped cream collapsing into sponge and jam. I find myself flickering between disappointment and a kind of startled pride in myself. I have never handled milestones well.

Graduation frightens me. I cannot see how to celebrate when it feels like opening a misted glass door into a liminal antechamber. Into nothingness. Into waiting. At least here, moving through campus, I can smell the ghosts of those who passed before, the fresh warmth of the living, the sting of papercuts along my ring finger, the vague protein-bar grit on my tongue. Afterward, what then. What remains, other than that terrible gap between Sunday night and Monday morning, the one that tastes of deep blue skies and breathless silence. I do not like to linger on it.