So you think you can study.

It's 9:30 pm and my new glasses are on to try and stop the fatigue that bombards my eyeballs as I write out yet another 300 word essay exam answer. I have written 30 so far, with a further 8 fully coloured illustrations and I am tired. I don't care any more, but there are 170 to go. So the glasses stay, a placebo to convince me that my apathy and headaches have more to do with my sight than the fact that I can think of a million things I'd rather be doing. I am hunched slightly in my chair, because the chair is too high and my back too long and the stretch in the lower thoracic muscles is starting to burn. I will do yoga tonight to compensate while my body whines.

Pegged to the wire directly above my screen is a pencil drawing of Pont Alexandre with its beautiful lamp posts and La Tour in the background and I feel a million miles away from ever being there again. The cool wet air and the smudgy clouds over the chalk white barely tangible. To the right of the picture, strung over the same wire is a pair of red footprints, smudged ever so slightly at the biggest toe that belong to the Elfling when she was a baby. I didn't date the picture, and I had a moment of not being sure if it was actually Elfling or Monkey when I hung it, but it doesn't matter. It's a symbol, more than anything.

Underneath the Parisian scene and the footprints are innumerable kindy pictures brought home crumpled in bags to admire that are bright swirls of primary colours and smudged soft pastilles. A bright red kite with a trailing blue string and a Welsh coal miner's lamp to the left.

Above the bottom string is another one, strung with lanterns and Christmas craft which is hidden by pen and ink drawings of the medial orbital wall, posterior orbit (globe removed), medial nasal cavity, cross section of the spinal cord and the cerebellum all there to remind me. I think they're decorative in their own right - or would be if my apathy were not so pronounced.

Behind them all is my gilded map of the world with the ability to scratch off the paint of everywhere I have visited. There are great swathes of golden paint left on my map and I cannot wait until I can scrape more of it under my fingernails.

Next to my computer, to the left is my lamp with its warm white glow through the fluted shade. Plain matte silver stand that does all that is supposed to and nothing it is not. Propped up against it, the Santa photo from 2010 in its red leather frame. Anterior to both, becoming superheated by the vent from my notebook is Gray's Anatomy, leather bound, 15th edition with silver pages. The ribbon place holder within the axilla. Under the book is my tablet, closed and unloved at present as I instead stick to pen and paper.

To the right, posteriorly are two galvanised buckets filled with flotsam - pens, pencils, staplers, my glasses case. At least 4 erasers still in their wrappings, a sharpener. Receipts. Anterior to these is my mouse pad and tiny mouse, my pen and my phone which buzzes occasionally with facebook notifications that I've yet to turn off or reminders for things that I've long since forgotten. Then anterior again is my workbook, filled with exam answers that I hope are acceptable, because I have so little guidance about what they should actually be. I will be showing it to friends who have passed to see if there's anything I'm doing wrong at some point.

To the left and right of the desk are my new white bookcases. Gradually being filled from the piles around the house that previously had no home, and storing up my collection of study notes and journals. My big travel book closest to me on the left, for those times when I need to sit with a Matilda-esque behemoth on my lap and ruin my neck by craning through its pages of beautiful pictures. One day soon I hope to add an atlas.

Behind me is the new piano, bought for the girls' lessons, but also for me to sit at quietly when they are in bed and flex my fingers over so that I can enjoy the sound. I am desperate to learn how to play, in a way I never once appreciated at 11 when it was offered, and so I am gradually, and poorly, teaching myself while under the guise of supervising the Elfling's practise sessions.

Behind and to my left is the little Ikea table and chairs where the babies eat their dinner when it is too cold or wet to eat outside at the dinner table. It is permanently sticky and the paint is coming off in places, but it makes me happy. They all 3 of them sit there, telling stories, or jokes that make no sense and giggling together, and even when they are all tucked up safely in bed it is still happy and giggly there.

And in the middle of it all is me. Wearing all black so that with my hair out I look like a cat burglar in bare feet. Everything stretchy because I hate anything digging into me when I'm studying. Toenails half painted and fingernails ragged from too much biting while I'm studying. Procrastinating with 13 tabs open in my browser and only 4 of them related to study. My fitness pal chiding me because I've not eaten enough calories today but not being hungry, and slightly addicted to the feature that tells me how little I'll weigh in 5 weeks if I keep it up. Recognising that not eating will make it harder to study but liking that my hips protrude again too much to let it go. Recognising that that in itself is not particularly healthy but not caring.

Mind reader

When I was a teenager, a friend used to say I could read her mind - as if I somehow had the ability to poke around in her head, and sometimes see things that even she couldn't. A close friend from a few years ago remarked something similar - that I had free access to thoughts that had never been verbalised. It was always a privilege to see inside someone, an intimacy of which few can boast.

The full moon was bright over the road as I drove into work that night and climbed into my chair, bare feet tucked up under me as I scrolled through the inside of other people's heads yet again. Silently assessing, appraising, categorising. Most of the heads I looked at were old, and the memories of a lifetime were gradually fading away. I wondered at some, as I scrolled past a dark spot, the herald of loss of a bundle of neurons, of what memory had gone with them. What moonlit walk, what tragic loss, what phone number or frisson of potential had held its place in memory.

I continued to work hard that night, steadily, playing my part in my little warm room as the patients came and went. Until he came in and I looked at his brain. His brain was young. Far younger than the brains I am used to seeing, a brain full of all the things that a young, fit, healthy, clever young person should have. Or it was once, before the accident that brought him into my care in the first place.

I wasn't in my little dark room as I looked at his head. I was in the bright room. The frigidly cold room to keep the machinery operating well. The machines that go beep were in there too as I stood at the terminal and began to scroll. And all those memories and that fun and that life and that spark were closed to me and all the people standing behind me, listening to every word I said. Until I stopped speaking and the room began to empty and the shoulders of all around me slumped. The adrenaline high that pulls you in in the middle of the night to do your best and do good futile at that point.

Where they all went I'm not sure. Some went back to work, and saw the next elderly brain that would shortly wend its way to me to delve through, others I think went home. Others went to see the family that had been woken in the middle of the night and wanted to know and to hope but couldn't. Not after my words that night.

And I sat in my little dark room and became acquainted with every part of his body. Following every line and contour. And at some point in the night I realised my cheeks were wet, as I thought of all the things that were lost. And it was important to me to do things properly, as I looked deep inside him to the parts that no one had ever seen before. To take that privilege and that honour and not take any shortcuts. Even if as I was scrolling his breaths were slowing and those around him were hearing my words from kindly mouths that have had to say them too many times before.

I drove home when the moon was still in the sky but the birds were singing and the sun was glorious through the clouds. So tired that I felt that my limbs were leaden. Few thoughts racing around a usually noisy brain as I indicated for my turnoff and parked my car. The wind chilly as I stepped out, ruffling around my ears and tickling my cheek. And it struck me again, how lucky I am to have thoughts. To record them here. To keep on having thoughts.  And the tears started again, silent ones that kept coming and coming and coming. And I cried as I saluted the sun, stretched out on my yoga mat until my biceps shook with the pain.

And I cried as I drove to the water, and ran into the choppy sea while my hair laced with seaweed and salt. But as later I lay on the sand and it pressed into my cheek the tears finally stopped. And the sun tickled along my bare skin and began to warm me from the inside out.

I can't change what happened to him. It was all over before we'd even met. And I could become cool and hardened like some of those I work with. Who look at organs and wounds and that's all they see, because there are too many sad stories. And it's not because they're lesser people or doctors or somehow innately cold. It's because they will see that tomorrow and the day after and you have to find some way or else it will break you.

But I need to know their stories. Who they are and where they've come from. I need to feel like I've earned the right to the secrets locked up inside that no one else knows. And when I find the secrets, the memories that are lost forever, I see them just for a moment, before I report them gone. And maybe it's silly and maybe it's delusional and maybe I should just buy the bottle of wine like so many others. But as I drove home under the moon tonight, the heavy golden moon, I felt the sadness shift - I did right by him. I did right by others. I will continue to keep on doing my best.

And that's my secret.

Flying high

The first time I took a plane ride I was 9. It was an Ansett flight and my grandparents dropped the 5 of us at Brisbane Domestic Airport. I remember strapping into the funny seatbelts and the roar of the engines. I remember my Dad explaining the clunk that was the landing gear lifting into the belly of the plane and I remember the airline food with the alfoil lids that you peeled back. My sister and brother got "kids packs" of food that had icecream and SPC two fruits but I got the congealed chicken and I remember being disappointed but trying not to show it. I remember the funny head phones that were really tubes, like a stethoscope. The amazing sense of adventure. Of doing something so outside our experience.

It was a big deal that we were even on that flight. Or the two that came after it in quick succession. No one else in my school had been on a plane before. It was a luxury - a massive and expensive one that my Mum had saved up for because she wanted to travel and she wanted us to love it as much as she did. But we were fortunate, something that I think I realised even then. Our car had airconditioning, a rarity at the time that was the envy of friends, even if we were only allowed to have it on on the hottest days. Opened windows good enough the rest of the time.

But that first holiday on a plane was exciting and wonderful if only for the plane itself. In the years that came after it as we travelled far and wide, the taxiing onto the runway and the initial burst as the jet engines fired up has always sucked me in to that same excited 9 year old, wondering at the magic of being in a plane. Of going somewhere. That potential and possibility.

I leaned back this afternoon into the leather seat and picked up my magazine. I didn't realise we were taxiing until I heard the rumble of the jet turbines as we were pressed back into the seats. The familiar sight of the slightly extended flaps as we tore down the runway. The belly lurching moment of liftoff, of pure elevation and weightlessness if only for a second and the awe in being able to do that. The pure magic of it all. And then, the crunch, as the landing gear lifts, and curls up under the belly, an aluminium bird in flight.

It's been more than 20 years since that first flight, and this one wasn't to go on a holiday. Or somewhere new or different. And it hurt to leave, and to get on the plane. Not as much as last time, but it still did. To get off the plane in the humid dark and walk across the tarmac to my car and drive home through the wide streets. No holiday to look forward to. No new place to explore. Just work and a pile of sheets that need to be washed.

But there is a part of me, that watched the red sun shining above the cloud cities, and just for a moment became that 9 year old again. Wishing and wondering. Peeling the foil off my crackers and cheese with my headphones in my ears. Travelling off into the sunset, the world slipping by underneath and the possibility of it all struck me. The adventure.

On My Own

I woke up on Sunday morning to the brush of the Possum's silky head against my cheek. The musty unwell smell of him as he curled in against the curve of my neck, his knees tucked up against my belly. I rubbed my cheek against his head involuntarily and listened to him mumble in his sleep while I cried. Silent sobs that matted his already damp hair.

I think I thought then, that I would not be able to forgive myself for later that day getting on a plane. And certainly, while I stood in line at the gate and the tears messily rolled off my chin and onto my new hand luggage I did not feel optimistic. All of my perspective and determination deserted me, left me desolate as I walked across the tarmac, wind whipping my hair into my eyes.

It was a short flight, bumpy, turbulent as my neighbour sculled Bundy and Coke while I stared out the window, watching the flat blue sea blend into the winter blue sky. The tears dried up somewhere near the Proserpine coast as my ears popped painfully for descent. I looked out at the water morosely, not wanting to find anything to appreciate. Enjoying my special brand of misery, branding myself with it to alleviate the guilt. The guilt of being a mother who abandons her children for 3 months. Even if she had no choice. Or no real choice at all, when the choice is unemployment and poverty and throwing away all the years of training.

My forehead rattled against the cold window as the mountains came into view. Beautiful mountains that reflected in the still water. In spite of myself, my tears dried as I watched the clouds graze across the fields, fluffy herds in the sky as we dove between them towards the tarmac. I felt the tiniest prickle along my spine as the possibility for adventure filled my mind for the first time. 3 months to head off to the beach after work to watch the last light on the water if that's what I wanted to do.

But as I walked off the plane, and into the cramped, tattooed and sunburned departure lounge I was grateful for familiar faces as we pulled my luggage off the carousel and headed to the hospital to pick up the keys to what was to be home for the next few months. The tears nearly started again when I saw the ugly apartment with the dirty floors and the stained carpet. The bed with the polyester blend green and yellow garish sheets and plastic pillows. The broken toilet and the dead phone line, and worst of all, no internet. If it had been just me I would have wallowed, then. Curled up in a ball on the thankfully clean couch and sobbed until it too was manky to match the rest of the house.

But my beautiful guardians took me to the shops where I bought new linen and groceries and a plant, so that I would have at least one living thing with me in my little house of mismatched ugly furniture and cheap fittings. And once they left, and the house echoed with all the sounds of silence, I didn't fall into a heap. Instead I moved the furniture around, trying not to notice the inch of dirt under each piece, as I made it less cramped, and more welcoming. Banishing the ugliest things to the room I don't need. Made my bed with the lovely light natural fibred linen and fluffed up the pillows. And I stocked my shelves with fresh food and fruits and curled up on the couch to watch some TV before crawling into bed and wondering at the vast emptiness, while I curled up on my side.

The next day was Monday, and my first day of work. I looked nice. I looked respectable and I was on my best behaviour. I smiled as I met new people, eager to make a good impression as a hard worker, a team player. And I smiled tightly every time someone reminded me I was staying for 6 months and tried hard to look enthusiastic at the thought. Knowing my eyes told the truth but not wanting to offend. Until someone asked me if I had any family, noticing my wedding rings and asking in that polite breezy way. Asking if I had children, and how many? And I thought of my sick little possum, who I had sung to sleep only 24 hours before as he rocked feverishly in my lap and I burst into inconsolable tears. Ruining my first day make up. And as much as I tried they would not stop. I did not care that my director was in front of me. Or some man that I do not know. Or that I never cry at work. Because I needed to cry and it's natural to cry and to be sad and to miss my babies. No matter how many people tell me that it will be fine.

But I got through the day somehow. Relieved when I could just work. Relieved that it was stuff that I knew how to do and that I could just get in and do it. Surprised when the end of the day came, and everything was ok and there was no fear in coming back. And I caught a taxi home in the afternoon light, put on my running clothes and went for a wander along the river. The beautiful river turning gold as the breeze teased ripples along the surface. The trees whispering quietly to me, to not be afraid while the birds chirped merrily. The heavy fog of murraya and honey blossom, warmed by the winter sun perfuming the air. And it finally felt ok. Felt worthwhile me being here. And I knew it would be ok.

Thoreau

The moon is big and heavy; the wind icy. I drove home tonight from a meeting I'd chaired and shivered getting out of the car, my scarf whipping up around me as the air bit straight through my clothing. I was thinking as I stepped, of a quote I've always admired by transcendentalist author Henry David Thoreau and how apt it seemed, walking into the moon.

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams!


How simple; so perfect. And yet so confounding as well. How does one go confidently in the direction of their dreams if they are not sure of what those dreams might be? If I could name a dream it would be to be happy. And yet if I am going confidently in the direction of happy does that not make it a destination instead of a state of being?


I don't want to arrive at happiness, I just want to be happy.


In amongst this academic debate, racing around my head as I climbed the stairs I realised with a start that I am not happy and the sobering realisation settled heavily in my chest. I am not sure when the unhappy came to visit, but it came with luggage and appears keen to stay. I want to be happy, but feel a little lost in where to begin. Unused of late of having to think so much about it. 


I feel dreamless and sensitive. Trapped and anxious. Unwilling to stay here with this unhappiness and confused as to which path might be next. I am not immune to happiness, I am absolutely affected by beauty, but there is something that is not quite right and I can't identify exactly what it might be. 


I think I need new dreams. 

Arco iris

At my bus stop there are 2 sets of stairs to get up and off the platform. It doesn't matter which staircase you take, the distance is the same and yet, I find myself (perhaps out of habit) taking the same route every day. About midway up the stairs, on the path I always take, the light hits the glass to cast a rainbow that extends over several steps. Even on fairly gloomy mornings only the smallest amount of light needs to hit the glass to refract it so that I'm walking through prismatic rainbows.

It is near impossible to be grumpy when walking through rainbows. They pierce the fog and dance along nerves until cheeks are involuntarily tightening and the corners of lips are tilting upwards. I like the way it sets my day. But this morning I thought about the fact that I always walk the same path and decided to try something different, to walk the other path and see if it too is strewn with rainbows. It's not. And I felt it apt, that not every pathway is bright and colourful. But I missed my rainbow so I walked back down so that I could walk back up through it, and the tiny scattered ones that touch my shoes and litter my steps as I walk by.

Sometimes it is only the rainbows that get me through the day. Or the coolness of the air as it chills my fingers and ears and nose. Or wind off the river as I walk to my bus stop. Or the fact that I can wear scarves. Long soft scarves in bright colours that snuggle around my neck and tickle my ears.

On days where I look at multi-traumas all day and diagnose unexpected lung cancers, sometimes I need rainbows.

Pterygopalatine Fossae

My fingers are cold and mottled, the blood vessels visible below the ink-stained skin like grout between uneven cobblestones. My rings are loose and fall forward onto the knuckle when I move my fingers and then back again when the movement changes. Threatening to fly off if I were to wave my hand or gesticulate.

Libraries are always cold - cold and dry. Keeping pages safe and their excellent mustiness preserved. Stopping the march of decay from ambient moisture and heat.

I am curled up with my knees against my chest, my chin resting atop as my fingers write and draw and type. Cloistered away in a tiny study room with blank walls, a mountain of heavy books and my new pen. The books are the oldest ones they had available in the library. Ancient anatomy texts that smell vaguely of formalin and are stained at the edges. Worn cloth covers that are threadbare at the bindings. I like them better than the new.

The stains on my fingers are from the new pen, an art pen purchased from an achingly beautiful store with every type of art supply possible. It has the narrowest nib. Each stroke less than one tenth of a millimetre. Just ten micrometres across. Ten quintillion yoctometres. I am irritated because my calcaneus is wrong. Bohler's angle is wrong and the adjacent navicular is too broad, but I keep on sketching, feathery strokes deepening the margins on the soft artist paper.

Occasionally I shiver and involuntarily pull my arms closer to my body, make my surface area smaller. And my wrist adjusts the angle as I pull the paper closer and keep drawing. Flick of the eyes to my 4 reference books, back to the paper. And so on. Avoiding the temptation to approximate. Occasionally my right hand gets sore and I switch, use my less precise left fingers to shade and etch, trying to improve the dexterity in both.

My hair sometimes falls across my face and I tuck it back absent mindedly, smelling the faint peroxide of the semi permanent "rinse" I put through my hair this morning and staining the tip of my ears in the process. The perfume and "bamboo extract" wafting around, trying desperately to mask it and somehow highlighting instead. Sometimes instead of tucking immediately I bring the lock of hair forward and twist it between my fingers, squinting slightly at the teinture. The unexpected darkness from hair that had been "nearly black" before. I think I will like it, but I'm afraid I won't - the contrast between dark and pale already too stark.

I am eating raspberries from the punnet. Deep red and indecently large.Juicy and plump that burst between teeth. Little seeds that stick in my teeth and ruby juice that mingles with the ink stains on my fingers. They are worth the $8 I paid for them. I have pepitas too. Soft green and crunchy. But I like the raspberries better.

I am supposed to be reviewing the pterygopalatine fossa this afternoon, but I'm not. I know I should and it makes me feel guilty and nervous in the pit of my stomach, but I want to draw instead so I am pretending drawing counts. It doesn't really, though at least I have an accurate picture of the sustentaculum in my mind. I guarantee they won't ask that on my exam.

My work involves focusing mostly on a spot a fixed distance from my eyes. I don't like it and my lenses are not as mobile as they once were. I find the outer edges of my long distance vision softer than it was previously. The colours are unaffected but the sharpness and definition has changed. I am fearful of this. Of losing my sight. Any of it. How could I draw if I can't see? Then I remember I could wear glasses and am slightly mollified. But only slightly.

The temptation to procrastinate is strong. Even from this which is procrastination in the first place. I want to open my e-mail. Or facebook. Click on things mindlessly. Read my favourite blogs. But I want to write here too because I have been neglectful and I feel it. I have let other relationships drift in the past but this one I want to hold onto. Luckily blogs are very forgiving.

Omohyoid, Digastric, Scalenus, Sternocleidomastoid. They were on my list to revise today, but I drew them last week and I am cheating myself by pretending that counts. I can't remember their innervation and I find it difficult to care, but I have to. There are only three weeks until my exam and I am suspiciously calm. Not because I am confident of passing, but the opposite. It seems so inevitable that I am going to fail that being upset about it seems silly. Except I paid thousands of dollars to sit the exam and will have to pay thousands again when I fail. And I could have bought shoes instead.

I brought my Physics text with me today, because I like it and sometimes I highlight passages in it that interest me. These are of course not the passages that I need to know for my exam. It thrills me in the tiny secret places in my brain that fizzle and pop about the understanding of what is un-understandable. Derstandable? That make me feel connected to the universe and an important collection of tiny particles that are not even a speck of sand on the beach of our galaxy. Feel oddly comforted by being so insignificant and yet able to do so many things. I wonder if that's how quarks feel.

It's 3pm and my self imposed time limit for being productive again is up and yet I know I'll stretch this out a few more minutes. That the e-mail that I've forced myself virtuously from reading while writing this will be read and that facebook will be refreshed.

Then I'll curl up again, with the pterygopalatine fossa in front of me, and I'll be an expert in an hour. Hopefully.

Adrift

I remember reading once, that one of the therapies that they use for anxious children is to wrap them in a heavy blanket so that they're provided with deep sensation over the skin. I guess it's a sort of regression to the womb thing, where those round walls gave a defined boundary so that everything you knew could be contained within your little egg. I don't know if I was wrapped as a baby, I suspect not as it was all the rage to sleep babies on their bellies, and the combination seems a bad one to me. Plus I'm intensely claustrophobic so I'm not sure how that would have worked (in utero or ex utero). But when I sleep I need a blanket - I always have. It can't be tucked in and it can't be tight but the weight against my back helps me sleep. I have to be so relaxed as to be almost comatose to sleep in nothing but air, there's just too much stimulus from every nerve ending being exposed to the air.

These were the thoughts I was pondering as I curled up in my single hammock this afternoon, like an oversized Anne Geddes baby with my feet tucked up and the soft nobbly material curving around me. I wasn't claustrophobic because my one foot was out so that I could keep swinging, and the breeze was on my face so I could breathe. But I was so intensely relaxed, swinging backwards and forwards spinning slightly before righting myself with a well placed nudge on the balcony railing, cocooned in space. And at least part of it was the gentle hug of material, holding me in.

It's easy to feel frayed sometimes, friable, as if there are just so many tangling threads all around you that are impossible to keep tidy and neat. It's like free falling in every direction while you try and work out which thread you should try and pull in first, knowing it all seems a bit pointless to go after one at a time. My skin becomes uncomfortably sensitive when I'm anxious, to the point where every light breeze across the hair on my arm can feel like bugs crawling on my skin, so intense is the sensation. And the need to have something external, pushing it all back in.

I have been studying but not. Occasionally chastising myself about my inability to sit still and absorb reams of information. I forget that I've always been terrible at studying - never having learned it at school, adapting a cramming method that worked for me at university and served me well through three degrees. I am useless at revising things, I read it, understand it all, and then feel virtuous for knowing that, but forgetting the finer details absorbed only through rote learning or revision. I do best with learning, not revision, where the first flush of understanding penetrates like pleasure as it tickles me to understand and grasp a new concept. But anything peripheral to that needs to be nailed down like a piece of particularly recalcitrant decking to stay stuck in my brain. And that's where I struggle most. Easily distracted, daydreaming when I should be concentrating.

Sometimes while studying physics, the diagrams and the formulae begin to slide around the page. The coefficients and the algebra and the Greek letters dancing around and refusing to stay still. All these concepts that once upon a time would have come to me easily, snapping and fizzling away feeling just out of my grasp. As if I'm trying to count grains of sand while I'm walking on it, and trying not to panic as I realise how impossible that is, as each grain moves under my foot and a hundred more pour on top of it.

But I draw diagrams, and come back to things, and I work out ways to quantify that sand as it slips in between my fingers. And it's probably a round about way, and I think it probably takes longer than those that just learn it through faith and rote, but when I learn it and understand it, it sticks there. Sticks and allows me to manipulate it, something tangible not just a poster on the wall of my brain. I can mould it with my hands, shape it, and share it.

I feel adrift at present, and the tangible days seem to slip by like silk over smooth skin, tantalising but brief. And a gentle fog sits all the way around my consciousness, not grey or miserable, but muted, soft and shimmering, nothing clear. And sometimes it's beautiful to exist in a world that feels lifted straight from a Degas painting, all swishes and light and movement, but others I need to curl up in my hammock and have it press me firmly in on all sides. Weighted and calm.

Curtain call for 2011

My facebook wall has exploded today, full of wishes and cheer and resolutions. Enigmatic and encouraging slogans, pictures of fitness and cheer and sparkling love in amongst the excitement of welcoming in a new year. It is a yearly tradition, and one I've participated in before. A new year, a new leaf, a new life journey to travel. Entreaties to positivity and something better these 366 days that will make up 2012.

Usually I'd be in the thick of it, grand declarations of plans and exciting resolutions. To be fitter, healthier, happier. Something more than the year before. Seeking, searching that golden year to fire the spirit, and knowing that while it may be very much like every other year that the optimism in approaching it allows for brief moments of hope and glee.

And instead I lie here in bed, unwilling to get up just yet, not because of a sore head or hangover or even misery. But just because I like lying in bed. And I have to go to work in an hour and though I don't want to I have to, because people have not ceased to become ill simply because it is Sunday.

Whether I make resolutions or not, 2012 will be a tough year. At the very least I will be studying again, and hard. I will be stressed and tired. In the second half of the year I have to leave home and work away - far away - for about 6 months. I am not looking forward to that.

I didn't make a resolution to read more in 2011, but I did anyway, and I want to keep that going. There's no resolution for that, just a quiet conviction that my life is better for books and a determination to keep it going. I learned to wear eyeliner in 2011 and wore it in Paris on top of the Eiffel Tower. And I wore it with a bright red dress to a ball. I bought a phenomenal amount of clothes in 2011, some because they were needed when the first half of the year made me so anxious that I lost a dress size, but some just because there was therapy in finally owning things that were pretty.

My resolution last year was to breathe and to go to Paris, and I did both. I breathed in Paris until the fine white dust coated the inside of all my veins and will never leave me even if I never see her again. It was my highlight, my pinnacle, my Gleam. I stood in the rain on the banks of the Seine and let it mist in my hair. I stood at the parapet of Renaissance castles and gazed out at the loveliness like princesses did centuries before. I sat on the steps of a tiny farmhouse in Versailles and watched the pigs in the garden. I ate a grape from the vine in Amboise and I climbed the steps of Montmartre all the way to the top of Sacre Coeur.

I sat in a tuktuk in Bangkok as we careened through traffic while disco lights above me danced in staccato blue and pink. I rode a bike through fruit plantations in Southern Thailand and ate hot and sour soup on the Mekong. My hands got burned because I forgot to put suncream on them, and I only noticed later as I was swimming in the pool on the 19th floor. I wore Louboutins to a famous roof top bar and I drank sunsets as the clouds turned gossamer pink after the rain. I ate street food picked from a sign and Pepsi from glass bottles.

I started doing yoga again, properly this time, and rediscovered my flexibility and strength. My standing strength that allows me to move into natarajasana fluidly and to arch more easily each time. The focus on my connectedness to Earth as all other thoughts and sensations flee, leaving a flood of warm breath instead.

I read more to the girls, and we started on a few of my favourite books. I cried while reading the sad parts of Harry Potter and cried more when the Elfling laughed out loud at the funny bits, so glad am I that she's starting to finally to enjoy the process of reading and the wonder of written worlds.

I read the Millennium Trilogy and Jane Eyre and Gatsby. I finally read Wuthering Heights and don't really get the fuss aside from this one line which I underlined in my book because I liked it so much*. I have decided that I"m going to do that with my books now and write freely in the margins. I used to hate finding defaced books in the library, but when they're MY books I want to be able to read my thoughts as I was reading. But some books will stay pristine, only yellow and love touching their leaves.

My hands are getting older and the skin is different. It's not as soft. It's not wrinkly or veiny but it's different and it's never going back. I like to sit sometimes and just look at it, these tiny, capable, inelegant hands of mine with the ragged nails that I can't stop biting again through anxiety or impatience or indolence or all of the above.

My hair is longer than last year and curling. It smells like coconut and I am better (though not good) at styling it. I have had 6 grey hairs. Except they're not grey, they're white and they glow. One day when my hair is all white it will look amazing.

My eyes are mostly brown again, with gold flecks. Some days they're green but they rarely fire into proper gold. I am ok with this. The Monkey has dark brown eyes and the Elfling has gold flecks so I feel like I have both of them when I stare in the mirror and wonder at the colour that is so different than it was before.

I have become a better writer and a worse cynic. A smaller dreamer but a fiercer fighter. I have finally locked a door that swung and slammed with every breath of wind - and although I still have the key and can't bear to throw it away, the noise no longer startles me when I had thought I had forgotten it. I didn't dance enough wiht the Wind in 2011 and I did not look at the stars enough.

I have no especial resolutions for 2012, I am trusting it to happen regardless of plans, and for once I just want to face it, without any layers of anything else on top. It feels like a hard year. A gritty year. An honest year. I no longer believe in satellite parties or mystic things. But I believe in working hard to make things happen. Magic things. Epic things. Mountains to climb and flags to fly. There feels a great deal of Alpine Path climbing in 2012 to come. I will be stretched and pulled and I will hurt. But it will be the good hurt, that comes of working for something worthwhile.

And occasionally I want to sit on a swing and swing just for the joy of swinging. Of seeing my feet in the air and feeling the wind rush across my face. And forget all things and all hard work and ambition and just swing.

Home

I have been home for nearly a week now, and fully intending to update on my blog, but was never entirely sure where to start. Do I tell humorous anecdotes of silly things that happened or that I saw? Do I take the romantic route and talk about the beauty of the place? Do I tell about the tears on my birthday, or the whimsical ones on the taxi drive to Charles De Gaulle? Do I just show some of the 600+ pictures I took, of the astounding architecture or of light so pale that it kissed my skin? I'm not sure, so I think about it some more, and ultimately don't write anything.

We arrived home on Sunday in brilliant sunshine. It was warm, but not too warm, and as we sat in the car coming home, the light through the window was hot where my skin had been burned in Thailand. The Elfling and the Monkey were seated either side of me, and their chatter melded into white noise while my whole body relaxed at being home. I remember looking at Bingley, as he went about doing the things that he does at home, and seeing him differently, to the companion who had followed me half way around the world and back.

What I can say is that Paris was everything that I knew that it would be. It was me. Sitting on the rattling Metro one afternoon, with sore feet and messy hair, my lipstick bright red, reflecting of the glass and my eyeliner stark against the unadulterated gold of my eyes. I belonged there. In the misty limestoned light, it was like ghosts of someone I had always assumed I would be were whispering around me. It was exhilirating and painful and beautiful all at once. Can a city make love to you? I'm not sure, but I felt flushed and beautiful and alive in its presence, more than I can recall having ever felt. I felt calm and tempestuous. Langorous and alive. Liquid.

Whether it was my research, or my sight unseen love or all the dreams I had had of the place it felt like home. From the very first moment of being greeted in French, to the lady who handed me my change in the crowded Franprix, I have no doubt that in some other version of my life I lived there, breathed there, loved there.

It is raining now, beautiful Queensland Summer rain that is sweet and clear and tastes of sunshine. The smells of Earth and the purple carpet of jacarandas. Golden rain. It captures the heat and the light and is why I never want to leave this place to live. It rained too in Thailand, heavy monsoonal rain, but flavoured with smog and thick grey. And it rained in Paris, austere, beautiful, silvery rain. Rain that misted my eyelashes and ruined every hairstyle I attempted and clothed everything in pale shadowy curtains.

I left my adolescence and my twenties in France. Left them there to dance with the ghosts of possibilities and leave me with memories to make me smile and forget how much I wanted two disparate lives, two chances at living. But I came home to my Possum, who grew into a big boy in two short weeks, and learned how to speak while I was away. A beautiful golden haired child that loves his Muhmee. And I came to the conclusion - Non, je ne regrette rien.

Ebony

I think that there is possibly nothing more beautiful then feeling air move in and out of lungs. Of lying your hand or your cheek against another's chest, and feel it rise and fall with life. The way the wind eddies in swirls through the deep passages of the core, and exhales in little puffs.

On a hard day when I come home spent, I love to sneak into bed when all the lights are off and the darkness is impish and rest my cheek against Bingley's heartbeat and feel the tidal wave of air as he breathes.

I cannot write at present and I cannot not write. It is a strange dichotomy that paralyses my fingers and my thoughts. I lie here now, with the Possum curled against my breast, his head rising and falling with my breath and I want to write of the beauty and the savage pain that nips in on the early Spring breeze, but instead I close my eyes and feel the ripples of air in my chest.

Blogging feels natural and clunky at the same time. Ephmeral sparkler writing in the night, little plumes of smoke trailing behind. I feel somewhat as though I've missed something in my absence, where blogs are suddenly about angling for sponsors and gabbing about conferences where you can learn how to make your blog popular. As if after a manicure and a style session and haircut the latest thing to require a salon is a blog.

And me and my whimsical thoughts and my words disappearing into the night sky as the trails dissipate into the darkness wonder if I've missed something. Wonder what happened to all the places filled with thoughts and words that weren't accompanied by hashtags and obscure twitter conversations and an emptiness of thought or feeling. Where you can learn how to make your header a brand and your words a marketing tool. And I shrink back into my standard template, and miss my navy background and simple text and limited add-ons and wonder why I write at all.

I have been drawing occasionally, but with the self confidence of the shattered, not helped by my disastrous interview. I'm not sure when it happened that I began to be afraid of things, and unsure of myself, but they all bubbled to the surface in the middle of an interview where I should have shone like an electric star. And instead fizzled and blew out, extinguished, while my 10 interviewers blinked in the darkness and wondered why they were there.

And sometimes I still feel lost, but when I am curled up in bed, with my fingers stained with graphite that smudges into the chewed edges of my nails and wipes across a cheek unnoticed, and a black cat curled into my knees and my cheek against a chest that warmly rises and falls, and covers me in breath: suddenly all that fades away, leaves me in the friendly darkness, and deep in my heart the Gleam flickers stubbornly, threatening to tip forth any moment into my veins, and reminds me.

36 days until Paris

Sandcastles

I dreamed last night, like I have not dreamed in a long time. It was a night filled with dreams, one after another, like a movie marathon projected against my eyelids. Misty dreams and clear dreams. The last taking my breath so that I woke gasping for air and struggled to pull the thin cool greyness into my chest.

It was warmer this time last year. I remember a wide purple sky and rippled water one day in the sun as I drew in the sand and considered stripping off my clothes to play in the gentle waves being as I had no bathers. It was one of those days that tattoos itself in white ink on your skin and never fades, just suprising you sometimes when you catch it glittering beneath the dermis. I was there with a little girl with big blue eyes who drew pictures in the sand with me, chased tiny fish with her toes and trusted me in that implicit innocent way that makes you want to wrap them in your arms and shield them from all the horrible things in life.

I remember finding a banksia core and showing her how when you strip away the crumbly, crunchy exterior that inside is smooth brown velvet, and watching her slide her fingers over it too. Such a silly thing to teach, but strangely glad that I got to teach something. I don't know if she remembers me; my guess is probably not. I do not remember all of the adults that briefly swept in and taught me something. I don't remember friends of my parents who probably hugged me and gave me Christmas gifts, what they smelled like, if they ever sang me to sleep. But it's nice to think that they were there, these nameless, faceless adults that only ever meant well. That life is not all about hiding from potential offenders.

This little girl was in my dream last night, holding a dark haired baby and grinning like only stupendously proud little girls can. I don't remember much about the baby, and its' strange, because you'd think that's who I would have been focusing on, being as I have seen that baby in my dreams a few times now.

I wonder if the dream was prophetic, and if the little girl will one day soon have a baby brother or sister. To follow her and tackle her around the knees like my Possum does with the Elfling. A blue eyed sibling to share her memories of childhood and to sit on the beach one day and draw pictures in the sand. I hope that she might, because she's the type of little girl that you know is an excellent big sister. But I guess I will never know.

Day one, Self Portrait

Because I am both a sheep, and in desperate need of something to keep me posting at present, that may not need me to think in terms of sentences longer than a word or two, I wanted to join in with this meme. I'm not the world's hugest "joiner" but I have a habit of joining things too late, and taking to them with a strange enthusiasm that scares off others with whom I want to jump in and discuss excitedly.

Day one of the photo challenge is a self portrait. Something that shouldn't be too difficult for me, as I take pictures of myself all the time. Now that sounds terribly vain, but the reality is, that if I did not take pictures of myself, very few would exist. Aside from the few times I drag a reluctant Bingley to take a picture of me (that I will usually hate) he is not the type to randomly pick up a camera and say "cheese". We don't have a bunch of those cute facebook pictures of the two of us grinning into a camera phone in spectacular locations. Our honeymoon almost predates digital and we kind of forgot to take any.

This complete absence of photographic proof of my existence from approximately age 13 to 27 did not cause me much consternation at the time. Believing in my dreadful glass shattering visage and having the self esteem of a well squished flea, I shied away from the camera on the few times it ventured an accidental glance in my direction. Of course, now, with my face starting to have tiny creases that don't go away with a good night sleep and a distinct shoulder slumping recognition that my legs will never grow longer, nor that I should never have cut my glorious hair, I wish that I had taken thousands.

And part of my coming to terms with the way that I look,( and no longer trying to bargain my way with the deities that if I drop 20 IQ points can I look 20% hotter? Please?) is that I have deliberately, almost as a Science Project of sorts, been taking photos of myself, almost daily. Often with my webcam, or with my phone. Sometimes with my gigantor DSLR (though this takes mammoth coordination and wrists of steel). And the end product is that I have hundreds of photos which swiftly make their way into the trash can in the upper left corner of my screen, but I have a handful that make me smile. That make me realise that while this face may never be on the cover of a magazine (nor would I wish it particularly), but that it has character and features that I quite like as well.

I see different colours and shades and warmths in my iris. I like the way my strong, inelegant neck meets my jaw and the little points on the tips of my ears. I like the way a good eyebrow wax changes the whole character of my face and have realised that such a high broad forehead desperately needs a fringe. I still have days where I wake up bleary eyed, stab my cornea with a mascara wand and grimace at the pallid smush of over large features in a too small face with just the wrong amount of puppy fat... and the pores that would send many a fashionista howling into their cream pots. But it's my face, and my dodgy pores, and I quite like them. Most of the time.

Schrodinger's Kitty

Are all beautiful things painful? The emotion that runs so deep has the power to soothe as well as slice, and I wonder how much chance there is in that... if it's God playing with his yahtzee dice, while we rattle around in the cup.

I cannot escape rainbows lately, they follow me around like some sort of technicolor omen, and it makes me laugh and wince in equal measure. They both mock and encourage me. My life some sort of weird farcical dichotomy of being. There was one over me as I drove home in hail today, some ridiculous metaphor of being. While others race for shelter I am out being battered, chasing rainbows.

This time last year I lived like I was on a tightrope, where the net shimmered beautifully below while I balanced serenely dressed in spangles. I have never felt so emotional in my life as I did a year ago, so reckless and wild, a raging storm of it. I have grown enormously in the last year - I have never been so beautiful as I am now. And all the lines and the new angles at my jaw contribute. Age is shaping me, moulding me against my will. I still don't remember how to breathe.

Sometimes in hiding from the emotion I have closed myself from looking for beautiful things, of seeing the beauty in everything, in pursuing the Gleam. But in honour of nothing, but being tired and anxious, and wanting to focus on something else, here are a few random things from my blog inspiration folder. I'm sure you all have one, and here's a glimpse of mine...

I have to know - did you dream this of me?

 Of wanting to lie with them, touch them, wake with them

My mirror friend

The hardest part? …there’s a fear that doubt will creep in, you will awaken one day and think “what the hell was I thinking?

I know it’ll get better. I wonder if it’ll ever be as good.

Reminded today of what I'm counting from

my mind is where the ghosted afterthoughts of you linger

you are still the brightest light to have shone in my sky

It's the shortest day of the year today. 
 
From tomorrow, every day will have more sunshine in it than the day before

As with other times before, Time had dissolved

I just closed my eyes for a second and disappared from reality. It was tough coming back

You're unlike anyone I've ever met, yet I feel like I've known you my entire life & beyond.

DFA

i will be frank, because i feel the need: i will take you in whatever form you are happy to share yourself with me, but i will always have, at the back of my heart, a little bit of wistfulness for more

the next day I didn't care & just held your hand for a moment

I was breathing so slowly & deeply that I may have appeared to be not breathing at all

i want words. 
 
and a tree

There was something about the beauty of the location, the company and the surrealism of having not slept and having no idea which day it was or which time. Some sort of suspended bubble that eeked itself out on the space time continuum. A beautiful lucid dream. I remember feeling my palms after all the digging in the sand, and how exfoliated and excoriated they were and the soft pain of that making me double take and realise that *this* was actually reality

Nope, in the end I cbf arguing so just went and did them.
 
QED
 
Then walked into a wall

well if one is going to be antisocial and self destructive one may as well do it antiseptically

now, when I sharpen a pencil, I enjoy the sharpness for a few seconds before deliberately softening the top so that it slides more easily on the paper

I'm perpetually glad that you appreciate the things that mean so much to me

When you're watching someone's face and they've yet to see you. The second that their eyes come into focus on your face and the connection is established: ephemeral; visceral; tangible. The way that you don't actually need to acknowledge it because it is so palpable that you can't help but know that the other knows it too

I understand gravity. Understand how it is that something so invisible can be felt so acutely. The pull towards. I never think about the fact that as I walk my feet touch the ground. It doesn't require concentration, it doesn't really require thinking. By virtue of the attraction of both bodies, the pull and force brings them together. Unintentionally. Inexplicably.

GTFOOMH

it must be strange shooting up your own vein. i look at my veins and think how easy they'd be to stick a needle in, but the idea gives me a shudder straight up the spine

i see it as a tangible edge, wispy and black but interestingly i see it against light