Deborah Forster

‘He remained annoyed with himself until he realised that not knowing what he wanted was quite natural.’

– Milan Kundera ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’.

When I was a teenager there was a young man who lived with his father in a house behind a tiny blue milk bar. There was no mother that we could see. He was so light and slim and together; he was like a piece of cloud. There were two milk bars within two hundred metres of our house, one red, one blue so that is what they were named. The young man had long blond hair and a panel van. He often had chalky surfboards perched on top of the van like spears. He was years older than me and he was coloured like the sand. I never got to know him because whenever I saw him, my heart sped up and I looked down or just away. He passed by in the street like someone from another world. Though I wasn’t ready for anything, it was sobering to adjust to adult possibilities. To consider the world of your maturing and yet, untouched feelings. To know that you can’t know everything.

These skills of understanding what you are and what you want, take time and I wonder if they are ever fully learned. I changed schools when I was 14 and kids were pairing up rapidly at the new school. Everyone had a boyfriend or girlfriend. It was dizzying coming from a girls’ school. Just when you thought things were settled, they changed completely and swapped partners as if they were on a merry-go-round. And a lot of competition was going on. I did not get involved in this because I was virtually mute whenever someone I liked was around. That tends to slow things.
Then, the school offered us the chance to see the snow! We went on an excursion to Harrietville and to a hop farm to see the frames the hops stretched out on in summer. It smelled like pines. Then the bus took us to Mt Feathertop and the snow was revealed. Most of us could not afford the right gear so we made do. I had plastic bags over my school shoes, held on with rubber bands. I stepped out with the other kids and was amazed at the beauty of snow folded before us like a blanket. We plunged into it as if it were the sea, we ate it and hurled it at each other. In a moment’s pause reflecting on the white that lapped at us, I was tackled from behind and knocked down by the boy I held secret feelings for. He piled snow on me until I felt like I was drowning. I was utterly shocked by this random act. If this was affection, I did not want it. Same if it wasn’t. I might have known; this boy had stamped on a mouse and killed it when it ran across the classroom one afternoon during maths. At the time I thought, anything is better than maths., but now I wondered. Still there was the excitement of being noticed, his physicality, the burden of his silence, my silence. This was not lightness, this was weight.
Ten minutes later, when the excitement lifted and the plastic bags fell off my feet and I was wet from the snow, the nausea from the winding bus rides rose again. It wasn’t long before I chucked. I’ve always had motion sickness and it had been following me the whole trip like a member of the party. I had a lot to think about as the kind teacher tucked me up in the back of the bus and covered me with left over coats. I threw up in a stray gum boot.

Leaves

They are yellow or rose red, some cupped as petals. They envelope us in drifts. The man across the road uses his blower at the waves of them each day as if they could stay where he wants them to stay. The noise of the machine gnawing at the quiet day makes you long for peace. Today the wind is back, ready to shake the last of the leaves and yet still some stay. I saw a possum leaping for its life along the fence top, an athlete gone on second glance. The blower droning like a swarm of bees.