WHAT IT MEANS FOR SPRING TO COME

The day after my parents return from a holiday overseas, in late September, I tell my mother that I’ve been contacting hospitals again. I’m stiff and weirdly formal when I say this, and she’s measured and deliberately calm when she responds. I’ve been honest, these last few months, about the fact that I’ve been struggling; she says she’d noticed, yesterday, that I didn’t look well. I’d noticed that she noticed when she hugged me, and brushed against the once-more protruding nubbles of my spine, I’m sure she noticed that I’d noticed, though neither of us said anything at the time. I read to her from the information pack that one of the hospitals, located interstate, has sent me, where it mentions a ‘humanistic approach that retains dignity’, because humanism and dignity are two things I’ve never yet been afforded in any hospital, and my voice breaks, and we both notice. I say it doesn’t matter that I’d be so far away, because being locked in a building 900 kilometres away is not much different to being locked in a building in the next suburb. I say an inpatient admission is the one thing that I’ve not yet tried; I say it still feels like a failure, even though I know that isn’t true.

Because I feel winter so keenly I always love this time of year. An ancient wisteria that curls beneath the railway footbridge is bursting into bloom, and the jasmine all along the station’s sound barriers looks days away from following suit, in full. On warm days, when the air is moving in the right direction, it’s all that I can smell from my writing desk beneath the window, and I feel nectar-heavy and golden in my limbs.

The American poet David Antin writes ‘but wherever you are you are likely to have this / idea of what it means for spring to come’.

Alex and I drive to a writers’ festival a few hours out of Sydney. We’re staying with a friend of his, who lives just out of town, and is one of those people who loves having other people in his home, who plies us with cheeses and expensive wines and elaborate cooked breakfasts every time we stay there. A few days earlier, he’d sent Alex a message asking if there was anything that either of us doesn’t eat, and I laughed when Alex told me this, although I’m touched, later, to realise how detailed he had been in his response, much more than I could ever have brought myself to be. Across the weekend, Alex’s friend keeps apologising for what he thinks of as the faux pas of the message, and I can’t seem to impress on him how minuscule a deal it is to me. He cooks a huge lamb roast for dinner on Saturday night, and it’s the first time I’ve eaten meat in close to ten weeks. I’m stunned by the thrill it gives me, the rich, red sweetness of the flavour on my tongue. I don’t eat lunch on either day of the weekend, but no-one else does either, so I feel justified and somehow haughtily imperious about this, even days later.

Alex stays over, and sets an alarm for Thursday morning so that, he says, we’ll have time for breakfast before we both head off to work. I tell him I don’t want to eat because I’m weighed when I visit my psychologist on Thursday afternoons, and I didn’t eat beforehand last week, and so I need to replicate the variables in order not to distort the number on the scales. He tries to dispute my pseudo-science but I know it isn’t rational and I know it doesn’t matter, and I’m angry at him when he suggests my favourite café rather than the one he likes. As we drive there – it is further from my house than the café that he likes – I tell him that I know he’s chosen this one to make eating easier for me and that I’m absolutely filthy at him for it and his giggle is so gleeful that I can’t help but laugh too and I cannot understand how he’s so patient.

I almost buy a tote bag that says YOU CAN’T MILK AN ALMOND / NO-ONE WANTS TO CALL IT NUT JUICE.

A student comes by my temporary office twice in the one day; the first time I’m in a meeting somewhere else, the second time I intercept her as she’s leaving a sorry-to-have-missed-you note on my door. I apologise for being hard to contact and say I’ve had a very busy day and she asks if I’ve had time for lunch, and I don’t understand why she would say that. It’s a few minutes to two, I realise, it’s just small talk, I realise, and I say that I have although the truth is that I haven’t eaten anything today and I don’t feel it, I don’t feel it at all.

I walk home after breakfast with Alex, wearing clothes I’d packed the night before, when the air was bitter and biting – a long-sleeved shirt, black socks and boots. The sun, though, is forceful this morning, so much so that a woman in a floral dress had leapt up and shrieked when she sat on the metal seat at the outside table next to ours, the unexpected heat sudden and sharp against her thighs. By the time I get home I am sweaty and uncomfortable and I change into a t-shirt and open-toed shoes, the first open-toed shoes of the season. My feet are so soft and white they look undead, but they feel glorious, sink immediately into the furrows they grooved into the insoles last year. In the park across the road are people reading in the sun, shirtless or in bikinis, and I think, it’s not just me who has been craving this.

I have coffee in a courtyard café with Nadia, we do this often on a weekend, though we haven’t for a while because I’ve been away so much these last months, travelling to festivals and events, and it’s so lovely to do something so simple, so routine, instead. Nadia asks me how I’m doing, and I tell her I am fine, but suddenly I’m crying, dabbing beneath my eyes with my shirt sleeves, and apologising, apologising again. I didn’t want this to happen. She hugs me, reminds me to ask her if there’s ever anything that she can do; I say, everyone’s going to get sick of me for being such a mess, and she looks me straight in my watering eyes and says, don’t you ever say that, don’t you dare even think that, that is absolutely not true.

There’s a part of me that still doesn’t believe her.

At this time of year, I eat my lunch in my tiny back courtyard, sitting on the white tiles that cover the ground, my back against one of the large pots along the wall. We’re growing eggplants this year, small and round and heavy with seeds, strawberries, bok choy that seem to double in size overnight, we’ll put tomatoes in too soon. I roll up my jeans so that the sun can sink into my shins, and I feel like a lizard, my skin still scaly from the last season’s dry air, my blood still cold.

I walk through the city in the evening to meet a friend for celebratory cocktails in a harbourside bar, striding through the office workers in a purple dress and multi-coloured heels, I feel electric, emboldened, capacious. In the pub’s lift, a woman is talking about her upcoming trip to Tanzania; her companion in a sharp suit says, Dar es Salaam is just a slum, go straight out to safari, and, the only thing that’s good to eat there is the chips. The bar is split-level, and they head upstairs, her saying, you have to walk in front of me because my skirt is really short.

I’m planning to travel soon, even though I’m still too thin to risk it, even though I will not eat the chips. I keep trying to pretend I’m not afraid.

Daylight saving begins, and its first day is glazed with sun, and viciously windy. I meet up with a friend I met in my most recent hospital program, he’s been changing his meds this last fortnight and is not sleeping, is struggling, inevitably, as a result. He’s dating, too, and that fraught combination of uncertainty and vulnerability that goes hand in hand with going hand in hand with another person has left him reeling, and I’m saddened, terribly saddened, because the last time I saw him he’d been doing really well. I tell him I’ve already had breakfast, but can’t stop looking at his eggs, their beautiful broken yolks. After we part, I run into a woman from that program, one who had done so well there, chosen the more difficult hot option every lunchtime, the scones and cakes at afternoon tea. She too tells me she’s having trouble, has had to go back to diarising her meals, and I hold these two encounters close across the day because I’d somehow thought, even though I do know better, that I alone was slipping backwards, that I alone was continuing to be defeated, to somehow fail.

I walk past the wall of jasmine at the end of my street, and it’s suddenly dripping with buds, tiny white chevrons so close to spiralling open into star-shaped blossom. I can smell them already, even closed tight like this, and the thrill runs the length of my spine.

I read somewhere that the word ‘avocado’ is taken from the Aztec word for ‘testicle’, because of the fruit’s pendulous shape, and it delights me to think that this is considered ‘clean’ eating. The very next morning, while I’m writing in a new café, the blonde woman beside me orders avocado on toast, and it’s delivered to her table crumbed and deep-fried and enormous.

Alex’s housemate Maria has just come home from three months in South Australia, where she’s been shooting her first feature, beset by weather so wild that the entire state lost power, that their industrial rig snapped clean in two. Alex has organised a dinner to welcome her back, slow cooked a chilli for the whole day beforehand, and bought a bunch of broccolini, a food he knows I’m comfortable eating; he holds it out to show me and it looks like a bouquet. After dinner, Maria shows us rushes from the film, I’ve never seen raw footage before; each dialogue is sliced in two, and I’m amazed at how instinctively we make connections, build narrative even where there are no cues, this almost reflex grasping for story and sense.

Maria’s film is beautiful, the main actors are well known and international, and I realise – somehow I hadn’t quite, before – that it’s going to be a cinema release. It’s still amazing to me that my friends are doing this, making things, still amazing to me that I still don’t quite believe in our own art. I wonder if I ever will.

I tell Alex that I’m going to write a poem called ‘Bae Brings Me Broccolini’. I don’t know if I actually will.

A woman about my age sits at the next café table, with someone I take to be her mother, slung beneath a bag as enormous and as orange as a pumpkin. The older woman says to the waitress, I’ve quit sugar so I’ll just have a chocolate croissant.

One morning, when I know I can expect a phone call from a hospital, I drive to the crests of Bronte so I can walk along the coastline, keep myself busy, keep myself active, earth myself on the edge of the ocean. It’s two days before the beginning of Sculpture by the Sea, and enormous wooden crates are scattered on the sand at Tamarama, workers in blinding high-vis vests crawling around them, wielding crowbars. Further on, two men are unravelling neon green cords down the length of a cliff-face, pulling them taut and holding them temporarily in place with a large sandstone rock, and an older, frailer woman is hooking weirdly alien pieces of plastic and bottle-tops to the soft mesh she’s draped over a boulder. A jogger jostles past me and hisses, keep left, idiot!

Eileen Myles writes, ‘Did you ever feel like spring is this sap, this slow-moving stuff.’

I don’t go to Alex’s house one night because I know he’ll try and make me have breakfast the next morning. I don’t tell him this, I can’t. I know I need to tell him this. I promised that I would. I can’t, because it feels so much like failing.

The interstate hospital finally calls as I’m walking through the park close to my house and I stop and sit on the low wall at its perimeter to take the phone call. This time, I’m speaking directly to the psychiatrist; it’s the first time in six weeks of negotiations that I’ve been allowed to do so. He tells me mine is an unusual presentation, that it is difficult, that he’s not sure that his program could accommodate me, that the unwilled vomiting might interfere with the treatment of the anorexia. He says he doesn’t want to waste my time, doesn’t want me to go through all the fuss of an admission only to have to leave the program early and by this stage I am sobbing, because I’ve heard these sentences so many times in as many years, because my weight has dropped again, because I had a throat-choking, full-bore panic attack just the day before, because I’m getting desperate. I tell myself to stay on the phone, to just stay on the phone; he says he wouldn’t want me to end up feeling hopeless and abandoned and I actually laugh through my tears when he says this. If you have to send me home, I say, then send me home, but at least give me a chance. He eventually agrees to add me to the month-long wait list, for a trial, and I close my eyes and crumple when I put the phone back in my pocket. A man in a death metal t-shirt walks over and hands me a bottle of cold water, and is gone before I get the chance to thank him.

It’s only later that I realise I am furious, that I still cannot believe that the onus is on me, the person who is ill, to convince a doctor to treat my disease.

Tom and I sit outside at a café, his dog at our feet. The man next to us is attempting simultaneously to read a newspaper, eat, and feed a toddler in a highchair, but the toddler is delighting in flinging chunks of ham and runny-yolked egg to the bottom of the seat of her high chair. Eventually, the man moves the child onto his lap, and the dog starts straining at his leash, desperate to snatch up the ham. Instead, I give him the burnt crust of my fruit toast, even though Tom seems convinced the single raisin still embedded there might kill him – he didn’t grow up with pets, like I did, has never witnessed a labrador eating nylon stockings, pork crackling, an entire birthday cake, without a moment’s hesitation or regret. In the time it takes for us to eat, my chest gets sunburnt in the perfect circle of the keyhole neckline of my dress.

I’m on the escalator out of Broadway and spot another woman who I know from treatment on the escalator heading in. She beams and waves and gets off her escalator to travel back towards me and we stand outside the shopping centre entrance as we talk. She says that it’s her first day home from a hospital admission near Parramatta, that her head is in a good place, that it helped, more than any other admission had done before. I tell her I have an appointment at that same hospital in two days’ time, and I tell her I am terrified and that I feel like I’m too old for all this shit and she just nods, but I walk home feeling steeled and solid, somehow, for the first time in months.

Crossing the road, a man is holding the hand of his small daughter, her hair the whitest blonde I’ve ever seen, wisping around her face. She stops to pat a huge black dog that buries its nose against her neck, and she laughs, crisp and clear and bell-like, ringing.

I park my car beneath a jacaranda without noticing one afternoon, and the next time I go to drive it, it is blanketed in purple blossoms. As I drive along the freeway, they tumble down the windscreen piece by piece, then whisk away in my slipstream, into the traffic.

Alex and I walk to a costume party, a few days before Halloween, in Dan’s apartment in Camperdown; he’s wearing a lime-green and purple superhero costume, left over from his university theatre days. I’m in a tight and shiny black catsuit that I picked up once at a clothes swap and have been waiting, ever since, for an excuse to wear, with sparkly cat-ears on a headband, and I feel beautiful, not just skeletal, for the first time in months. On Parramatta Road, Alex stops to buy himself some wine, and I wait outside because the air is languorous and balmy, and in the few minutes he is absent, five cars pass with blaring horns and unintelligible shouting. This hadn’t happened while I was walking beside Alex, doesn’t happen once he returns; this makes me furious. When we get to the party more than half of the men are in drag.

Maurice Riordan writes, ‘And tonight they are gods / under the jasmine under the stars.’

I go to my appointment at the second hospital, tucked away in the suburbs just off the M4, and share the waiting room – the psychiatrist here is always, always late – with a young woman in skinny jeans that make her legs look like toothpicks, and I immediately think, I’m not that sick, I shouldn’t be here. (I think this again, I’m not that sick, the very next day when I catch a glance of a woman in a dark shop window, before realising the person I have seen there is my reflected self.) I’m too nervous to read, so spend the half hour I am waiting playing Candy Crush on my phone. In my appointment, I tell the psychiatrist that I’m a doctor too now, god knows why I say this, and that I’ve been trying to find treatment but no hospitals will take me. He says, you shouldn’t be precluded and I burst into noisy, sloppy tears. I cry, intermittently, the whole way home, because I’m so relieved and so afraid of what I’ve done.

On the first day in the hospital, I curl on my bed and cry for a full hour after every meal, and I keep thinking, I can’t do this, I can’t do this, I don’t think I can do this. I panic at the piece of meat that’s on my plate for dinner, I gulp for breath, great ragged gasps that hurt my sternum and then I sob outside the dining room because I hadn’t realised, somehow, that I’d gotten quite this sick. I’m so afraid of what I’ve done and of who I have become.

A week in, on my first day of partial leave, Laura drives me to Parramatta, for my first real coffee in a week. I order cake as well, and she beams, although she doesn’t say a thing, and it is beautiful. Afterwards, we walk through the streets so we can sit in a park in some sun. Outside the library, strips of brown paper are tied to the rails of a fence, printed with calligraphied text. The strip that I unfurl reads, no winter lasts forever. I’ve been in treatment for eight years now. I still don’t know what I can hope for, how to make, or wait for, the season’s turn.