47. Disordering
Summer is a perpetual echo of things lost and found, stagnant heat that amalgamates beginnings and endings into a sea of molasses, disorienting and volatile.
Graduation passed in a melange of starch-pressed gowns and tepid promises to stay in touch, stay online, call every night, that act as a poor bastardisation of intimacy once shared.
The outdoor ceremony had been followed by the afterparty, held at a smallish pub a couple blocks down. You had perched yourself on a worn barstool and cheered on as an adventurous few took to the endearingly outdated retro-themed dance floor, giggling and falling into each other in messy steps, courtesy of the Friday special on mojitos.
You get the impression, at times, that you’re invariably three degrees removed from any scene at hand; the permanent spectator, wistfully watching on, not in reality, in the heat of body warmth and glistening skin and goosebumps in cool summer breeze, but through an array of pixels transferred to you 5,000 km away from where real life is unfolding.
You’d sat in Denise’s car once the final photos were done, windows open to let in the tired hum of the evening cicadas. Her eyes, mascara streaked and still damp from the sentimentality of it all. Yours dry, not entirely willingly. Tears stilted like water held begrudgingly behind unyielding dam walls.
“End of an era,” you’d commented, only half-joking in tone.
“We really should,” she’d said in response, like she was trying to convince herself, catch up when I come home for winter break, and you’d known then, with an odd certainty, that this would be the last time you’d share this proximity – perhaps not necessarily on a physical plane, but in the plane a mutual adolescence creates.
Upon arriving home you’d entered your sister’s room and found it an empty space populated by boxes heavy with memories. Vacant space not yet tarnished by settling dust particles, ones that swirl angrily in the afternoon light as you make your way in. You closed the door softly as you left, so as to not disturb them.
* * *
Entropy: a measure of the disorder of a system. The total entropy of a system, such as the Universe, cannot be decreased nor reversed, much like time itself. (Lindemann’s Introduction to Thermodynamics)
* * *
The ride to the coast is largely uneventful, as always, the car drifting along lazy, undulating slopes of road where you are forced into introspection in the face of high midday sun on dark tarmac. The world grows distant the further south you travel. School, Denise, the future, and the past, shrink microscopically in the rear-view mirror. It leaves you simultaneously weightless and gravid with emptiness, floating in the hollow metal shell of the car yet tugged inexplicably from the root of your internal viscera.
“You missed the turn.”
“What, back there?”
“Mmm. You’d think we wouldn’t need the map by now.” Your mother says, exasperated, and your father scoffs.
“Juice?” She offers, leaning into the backseat with an outstretched bottle of Golden Circle.
“Thanks.”
You often think back to the first time you’d made this expedition, optimistic at the mouth of the unknown in a way only a child can be, Rita running out rashly in front, your mother and father not far behind with duffel bags in tow. You’d been overwhelmed by the boundless rolling plains that transitioned seamlessly into endless miles of crashing ocean, an infinity unfamiliar to your child’s mind.
Rita pops her gum loudly next to you, leaning forward in the gap between the front seats. “Can we stop to piss soon?”
“No. Almost there anyway.”
“Fine.”
You turn your attention back to the washed limestone that blossoms gently around both sides of the strip you’re currently traversing, shaped by gentle yet firm hands.
“Dad?”
“Yes, love.”
“How come the rock is shaped this way?”
He looks at you in the rearview mirror, laughs. “You ask this every time we drive past it.”
“I know, but tell me again.” You say, and he begins.
You consider their plight as he speaks. Centuries elapsing as the sun waxes and wanes over weary scrubland, unforgiving winds scraping relentlessly at weathered rock, all subjects of the unyielding forward march of time. One that will persist regardless of your wanting, either with you or through you.
You shut your eyes.
* * *
Example 1a: Dissolving a teaspoon of sugar into one’s coffee, breaking apart the crystal lattice to create dispersed molecules.
* * *
“You know those old buildings have like asbestos in the walls and shit.”
Rita grins across the table, a worn red towel, now far too small for her, draped precariously across her shoulders. Saltwater drips rhythmically from her hair, a memoir of the evening’s excursion. Your parents, across the table from her, grimace in synchrony at the thought. Someone says something you don’t quite catch.
Your eyelids are weighing heavy from a combination of the day’s travel and the warm cloying air of the kitchen, cinnamon notes reminiscent of the hot chocolate you’d had for dessert. You flit in and out of the conversation, picking up fragments intermittently.
“Well, it’s a studio apartment, yeah,” Rita’s saying. “...just for next year. It’s all temporary anyway.”
“And your car? How are you planning to get around?”
“They have great public transport, Dad. It’s not like here.”
In the dim amber light cast by the overhead fixture, she looks different somehow, familiar features hardened and refined by a certain maturity.
“When will you come back?” You ask.
“Hm?”
“To visit, I mean.”
“Oh.” She frowns, shrugging. “Depends on my schedule, really. God knows how swamped I’ll be.” She takes a sip from her mug. “I guess it also depends on what you’re doing, too.”
Your mother glances at you. “And what are you going to be doing next year, darling?” she says, tentative.
A pause. The waves thrumming outside grow louder, beating incorrigibly at weary dunes. You look down at the table, silent. A sigh, presumably from your father, and the conversation picks back up again.
“So–”
You reach across the table for your glass. A loud thud and crack. Water on expensive timber flooring and two large shards, which you immediately reach for in a futile attempt at salvaging the remains. Your mother tsks and swats your hand away. “Let it be. No use now.”
* * *
“Remember that one time when Myo started that bonfire out here and the ranger had to come in?” Rita’s saying, hunched over next to you in the sand. She’s brought a cruiser out with her as a post-dinner drink, but it sits untouched, condensation fading in the muggy air as she looks out onto the water.
You do remember. A couple years back, when all your aunts and uncles had coordinated to spend summer down here together, Myo deciding to sneak off on his own and collect driftwood to build a fire that spiralled well out of control. The rest of the older cousins sitting and dancing around it, the scene comical in how ritualistic and bizarre it had looked.
You hadn’t been allowed to go down to the shore with the rest of them, and you’d watched from the window of the house as the green park ranger car approached in the distance to disperse them, presumably called in by well-meaning neighbours.
“It’s crazy,” she says, shaking her head bemusedly. “That he’s getting married in April.” You smile at the thought. “We never thought he’d get a girlfriend, remember?”
“Yeah. Guess miracles do happen.”
There’s a comfortable lapse in conversation as she pops open the fluoro pink bottle, little puff of contained carbon dioxide blossoming out. Her feet dig indulgently into the sand. Next to them is the metal shell of the bottle, which lays discarded. You pick it up instinctually.
“Ok but really though.” She turns to you, laser-focused. “What are you going to do next year?”
“Not you, too.”
“I’m serious.”
“I’m serious too. I don’t wanna think about that right now.”
“I just wonder if you’re happy,” she says. “I worry about you. We all do.”
“I know.”
She sighs, digging her feet further into the sand.
“I know you’re upset with me,” she says quietly.
“I’m not stopping you from leaving, you know.”
“That’s not the point–”
“I just don’t understand. You never even told me you’d applied abroad.”
She’s silent for a long time. You fixate on a point far ahead in the water where a budding ripple is compounding slowly into its definitive form.
“There’s nothing here for me. And you should know there isn’t for you, either.”
You are biting the inside of your cheek so hard that blood is beginning to mix with the wet tang of salty air. An old habit, yet to be discarded. “Don’t speak for me.”
“You can’t–” she stops and takes a deep breath. “You can’t just wait around like this. You can’t just stand still forever and hope that everyone else does too.”
You don’t say anything. The wave you were observing reaches a breaking point then dissipates languidly into foam on the sand, simultaneously relieved and dismayed at its inevitable end.
You both sit there for some time longer, silent save for the gentle lapping of water at your feet. You look at her in your periphery from time to time, but she’s already miles away. Eventually she rises, pads back to the beach house leaving nothing but footprints in fickle sand.
* * *
The remaining weeks pass paradoxically slowly and quickly. Regardless, you painstakingly attempt to prolong each second and step of the process: here, it’s only Tuesday, not yet time to pack our bags; to the kitchen, for breakfast, a shared meal, still with time left to linger at the door and watch your mother dry off last night’s cutlery.
Afternoons are spent on the peeling brown sofa by the kitchen. Your family coexists adjacent, whir of steaming kettles and chatter, and you circulate quite happily on the perimeters of their warmth. On your lap is a copy of East of Eden. You have been reading the same book for months now, dog-earing the pages that you wish to revisit and appraise when you’ve forgotten. There is one particular chapter that has you stuck like a fly in honey.
Often, you find yourself sitting at the large arched window as sunset dances to a close, and as you shut your eyes, a sequence of brief untouched moments play across your pupils in vivid technicolour. Strings of experience, free to peruse at your whim, and you pull them back and rewind and play them again and again when it’s over, each scene, each second.
When you were twelve, someone called you a wallflower. You didn’t fully comprehend the weight of the term at the time and you’d merely looked at her, puzzled, your future best friend.
“It means you just watch.” Denise had said, laughing, brilliant white pearls glistening. “All you do is watch.”
* * *
Example 1b: Fragments of one’s life spiralling in disordered chaos, ever expanding akin to the Universe itself, outward bound in perpetually estranged fractals to the frigid final place of rest.
* * *
On the final night, sleep is hesitant in its embrace and you dream feverishly. You look opposite, to your sister’s adjacent twin bed, and it’s been made neatly. The room is devoid of any belongings, uncharacteristically large. The weight of its emptiness is unbearable and your knees buckle under its enormity as you attempt to stand.
Your sister is at the door, propping it open with one hand, the other resting expectantly on her suitcase. She nods her head towards the exit pointedly.
“Wait, Wait. Wait,” you repeat.
“Wait? For what?”
You look up at her, but she’s outside now, waving at you impatiently, bags thrown haphazardly into the car.
“Well, are you coming?” She’s shouting, though it seems from a great distance away.
You would, but you are on your hands and knees, gathering particles back into shape and rearranging molecules, modern Sisyphus. No, I think I’ll stay here.
* * *
When you come to, from nauseous sleep, the air is still with thick heat and brine from the open window, oppressive in its heaviness. You lay paralysed amongst tangled sheets for what feels like several hours, eyes open and transfixed on the peeling wallpaper, a slight film of condensation building on your forehead.
First, you wait. You fall through shapeless days that turn to shapeless nights with no beginning nor end. You shift and distort languidly and willingly into your surroundings, forming great shadowy conglomerates and revelling in the kind of pleasure one cracks open when stretching in the mornings.
Still, there is no call from the door.
Afterwards, it settles and all is motionless, once again, pieces fractured and dispersed in the thick jelly of the room. There is comfort in its solidity. The sheer lace curtains billow sluggishly in your periphery.
Nobody comes to fetch you. You have ceased to wait.
At some point during this small infinity, you find it within yourself to surface. The house is empty. The air is still. The moment is untouched.
Mathushika Kawryshanker is an aspiring writer and doctor based in Boorloo (Perth). She hopes to continue exploring the interface between fiction and STEM in her future work.