Nothing Happened

By Sioux Patullo.

I was seen by no one today. No one was witness to anything that I did, nor heard anything I had to say. Maybe the neighbour spied me taking out the rubbish but took no notice. I could be non-existent. Except, I saw others. As I stirred my coffee, I watched through the kitchen window the chiropractor walking along the railway track behind our place. Cream, linen trousers told me he probably had the day off. He didn’t see me with my ragged, maroon top on inside out, stiffened toothpaste down the front of it. The rail track is part of the main line between Sydney and Brisbane, but along here we all know the train times like the tides, so we’re comfortable to use it as a path into town. Besides, we’re sure we can feel the vibration coming through the thick, warm steel of the tracks when a train is on its way. According to science, that’s not always true, but if it was going to happen anywhere it would be here. People come here for different reasons – for the start or the end of the rainbow, for new faith, for what they call the higher vibration. I’m not sure I know what that means, but there is an ironic and intense busyness that permeates the town. High expectations are brought here, in the search for inner peace. It’s not as easy to maintain as you might expect, this peace. It’s like there are so many therapies and solutions available that we’re all frantically looking for a problem to solve. I watched the brown and white patterns of my coffee swirling, reforming. I breathe in a deep, warm reminder of him.

I saw the girl from the next apartment as I hung the washing out behind our building. I saw her shiny, brown bum as she lay there basking. We have no washing machine, so the crisp, almost dry clothes had been waiting in the basket since yesterday. I don’t want a washing machine. It would fuck up my weekly visit to the laundromat and the free advice I encounter there. I heard the people on the other side, arguing over the drone of a hairdryer.  They head off to work early, and the familiar string of voices inevitably call while they are gone. Their answering machine is so loud that I hear all their messages. All before they do, which feels like something I am obliged to carry. Not many people work in this town. There are far more seekers than jobs, and anyway, they don’t want to. This is a place that people pass through on the way back to their lives. They come here to surf and search and sometimes lose themselves. Just to be. As our yoga teacher said to us last night, “You can’t let work get in the way of your transformation.” But it’s a fine line between quietening the ego and building something even more false in its place. It’s a fine line between spiritual enlightenment and bullshit. We live just a few doors up from the community centre – what was once a whaling shed – where energy lines are supposed to interject if you’re into that sort of thing. Often, if we walk home along the beach road, we will be given important, soul messages from strangers who have just come out from the Laughing Workshops. Or participants from the Miracle Sessions will dance around us, chanting “We are not bodies. We are not bodies”. Spiritual leaders come and speak there, in this former cathedral of slaughter, and two thousand people take off their shoes. I can still see the whales hanging there heavy in silent song. 

I made the bed, and I watched how I always do his side first, thinking that any day could be our last together. If your heart breaks in Paradise and no one is there to acknowledge it ……………………? I am sad. Tangled. Guilty. Responsible. This self I am is according to the map we have made and followed as a couple. Its creases are so old and defined, that the map is falling apart. I tucked in the sheet corners as I always do, taut and smooth, and I could hear the ocean roaring over the road, a constant reminder that the tide goes on without me. The ocean is out there, refusing nothing. Refusing none of us. Letting everything in. I pull and tuck, fold and smooth, rocking the past back and forth in my mind, until the bed is made. Flat. Quiet.

Two surfers stopped over the road, got out of their car to check the waves. They sat on the wooden railing in silent contemplation, watching the sweet sets come in, searching for something specific and magic that I know nothing about. With no words between them they decided on somewhere else. I heard the guy two doors down yelling at his girlfriend. Yesterday they broke up, but they have nowhere to go. People are here for all different reasons, like I said. Some don’t realise that it’s paradise, or on energy lines, and their lives fall apart as they would anywhere else. Those who have grown up here are suspicious of those passing through. They don’t fully trust anyone until they have been here for at least two years, which makes it hard to find somewhere to rent. We got so lucky with this second story apartment right by the beach. We never close the glass doors along the balcony. Cold does not exist.

After lunch I heard Pete next door, playing his Spanish guitar, as he does every day. The same chords up and down, trying to get it right. I did some knitting as I listened to him strum. Coloured squares which I join into long rows, will eventually become a rug. In the unit underneath the couple that just broke up, is the woman who screams at her kids. I had to side with the kids this time. She was “being a bitch”. That’s a narrow conclusion to come to, without filling in her gaps. I take it back. I hope they will all forget these days. So much noise can be created in our heads, that we are left with no silence to scream into. Our small, human bodies do not deserve the burden of what our minds choose to struggle with. Her anger does not disturb the calm in our street though. Nothing does. The palms brush lazily against each other, and the frangipanis remain unblinking in the sunshine. I went to check the mail, but no one was around in the perfect afternoon. The cars waited, glinting in the brightness while their people were down at the beach. I went inside and read his letter. I imagined his face. I imagined seeing him again, and I knew he would be wondering about me. About what I will say when he comes back. Truth is patient.

I was going to call him, but I didn’t feel like talking. No one heard from me today or knew anything that I did. I could be non-existent. I went into the bathroom to see myself in the mirror. Just to check that I was more than a mind swirling. I saw my reflection. In paradise. With all the doors open. I thought about going for a swim. Then someone would have seen me for sure. A few of us along here have a daily ritual of being in the ocean at sunset. Our beach faces north so we get the changing colours all along behind the mountains. Nature knows it is destined to wait, grow, shine and decay, and it whirls on devotedly around and around. We are no different, except that we may fail to see the infinite circles we move in. We climb around the same rooms, up and down the same stairs. We are creatures of response. So many wander the streets of Summerland, on the path to madness. I’ve seen it happen. Sturdy, young seekers following too many paths. They start screaming each morning, squatting naked in the forest, burning their feet on the coals in their desperate search for healing. Breakthrough, transformation, whatever word you want to use, is not guaranteed just because you’re here.

I sat on the balcony instead of going for a swim and looked up at the sky. I saw it as a giant mirror, reflecting the magnificence and potential in us all.

I breathe. I hold onto the eccentric ambition to keep beginning every day anew, watching the brown and white swirls of my coffee. Things are re-shuffling on the path ahead. Things will happen for me that I can’t know about now, and I will block or clear the way for myself. The next train will come through soon and another pile of people will arrive, looking for something to believe, or for something they already have. The sky slowly changes from electric pink to pearly white and palest blue. I look out over the mountains, and they stare back. Maybe someone sees everything we do.

About the Author:

Sioux has been involved in dance, theatre, and education for fifty years. She is passionate about the arts, especially juxtaposing various disciplines and styles. Writing has been a daily part of her life since 1994. Her poetry has been published in WEMOON Diary and Anthology; but her fiction and memoir have remained within the privacy of her computer files – until now. She is a beach person and a book person, often indulging in both at once. If favourite authors are to be judged by number of books enjoyed by them, then at the top of the pile is Ali Smith, followed by Cees Nooteboom, Enrique Vila-Matas and Henry Miller. If you can judge a favourite author on one book alone, then Amor Towles, Pascal Mercier, Richard Powers and Christopher Isherwood.