#33: Life in fragments
We're mosaics of all the things we've ever loved
Hey friends,
Happy Solstice! It’s midwinter here in Australia, and the temperatures have dropped to match. I love winter. I usually find it the easiest time of year to write, but I’ve been struggling a bit recently.
Unwilling to give up on my 40-week publishing streak, I decided to do something different this week and see where the words would lead me. It’s not what I expected, but I kind of like it.
It's been a strange week. I often find the solstices are, but this one is even more so. It’s one of those weeks where you know something big is happening - something that, even though it's entirely out of your control, you still want to go well with every fibre of your being. To the point that it's hard to focus on anything else.
Tonight is my Mum's first night in a care home.
She's going in for two weeks for respite care while my Dad has an operation. They've barely spent a night apart in the 36 years of their marriage, so my heart hurts for both of them.
We’ve found an amazing-looking one (who knew a care home could have so many five star reviews!) but even though it’s been a long time coming, it isn’t easy.
I know we’re getting to the point where he can't handle it on his own, but it's still hard to make the call; to cross that invisible line in the sand. I don't think it would have happened yet if he didn't need this operation. He can't see how bad she's got.
If you're new here (hi!) my Mum, who lives on the other side of the world to me, has late-stage young-onset Alzheimer’s. She's only 63. You can read more about our journey here, here, and here.
From an outside perspective, this journey offers a fascinating glimpse into neuroscience and psychology - including all the leaps our minds can make to protect us.
From an inside one, though, it's shit.
Zooming out, back, and into my old life or other people’s stories have been the only things I can seem to do to settle my nervous system from the anxiety of it all.
Which is how I ended up writing this, I suppose. It's a little out there compared to my usual post - a stream-of-consciousness ode to a camera, aphantasia, adventures, and stories, but it felt good to write. And right now, that's my main deciding force. Life is hard enough already.
My current life motto: Does it feel good?
Yes = go for it.
No = let it go.
For the last few months, I've been trying to write a book, but I seem to only be able to write in articles and essays; in fragments.
I have big dreams, but everything there feels fragmented, too. Split; like all the chapters I've lived. All the versions of myself, scattered to the wind, slowly drifting through time and space. I feel like I’m back under Sylvia Plath’s fig tree.
I've always prided myself on how I could live with my whole heart, falling in love with places, people, and things over and over.
Yet, all this love comes with a splintering; an unseen sacrifice. A ritual conjoining. A declaration of love and an exchange; a part of me left behind, a part of them carried with me. Like I’m a mosaic of everything I've loved and lost.
Right now, I feel like I'm all of those tiny fragments at once.
One here in Australia, sitting in bed, writing this on my phone. One watching over my dad, alone in the house, another watching over my mum, a stranger in a strange land. Others desperately reliving the past; delving back through the archives to happier times, when everything still made sense and I hadn't shattered into a million pieces.
This week, I finished Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path and the follow-up, The Wild Silence. I've now read 41 books this year. According to my Kindle, I've read every week for 232 weeks since I was gifted this Kindle for my 30th birthday: January 12th, 2020.
Without even thinking, that date sends me right back to January 1st, 2020. It’s funny how some dates just seem to wedge themselves in our minds; like landmarks in the landscape of our memories.
The year didn’t get off to a good start.
I’d booked a campsite at a place named Honeymoon Pool, but when I arrived, someone was already camped there. So, I dragged the old tent, a hand-me-down bought off my partner's old boss for $150, to the furthest corner of the spot and went for a walk.
Then, as I knelt to take my camera out of my bag, in a slow-mo force of nature that I couldn't replicate if I tried, it rolled out of my bag and straight off the outcrop I was standing on, disappearing into the water with the tiniest splash.
I threw my phone out of my pocket and leaped in after it, managing to catch it before it hit the bottom, but it was too late.
My beloved Lumix, which had travelled all over the world with me in the years since a friend had brought it to me in Cambodia - lovingly carried in her hand luggage as she returned from a trip to visit family in the US - was now nothing more than a fancy paperweight.
As someone with absolutely zero mind’s eye - or any sort of sensory imagination at all - a condition known as aphantasia, taking photos is less of a hobby for me, and more of a necessity.
Or at least it was, back then.
Read more about my experience of aphantasia in this article I wrote for Passion Passport in 2019.
Even while I was in the midst of living them, I knew those halcyon days wouldn't/couldn't last forever.
While everyone else was busy soaking up the moment, I was the local photographer, documenting our lives. Documenting my own life. Trying to take snaps of everything so I remembered.
I wasn’t even trying to take good photos - just to capture moments.
Between snapshots and scribbled notes in cheap school exercise books bought by the bundle from the EBC stationary shop in Sihanoukville - the nearest city to our pocket of paradise - I tried to create a memory bank so deep it would fill the inevitable void that would one day come.
Knowing my old camera was on the fritz, my friend had offered to bring me one back months before.
It was an unspoken agreement that whenever anyone returned to the West they would bring home comforts for those who got in there first, but in my case, that was usually Yorkshire Tea and biscuits.
I'd never asked anyone to bring me a DSLR and lenses before. I'm not sure I'd ever trusted anyone.
It was to be my third camera since I'd left the UK. The first I’d lost to salt and sand, the second was slowly succumbing to injuries sustained in mud and rain-splattered adventures on the back of a scooter careening around Laos and Vietnam.
For the latter, my ex and I had taken a bus over to Ho Chi Minh City, watching the Mekong Delta pass by in a blur of green palm trees and blue sky, our full-face helmets taking up precious space next to our packs.
We bought a scooter for $350 from a man in the car park of a towering apartment block on the outskirts of the city and drove it back through the chaotic streets, our veins humming with exhilaration and adventure.
To outsiders, Vietnamese traffic is a whirlwind of colour and noise, but when you're in it, it flows like a river; a dance that everybody knows the moves to.
The first time I'd been in Vietnam, six years before, I hadn't known the moves. It took all of about five minutes for me to get caught out; just after I got off the bus that had ferried me away from the friends I'd been visiting in China. Alone and uncertain, I did the worst thing you could possibly do crossing the road in Vietnam. I was unpredictable.
I stopped.
The bike that hit me sent me flying, landing on my pack like an upside-down tortoise, legs waving in the air. Some bystanders helped me up, my face red and mortified, while the driver zoomed off with a frustrated beep.
I didn't make that mistake again.
My second time in the country was a very different experience. Uninhibited by the bus and train schedule, we were free. Well, as free as my two-week visa would allow us to be. After a fortnight of gorging on pho and iced coffee, we snuck the bike back over the border, avoiding cops and bribes. Bandanas pulled up high over our faces, we zoomed back through the rice paddies to the beach we called home.
In the end, it took me months of reading reviews to decide which camera to get. My travel writing career was finally taking off and being able to spend $1500 USD on a camera felt like such a treat.
It was the most money I'd spent on one thing in years.
Like Raynor and her husband Moth, when you live out of a backpack and have to carry your life on your shoulders, everything becomes precious. My tattered old backpack and stained clothes hadn't survived the crash landing in Australia, but my camera had.
By then, it wasn't any old camera. I loved it. It was like an extension of me. My mind’s eye. My memory-maker.
It documented my final days in Cambodia. It came back to the UK to visit my family and took the last smiling photos I have of my mum and grandma. It spent a winter catsitting in Amsterdam, and months road-tripping across the US.
It survived a mugging at knife-point in El Salvador, a few months of disaster relief work in Guatemala, and getting lost in no man's land crossing the border between Belize and Mexico. It survived the once-in-a-century desert storm that destroyed my tent in the Joshua Tree desert, and car-camping in Canada in December.
It served me well until I dropped it in the dark waters of Honeymoon Pool on January 1st, 2020.
I guess there are worse places - Honeymoon Pool is a picturesque spot in a grove of peppermint gums in the middle of southwest Western Australia. Once part of a WWII army training camp, it was named by the soldiers who would discover honeymooning couples camped along the riverbank amongst the trees.
My time there was less idyllic.
It was meant to be the first day of a two-week solo adventure to celebrate my 30th birthday, but I decided I couldn't do it without a camera. In the end, I drove to a camera shop and made a snap decision. One I still kind of regret.
In a world where we've always been conditioned to want more; to aim higher and desire the biggest, best, and newest things, I can tell you that buying that new camera did not make me happy.
Technically it was “better”, but there was no connection. I hadn't dreamed of it for months beforehand. It hadn't crossed oceans to be with me.
I didn't need to take a photo or make a note to remember how I felt standing in that car park, a $3000 hole in my pocket. How I said, out loud, “Oh well, guess it can't get any worse. I'm sure 2020 will be all up from here!”
Famous last words, hey?!
The old camera still sits on my bookshelf, along with three others. None of them work. I have a pair of socks my mum gifted me for our last Christmas together in my drawer. They're glittery and scratchy, and I'd never in a million years wear them, but I also can't throw them away because they were from her.
I won’t even tell you how many random knick-knacks weighed down my backpack as I travelled around the world. I just can’t help myself. Sometimes, I get annoyed at myself for how sentimental I can be, but I kind of love it too.
At least the Kindle is still going strong. It's even meant to be waterproof, although I don't feel like testing it.
I wonder if I’m alone in this or whether other people feel the same.
Do you have any personal relationships with objects or places? Please feel free to share if you do!
Sending love across the oceans and seasons.
Yours, in fragments,
Cxx
PS: As always, I offer creative mentoring sessions. I’ve just signed a new client to help write her family’s memoirs which I’m really excited about! I’ve worked with everyone from writers to fashion designers and photographers to creative business owners looking for some help bringing their dreams to life.
If you’d like some support as we journey into the second half of this year, feel free to reach out to book a free discovery call or check out my website for more info and testimonials. I’d love to help!
I get attached to things too. I have some clothes that are ~20 years old and have holes, but I can’t bring myself to get rid of them. Thanks for sharing this story. Thinking of you and your family during this time. You know where to find me. 🫶
I can appreciate that sense of life being fragmented. It feels quite disparate, at times.
Also, thanks for sharing the story of your camera. Proof that shiny doesn’t necessarily equal better ✨