Something happens when the temperature rises. Inhibitions droop with our eyelids, squinting into the heat haze. The spring winds scatter plane-tree debris and our sinuses work overtime. There’s a sort of electricity in the air. A kind one might recognise from the first snow, just before it falls, how the atmosphere seems to hum with the surge of a new season. Like a live wire waiting to be ignited. Like new skin pushing through old wounds.
As the winter wattle begins to wane, making room for new blooms, people flood the parks in streams. Flushed cheeks and cold beers and long limbs huddle in masses as if suddenly, the air is clean. Our lungs, stronger than ever.
With the growing daylight comes an urge, a sort of insatiable longing for something new. It is as if the golden lick of sunshine trailing across our skin singes all the fog of days past. Things we’d hide undercover. Behind closed curtains. Sweep under the rug with the dust and debris of our conscience.
Or, maybe, time is changing shape, shifting into something by which we are no longer held captive.
In 2014, I found myself on the shoulder of a highway in the middle of the night. The sky was low, pulsing with humidity. I hadn’t slept in a bed in three days. My body was beginning to adjust to the concrete floors, ferry decks and starchy bus seats. It was spring in Greece, the heat was already shimmering on the road.
The man who sold me the ticket told me I was going to Patras, I said. The driver raised and slumped his shoulders with an exhale, his palms facing the sky. The sound of the bus door closing made my neck tense. As he disappeared into the night, the dust stirred, and I turned away with eyes closed. The moon was hiding behind storm clouds. There was a streetlamp down the way. It glowed a honey hum in the distance, and I began to move toward it.
Excuse me miss, do you need a ride?
I turned to see a young man standing with a suitcase, his shoulders slouched forward. I recognised him from the bus. Over his shoulder I could see another man leaning against a navy Subaru. He waved at me, one short sweep of the hand. I looked back to the familiar one and tried to make out his eyes in the dark. My parents always said you could tell a lot about a person by looking into their eyes. They’d be livid at me if they were here to see this.
Do you know how far we are from town? I asked. My voice sounded sharper than I felt. Maybe 20km, he said, my friend over there, he can drive you. I felt a little flood of nausea creep into my chest. A balmy breeze flooded the truck stop and I could taste the sea salt in the air. That’d be great, I replied, before I had the chance to falter.
On the back seat of the car, I picked at a scab on my knee. It was new, still tender, like sap weeping from a tree.
One man was a police officer, the other an architect; they spoke of illegal relationships by the shore. How adulterous couples would pull up, park their cars, and make love in the dead of night. That’s not illegal where I come from but I think I know what you mean, I said. When we passed the coast they pointed to the handful of cars excitedly, their windows fogged over.
When I remember this time in my life, it is as if I am floating above myself, witnessing someone I do not know. A version of myself I will never meet. Yet the heat of these new days glimmers on my bare legs and for a moment, I feel free. If I close my eyes and breathe a little deeper, it’s almost as if I can hear the sea crashing on the rocks, taste the salt as it sticks to my lips, remember what it is to dive under a wave just before it breaks. When the sun glimmers on the surface of the water and the teal underworld sings to me, a song of deep repose.
Growing up in a town where shoes were rare and our hair was mostly sun-kissed, I pine for moments by the sea. The wind that saunters off the deep blue, the weight of lethargy after a day on the sand. Oscillating between a book and a swim and fish and chips and not staying hydrated. A cycle of inertia unlike the one we’re currently consumed by.
Marine Biologist, Wallace J Nichols, explores the theory of a ‘blue mind’, how bodies of water promote positive mental health. He said the science is in the sea, and neurologists back it up with the ions we absorb when shoreside. It’s no wonder the ocean is all I crave, when facing the same city walls each day, walking the same streets.
This tedium of life in lockdown is beginning to vex me in a way I’ve never known. Sometimes it feels as though my blood is thickening, simmering like lava. I wonder if the dam of my flesh will fissure, if I do not get out of here. And sometimes I sit a little longer outside, look around to ensure I’m alone, pull down my mask and revel in the air on my face. I turn it up toward the sun, eyes closed, and pretend I am somewhere else. Where the breaker billows and my lungs expand and everything falls away with the ebbing tide.
Freia Lily is a Melbourne based journalist and photographer. She has a keen infatuation with the natural world, and how it affects the human experience of trauma.