Between Light and Marker Pen
Along she drifts
with the quiet breeze that sweeps through the bluestone streets.
Backwards?
Forwards?
The poems of strangers are written all over the bridge’s balustrades. They’ll be removed soon enough, or painted over by the city council.
It’s the fleeting nature of it all that intrigues her so much.
The breeze permeates through her scarf, setting it afloat like a balloon let loose into the sky.
Isla has long been held captive by this place, absorbed by the concrete and glass that obstructs her past. Old friends have long since disappeared—they too were absorbed by the city’s pursuits.
She steps onward, entering beneath the clocks of Flinders Street Station.
The tick,
tick,
ticking of time is a shadow she’s never been able to escape. She passes the coned yellow sign into the station’s bathroom. Isla loves the liveliness of public bathrooms. Even at the strangest hours of the night, bathrooms gather mobs of girls in low-cut tops and ladies in heels with wealthy laughs. It’s the closest thing Melbourne will ever get to unity, Isla thinks.
The room she stands in now is like a shrine—sprawling proclamations of empowerment overlap crude doodles, a web of cryptic interactions etched onto every wall.
She takes it all in, the scribbles and artworks left by strangers before her.
girls
just
wanna
have
fun
The words are scrawled onto the top left corner of the bathroom mirror. They drip pink ink like tears over Isla’s reflection, tinted green by the fluorescent strip lights on the ceiling. She lays out the syllables in her mind, mulling over each word.
Girlhood. So void in her mind, so unobtainable, a past mystery that she has long ignored. Something about it itches to be explored, to be known, to be opened and assembled and then disassembled again. Fragmented memories (are they memories?) suture her tongue to the roof of her mouth and linger in her throat. Always just concealed.
She closes herself into a stall. Blue ballpoint words are scratched under the lock.
yasenya,
if you’re reading this,
i
love
you
She tries to recall the last time she heard those words spoken to her. Her father is long dead now, and her mother is getting old. Bitter. Although she’s become weaker now, and her revilement comes from fear, not anger. Fear of getting old. Fear of losing control. The nurse said that she was beginning to forget things, her mind slowly seeping into the same aged state of her body. She said that an excess of ‘mental tension’ had worn her mother down sooner than she ought to have.
But time will get the better of us.
It’s quite a few years back now that Isla stopped speaking altogether. Her family thought she’d finally lost it. Maybe she had. Her muteness didn’t change much. She had always been voiceless in a way, sort of meek and resigned at an age where girls usually learn to be outspoken. Expressive. People always spoke down to her as a teenager. Perhaps they heard silence and thought there was something wrong with her comprehension too.
She brushes her fingers over the peeling remains of a vinyl heart sticker on the wall—it feels familiar, like skin flaking off a healing wound.
Outside, a tap turns on, the sound of water flowing into the porcelain sinks and sloshing onto the floor. Sitting on the closed toilet lid, Isla pulls out a leaking black Sharpie from her back pocket, hovering it with a shaky hand over the surface of the door. She wants to add something to the wall. She wants to say something to these walls. To tell them a secret.
Her eyes stay fixed on the blank spot beneath the nib of her marker, the strong stench of xylene in her nostrils. Waiting for something to manifest. Palms perspiring and unstirring.
The fluorescent bathroom light above her wavers and withers her vision, leaving black spots. A fragment of a memory assembles in her mind. A young Isla, seven or eight, her face illuminated by the flicker of the faulty light fixture in the dining room. Her tear-stricken cheeks swollen with frustration. And a pain. A red, hot swell that began in her stomach and spread up her chest and neck. It turned her skin pink and bubbly beneath her sweater, warping her vision and blocking her ears and suffocating her lungs. She was trying helplessly to string words together, fighting a stutter as she mumbled out into the room, hoping her voice would find someone. Some relief.
Ringing ears muffled the cruel laughter of her siblings, distant voices mimicking their amusement. Her father was nowhere to be seen. The faces of the guests who loomed at the table were blurry, but she knew that they would’ve had something to say to her parents. To see about getting an occupational therapist, to give their little girl the help she needed, lest she go out in the world speaking like that.
And her mother. She was looking at her mother. Her eyes were pitiful, taunting, searing into Isla’s chest with sharp disapproval. She could almost hear it.
Stupid girl. Stupid girl.
And the pain. It blistered, leaving welts on her chest, large purple marks that never left her body. Her vision spun around and around, in rhythm with the faltering ceiling light and tears falling, harder now.
Bubbling skin.
Burning body.
Blurry eyes.
The girl cries foul, slick black marker smudging Isla’s trembling hand.
swollenstupidhauntedruined
ashamed?
She jumps up, her mind bolted back to her body. Sweat beading at her temples, she flings open the bathroom door, stumbling down the street towards the water. The air outside is pitilessly raw, permeating through her scarf and striking her in the throat.
She peers over the elaborate balustrades, her silhouette spotlighted by the cast iron lamps above. Her shadow is vivid on the graphite river, as if she was cut out of a magazine world and pasted down in the grey of Melbourne dusk.
Under the faint glow of the city’s eye, Isla breathes. The night is quiet, and she is too.
