Living in and as the Earth Quakes
I’m 27 and I’m tired. I have a pair of yellow crocs with fineliner drawings scrawled messily on top of them, I sometimes feel like I am living inside a blue curling wave with air bubbles just big enough to breathe inside, I miss waking up to the taste of another’s hair swiped around my mouth while we’ve been sleeping, I think the world needs more brick buildings, less glass ones, and I’ve just been diagnosed with ADHD and autism. My bedroom mirror sits wonky and tilted around a rusted hook pressed into my thin asbestos-filled wall. Staring inside this mirror’s crooked eyes at the tattoo of earth I needled to my throat, it sometimes looks as if our planet’s hurtling through me sideways, like a comet or a meteor or a promise perhaps about to burst. Why do people think of grounded as meaning calm or steady when the whole entire ground we’re standing on right now was born from a collision? Apparently, this planet cops millions of earthquakes a year. It is constantly shaking. Even now. The majority of them are far too small for human feet to feel but this world knows the throbbing pulsing textures of each and every one. From this trembly footing, maybe grounded more accurately involves knowing how to hold our own undetectably small explosions.
*
I am days off 24 and the person that I love is holding a pregnancy test up to their snow-white shattered face inside a public toilet by a half-deserted beach as if this cheap plastic test is a living breathing ghost telling them their life is different now from how it’s always seemed. We lock eyes foggily and both our feet feel so damn far above the ground.
*
I’ve just turned 22 and an old woman who accepted my upturned thumb against the side of a dark battered bitumen highway is reading me my entire birth chart as she drives. I get out and sit by a tree whose tangled-together branches remind me of my grandma’s hair a year or two before she died. Time feels different now to how it ever has before, like I can see each tiny vein of life that ties my sunburnt skin to every little thing that’s beating here with me.
*
I’m 19 and I can hardly even speak right now. Each dot of hair that’s laced around my body feels simultaneously like it could fall straight through me, tear me open, and be suddenly and miraculously floating in thin air, the rest of me vanished like a high school girl in an overly dramatic bad American crime film.
*
I’m 17 and in a therapist’s office for the very first time. The walls are so ridiculously green that I start tasting lime thickshake in the corner of my mouth every time she asks me how I feel.
*
I’m 14 and chanting to myself outside an empty bay of lockers during class time—I am extroverted I am extroverted I am extroverted—as a desperate form of disavowal from all the times my nervous system’s too afraid and overwhelmed to really process that I’m here.
*
I’m 12 at primary school graduation reading the farewell blurb of a bullied classmate. His hair is red like sun, his freckles feel like echoed marks of waves on lonely shorelines, and, he so often stands around a corner of the outdoor basketball court with a giant length of stark white string, one end fiddled with in bony child’s hands, the other end chewed on like how a mouse might chew on cheese. My sort of kind of somewhat friend urged me earlier today to read the bit this bullied child’s written of himself, ‘___ wants to be a famous pianist,’ as, ‘___ wants to be a famous penis.’ I do. The whole room snickers gently like the sound of air deflating from a set of yellow camping mattresses. Afterwards, in the car back home I feel so pressed down deep with guilt and shame it’s like my soul has sunk down to the ground my parents’ baby blue Getz is gliding on, leaving a half-empty body sat wilting in the backseat like a plastic vase of tulips.
*
I’m 9 and I just came for the very first time. I still don’t really know that I can emulate this feeling with my hand rubbed up against my cock. Instead, I just got dunked by a wave so hard that I rose up thrashing with a half a load of breath left, just in time to see a dolphin’s wobbling body swallowed up by sunlight and peeling through the air. A family friend is jumping up and down all scared and exhilarated, asking me if I’m okay, but I can’t hear a single word he’s saying. I am quivering, slick and new.
*
I’ll forget this for the next 17 to 18 years, but I’m 7 and I’m happy.
*
I’m 4 and my brother’s 1 and a drugged-up man with thick unruly hair like Jesus Christ’s just pulled a knife out on my mum and us at Box Hill Station. I understand many inexpressible things for the very first time all rushing through my head at once like separate gusts of wind converging through a tunnel. 1. That some people are drawn to do such terrifying things they don’t actually really want to do for reasons they won’t ever actually know. 2. That we could die at any moment. 3. That this knife-wielding man deserves my kindness. 4. That I won’t ever know a way to give it to him. 5. That Mum can’t actually save us. And, 6. That, in spite of or maybe even because of this, even as I’m looking at this terrified man’s widely opened pupils reaching out and shattering me and the short sharp blade shining like a kite in arvo sun, with my mum’s arms all but wrapped around us like a hot long shower engulfing a shivering person’s undressed body, I feel somehow safer and more grounded than I ever have before.
*
I’m 2 and I’m outside. There’s a few brief seconds where my parents are not watching me so I go for it, grab a worm up from the rich dark brown and chew its head off clean like I am swallowing my whole entire life. Mum looks mortified yet amused, Dad is trying hard to stop himself from laughing but it’s not working and I think to myself, Oh, so this is what earth tastes like.
*
I’m less hours than you could count on 1 hand older than 0 and I have just woken up from my very first sleep. The little bed in the hospital smells like peaches and disinfectant. An earthquake undetectable to human feet went off just down the road. All the sleeping babies are still clobbered into pause, while their nurses laugh through stress, chatting while all leaned up against the curved white reception desk. Still, though, the earth: she shook. Mum’s arms remain tensed, as if one tiny part of her’s on look-out duty, the tiny atoms in her scrawny upper limbs anxiously checking if I’m still alive while the rest of her lies still. Or, maybe, her arms haven’t even realised that I’m born, are still there straining, preparing to give birth to that which already has stepped out and into life. Anyway, her hair is wiped madly across her face, some of it caught inside her open mouth. Pearls of sweat from my birth remain wiped across the creases in her forehead. Dad’s snoring on the armchair next to us, his legs bent and wrapped up in his knackered arms, as if frozen in a state of prayer. A small bundle of nurses are just outside the door, talking. I don’t know what any of the sounds they’re making mean but their voices are rising falling rising falling rising falling like music singing in an empty room and it makes my head feel sunny. One of them curves their lower lip into the word grounded and my ears prick up. Soon, everything will begin. Although, of course, it already has. For now though, it’s quiet. A weed is growing through the concrete on the street outside. I open my eyes. The space between each lash and lid of skin fills up with light. I can hear a newborn in the room next door, yawning while her mother laughs and I guess I am alive.
Rosie Shute is an Australian trans and neuroqueer spoken word performer, gig organiser, writer of fluid forms, visual artist and creative writing honours student at the University of Melbourne developing a neuroqueer DIY performance poetics of too-muchness. They’ve been published in Australia, England and Singapore and think custard is underrated.