There's no plot here, Emily Bass by Ellen Sambell
CONTENT WARNING: This work contains metatextual themes that include unreality and loss of sense of self.
There’s no plot here, Emily Bass
I found out that my world wasn’t real on a Thursday, a little after two in the afternoon.
(Thursday- ‘day of thunder’ derived from Thunor/ Thor; translation of Latin Jovis dies ‘day of Jupiter’: Old Norse influence? Foreshadowing for war/ conflict?)
The discovery was, I think, a little like the shuddering feeling in the pit of your stomach when you step on a piece of loose sandbank in waist-high water and start to feel it slide away beneath you. The sudden sense of freefall before you’re swept out to sea. And how you realise, as the water starts to swallow you, that you’ll never be able to paddle back to shore.
I’m not sure why I’m saying this. I never went to the beach, as a child. I never have since.
*
I don’t know who is writing me. I only know that she is probably a woman. I say this because I am a woman, and I don’t trust a man to render a woman’s life with this much unwavering accuracy. Unless, of course, what I think of as the female experience is merely someone’s approximation and I, being privy to no alternatives, am none the wiser.
It’s an odd game, I’ve started to play with myself, watching my world and my thoughts with the utmost care. Trying to decipher the person attached to the hand that holds the pen.
(Hence the annotations. But you probably already figured that one out.)
If studying literature has taught me anything, it’s that someone always has a reason for writing something. It might be socio-political commentary, a love letter to a genre, or the works of a predecessor, or it might be overwhelming emotion that flows from the heart to the page. It might be that they were bored that day and wanted something to do.
Why did she choose to write me?
What does my story mean?
My name is Emily Bass.
I hope to God that there’s a reason that I exist.
*
I was born in Sydney, a few days before New Year’s. I remember, as a kid, getting my birthday and Christmas presents all at the same time. I was an only child, and my parents could afford to spoil me. I remember day trips to Lunar Park, nightmare traffic, and blazing hot summers. I remember melting ice cream dribbling down my ten-year-old fingers, and I remember the first time I crossed the Harbour bridge and looked out onto the cerulean sea.
(Was the harbour ever really that blue? Is it my nostalgia or her romanticism?)
I remember Easters, Christmases, birthdays, and family reunions. I remember my Mum making Caesar salad in our shoebox kitchen and my Dad playing the electric guitar in our lounge room. I remember my Nana dying when I was six, dressing in black to go to her funeral, and the painful silence in the weeks that followed. I remember the white-hot pain of snapping bone when I broke my arm falling off the monkey bars.
(Caucasian, loosely Christian childhood. Is she writing from experience? How much of her lives in me?)
I don’t know if any of it happened. How far back is real, and how far back are Last-Thursday-ism-esque false memories? I hope some of it happened. I hope all of it did.
I wonder if my family is out there somewhere.
I wanted to be a writer when I was a child who didn’t know what HECS debt and stable income was. I guess it's partly why I went into academia in the first place. Mum always said it was hardly better, but sometimes-employed is better than never-employed. Writing always stayed a part of my life, haunting me. I never realised there’s odd cruelty to it. Conjuring people from nothing and having them act for your entertainment.
I’d have never picked up a pen if I’d known. I don’t think I ever will again.
There’s a knot in the wood of my desk. I scratch at it with my fingernail.
It looks a bit like an eye.
*
I don’t talk to people as much as I used to. It’s harder, now that I see them for what they are: words upon words with nary an independent thought behind their flat eyes. Talking to them is like trying to hold a conversation with a robot from a call centre or looking at a garbled piece of artificially generated art. I search and search, but I can’t find anything human, and it scares the hell out of me.
Whenever I speak, their words are an echo of mine. Garbled, reworked and filtered.
(Maybe that’s what I sound like to her. A poor copy.)
It’s cloudy today. Wind pinches me through my knit sweater as I walk aimlessly around my block.
(I should hate her. Somehow I can’t find it in me.)
I buy exorbitantly priced coffee from a hole-in-the-wall place. It still tastes like coffee, at least. I wonder how long it will take before I start to choke on ink and paper each time I take a swig. The cashier stops halfway through my order, like a buffering video, and says the same thing she said before, slightly differently. I wonder how many times that’s happened. How many times have I brushed it off, lost in my own mind?
I wonder how it is that I can think. Or think that I think.
(Cogito, ergo sum.)
(Fuck you, René Descartes.)
*
Food is getting more expensive.
(Commentary on capitalism? Linked to repeated instances of the shadow of debt?)
There’s a reason, or so says the news. A flood or bugs or trade problems. Could be any of them for all I care. Sometimes things don’t need a reason. They just are. That’s what I thought anyway. Now I know for sure that everything has a reason. Everything is by her design.
I brush by a man, looking disparagingly down at a cluster of tomatoes, and mutter an apology. He doesn’t seem to register I’m there, even as his eyes slide over me. A woman pushes an empty pram into my leg. I sidestep, and suddenly the pram has a baby in it.
I look at the paper-thin people in the grocery store, their unreality seeping through their skin when you look at them the wrong way. I look at how, when I watch them out of the corner of my eye, they stop moving entirely.
*
I had a dog as a child. I know this like I know my own name, like I know that I was born in Sydney, and my Mum made Caesar salad in my childhood home’s shoebox kitchen, and I ate ice cream next to the Harbour Bridge, and I wore a cast on my left arm for eight weeks when I was eleven.
I don’t anymore. Now he’s just an abandoned draft on the cutting room floor.
*
I think I’m getting close to the meaning. I’ve already figured out I’m a pseudo-everyman character. That one was a given.
(White, middle class, educated, straight until proven otherwise.)
But the world that I occupy is an every-world. Spectacularism is sorely lacking. On campus, or in my apartment, or in the store, is an endless reflection of the mirror world I’m sure must be on the other side.
(Maybe this is the point. Maybe I’m supposed to be grateful.)
Acceptance is death. If I reach the culmination of my character arc, what need is there for a story? Will I die? Can I die? Or will I merely stop, frozen in my last breaths of relevance for the rest of eternity, waiting for my story to be picked up and read so I can live again?
I had a point. I’m not sure I can remember it.
*
I’ve stopped marking papers. Delivering lectures. Doing anything other than pace around my apartment and watch passer-byers out of suspicious, narrowed eyes. Food turns to paper mush in my mouth. Water has the bitter taste of ink.
(Does she know? Is this my punishment?)
No one has noticed. They don’t exist when I’m not looking at them.
*
There’s got to be a meaning. She wouldn’t write something if it didn’t have a meaning.
(And if that’s the point? Or if I’m just a scribbled whim on a Saturday afternoon?)
I’m in my house. I was in my office a moment ago, or so I thought. I don’t remember walking. An unnecessary scene, I suppose.
If I’m not a metaphor, or a socio-political commentary, or a love letter to whatever genre or author I’m supposed to reflect, then God at least let her have put some feeling into me. Let me mean something to her.
I sink to the ground. I sob. I block my pseudo-every-world out with my sweaty palms, my thoughts fragmented, but there is one, semi-shattered notion that ascends above the rest.
(What does it mean, Emily Bass?)
(What does it all mean?)
