bondi nostalgia diary

against my will, my memory persists

I’ve been staying in Bondi, my old haunt from four years ago. On my first night here, E and I went for a walk down to Bondi Junction to get an ice cream from the servo, and I saw him buy two Magnum ice creams and promptly delete them, which was impressive. The dog he was looking after was antsy, almost growling, because we spent too many hours talking in the heated apartment before we let her out.

When I lived here before - at a place about twenty minutes from here, with the same art deco doorframes and brick exterior - my boyfriend at the time lived with his family here, and he would walk me around the area telling me about the different houses: how you could infer from the architecture when they were built, imagining the shapeshifted skylines of yore. You could walk back through a series of mundane features - the brickwork, the shape of the roof, the degree of symmetry - and sift it through your memory to make contact with broader history about a place. I was warmed by the simplicity of this act, but I also felt strangely envious - I’d grown up in this suburb full of houses built to a singular template, raised from the ground in one rapid motion to house straggler immigrants, remote and obscure to the rest of Sydney. This sensitivity to environmental detail and the histories they implied were lost on me, and I felt a little awkward about it, because I had nothing to point at, no familiarity and ease to project about where I’d come from, an uprooted plant.

My apartment was five minutes from the beach. When we broke up, I used to go and run back and forth on the beach sand. The sliver of wet sand between the foam and the sand proper looks like a sheet of cold glass, which my footprints shattered on contact. At night my housemate took me to the cliff edge to scream at the big ocean void. Breakers like white stallions, whinnying and bolting and thundering into the rocks, then they would shake their frothy manes and dive back anew, wedding cake white seal pups bobbing up and down. One night, we had a party - a quarantined one, as per the times - and we pushed a mattress up against the archway, plugged in speakers and cheap party lights from Amazon, sniffing lines of ketamine off an Ikea plate. I would go out on the balcony for relief, and feel annoyed because I could see my ex’s house from it.

There’s so much about techno that I think captures the essence of that time: the repetitive clang of it, every beat reverberating against the walls, news marquees and numbers marching up steadily each day. Time was a smooth, silver surface that kept rolling, and casual self-destruction was a way to give it texture and undulation. I worked a corporate job, getting permission from my supervisor on when to eat lunch via Skype, in between arranging rectangles on a slide for an oil & gas company who were hopeful to drill into an Alaskan wildlife park and gleeful at the ease at which it is to do so since the (first) Trump administration. The spectre of a worsening mental health epidemic was a vogue topic of the morning news, ‘mental health’ which abstracted over rationalised addictions and long meandering messages from intelligent friends gone full schizo. Howl by Allen Ginsberg opens: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked”.

‘Bondi is a shithole’ I’d told people for a few years. I realise now that I think this about nearly every place that I used to live; it’s a term of endearment to me I suppose. M observed aptly that I am ‘a lover girl and a hater girl in equal measure’.

But I did like it there, I liked it most when I was outside of my apartment, which was claustrophobic with the tedious and heavy air of introspection. In the neat compression of hindsight, there were so many bright spots.

• On New Years, my friends and I walked onto the street before midnight, my consciousness held wide open and bright by a dose of MDMA, and yelled excitedly at strangers as you are permitted to do on that one day of the year, passed by people holding sparklers running drunkenly down to the beach.

• I discovered my friend H had moved just down the road from me, I would go over to their place and lie on their big plush couch watching comedy skits, or him and his girlfriend dancing their goofy dance that only comfortable couples would do with eachother to funk music, H would get baked and then order vegan ramen.

• One of my friends moved cities - we had a farewell for him at my apartment, spelled out his name with balloons, and because it was Halloween dressed up as fruits in a fruit salad for no real reason.

• One night I hung around on the balcony gazing up at the supermoon, and there were all of these other people out on the street looking at the same and going ‘aw!’, I snapped a photo of it and sent it to my then-boyfriend, because we were all locked in all the time it was a very remarkable event.

  

• After we watched the movie Magnolia, I started to notice how many magnolia trees were on the street.

• Just going from one end of Bondi to the other was a remarkable event. I would walk up north ten minutes to get to my boyfriend’s house and get a tattoo on ankle leg from his sister, and she used these black nitrile gloves which gave me an allergic reaction.

• There was the time I bought a painting in anger, on impulse. I spent $400 on a charity auction for what I thought was a small painting of a girl on fire. When the artist contacted me, I realised it was a photoshopped photograph, and also, it was two metres tall. T had to come over with a GoGet van to help me collect it and haul it into the apartment, and I had nowhere to put it because I was afraid that a gigantic image of a girl on fire would bring bad feng shui to my room, so I turned it around and hid it behind my bed.

• I read some of my favourite books, Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House, Zadie Smith’s Intimations, Jeff Tweedy’s Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back).

• My hair was a disgusting shade of blonde, a stain on my history I look back on with contempt and affection.

  

It’s strange that these glimmers of joy feel so disconnected to each other; I feel that pain seems to demand analysis and understanding whereas joy defies it - feels suffocated by the threat of reason and demands to be free of explanation. Byung-Chul Han: ‘It is with pain that narration begins.’ We are pain averse creatures above all else. But pain and joy have equal capacity to be random, spontaneous or equally - determined, I think.

I still have remnants of that time. Recently I sent a photo of these three paintings of a nude girl that my then-boyfriend had picked up on the street, and the other day I sent it to him and he flashed with friendly recognition.

Those moments became precious because of their transience; there’s never any going back for a do-over, and they are far more interesting in hindsight, shaved of redundancy and spiky emotions. I think its important to hold nostalgia without a desire for repossession, but more of a sense of awe or bafflement about how things change beyond prediction. ‘The more I wonder, the more I love,’ said Shug, in The Color Purple.

I ended up moving out of the apartment, vacuuming it all and sweeping cobwebs and listing appliances on Facebook Marketplace while crying because my housemate had effed off to live with his girlfriend in the last month of the lease without any warning, I asked him to come help me and all he did was throw his old boxes of tea and soy milk out. I had put up a flippant bio on Tinder: ‘Not really looking for anything serious, just looking for a guy to buy my fridge’. S matched me, came by in a GoGet van and a trolley to collect the fridge, and a week later helped me move all my things from Bondi to Erskineville. When we were done moving we got garlic bread and played Mario Kart on the big television, then he drove around Australia in his makeshift van-home and then he left the country.

Just last month I was in a random country town on the way to the Warrumbungles, and my friends and I kept trying to pronounce the name of the town to very little avail. After enough attempts I had a moment of spontaneous recognition. ‘I’m a Coonabarabran boy,’ S had said three years ago in a message with a map pin in the middle of god knows where, saved under the contact heading ‘S (Friendly Tinder Guy)’, so I sent him a photo of the intricately decorated Chinese restaurant in a chat where we hadn’t talked for a year, and he recognised it immediately. I learned that now he was in Goa, running beach clean-ups and working remotely, where B used to work as a bartender for five years, often riding around high as ever on his motorbike over dirt roads looking for cool spots that he called ‘haunted’, so I sent S a list of lookouts to go to.

It is rather boring and glib to observe that moving between places incites a death and rebirth of the self. Those things are true, yes, but I’m also moved by how much memory and detail lies in wait until a critical moment of recognition. There are strange and magical things about memory: its fallibility, the illusion of continuity, all of that stuff. But also it’s worth noting that memory isn’t really a phenomena of the internal self; it requires invocation from the world, from other people, from old houses and details where our recognition invokes reflection, not unlike a horcrux (!), bits of the soul somehow are stored in bits out there.

I’ve sometimes spent too much time wondering how things are connected - how to prove how electrons ladder up to bits ladder up to information? how to prove my perceptions and my beliefs and interpretations are consistent? - instead of being affirmed by the fact that they simply, demonstrably, are connected.