Summer Camp : Part Two

now I have a nagging flaw, I never saw it sneaking up / it wrapped its dirty arms around me, pockets full of blood.

Read Part One here, then come back and carry on the adventure.

The school bathroom, usually fluorescent and echoing with high-pitched voices, was dim. The dull thud of bass snuck in under the gap in the door. I stood at the sink and rinsed my hands. The water was freezing. My cherry Panda Pop (the drink of nineties school discos) was balanced on the porcelain. I stuck my tongue out to see the unnatural red of it in the mirror. I don’t remember having paid much attention to my reflection before then, but something kept me there. The frizz of my white-blonde hair maybe, or the slight droop of one eyelid behind my glasses. I inspected my face, and I thought about the other girls in my class, all of us on the cusp of something new. It was our last year of primary school.

I realised then, in that bathroom, that I was not pretty. That maybe I was ugly, even. More, I finally saw that I was a body and not just a brain free to roam as I wished. I existed. And I knew this was going to be a problem.

I would spend more time under the stark light of school bathrooms, though rarely looking in the mirror. Mostly it was to lift the sleeve of my navy jumper and inspect the soft skin underneath. It has always been pale, almost white. Then, it was a crosshatch of razorblade cuts, dried blood and raised pink welts around fresh wounds. Now it’s a memorial to those moments when I couldn’t bear to look at myself. When relief came only from the sharp intake of breath as I left my body, became a single clean line of pain.

Sometimes my children ask me where those scars are from, but I haven’t thought of the best way to answer yet, so I just say later. I’ll tell you later.

*

I woke up early that first morning in Wandawega, keen not to miss 7AM yoga. Everything remained saturated although the rain had finally stopped, so we laid our mats on the aged asphalt at the back edge of the field. The music Billie Oh played as they talked us through the flow became something Pavlovian to me by the end of the week, permission to feel safe and still. That doesn’t come easily.

Afterwards, I ate breakfast alone in the small kitchen I found on the lower ground floor of the bunkhouse. Everyone else mingled in front of the lodge. I wrote in my journal and read the novel I had picked up at the airport. Looking at it now, I put myself at a remove in anticipation of being on the outside anyway. Better to feel like I had chosen it.

There are people though – and thankfully I found so many of them at Wandawega – that don’t let you sink into isolation. They tell you they like your trousers (they call them pants) and sit next to you in class, even when your nerves and overthinking make you seem like you don’t want to engage. Later they say things like I know what it’s like to want to be seen, so when I notice that spark, I keep trying.

In the afternoon, we divided into small groups for workshops. Mine, yellow group, met in the lodge. The lodge was shady, full of bearskins and antler chandeliers. On the cluster of wooden tables at one end of the room were some small brown notebooks and a pile of pencils. I took a notebook, found a place to sit. Vanessa, Steve and Katie were at the same table. Together we listened to Billie’s instructions for the workshop. We were going to draw. Each of us felt a little apprehensive and there was laughter as we tried to figure out how to get our brains to talk to our hands to talk to our pencils.

We were writers, why were we trying to make pictures?

I resisted until I relented. Until I felt the pull of concentration and my fluttering mind rested its wings, let me lose myself in the scrape of lead on paper.

The final prompt was to draw something a little bigger and we were given an A4 piece of paper. Its wide blankness intimidated me. We could take a mirror, Billie said, and try for a self-portrait if we wanted. I peeled the protective sheet from the mirror (they were brand new) and my face came into focus. For a moment, I was back in that bathroom, realising that the way I looked felt like a punishment. That having a body was a burden. And then I began to draw. I sketched the hollows under my eyes, the nose that my step-father always mocked for being so big, the eyebrows that used to meet in the middle. I sketched the point of my chin and the mole just to the left of my mouth. I didn’t see ugly or pretty. I just saw myself.

On the last day, I folded that picture in half and wrote a note to Juliane Bergmann, tucked it under the handle of her suitcase. She gave me her self-portrait too. She had told me how she liked my pants and then she had taken the time to truly see me.

And those Wandawega friendships, they warrant a whole other essay…

[to be continued]