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Dunedin; Dogs; Sneezing
The strangest and best thing about living here is how the air feels and smells. (Cold, fresh, empty and pure - it's difficult to experience for people who suffer from anxiety - there's no respite from the emptiness of space here. There's barely any air between the earth and the sky. It's like the feeling of real depression, the feeling that you can only earn by having been solemnly in love with somebody and having forgotten all your friends and then being dropped by them, and being completely alone, and never sleeping - that is, it's the sort of feeling you hardly deserve to experience just by breathing. And at the same time it has a scent. Because ice is scented!) For weeks in Auckland there is nothing but warmth, and it's only occasionally in the evening that the air is strangely scented (when Auckland has a scent in the evening, it's rich and like what they mean by 'the air was like wine' unless you walk past a jasmine hedge) but here every day it's astonishing - this is tiresome. It's tiring to have to be amazed and feel uncomfortable every single day.
One is made ashamed to write about how things smell, because for instance your father would make jokes about farting if you dared. For me personally, it gets the better of me every day, and I mention it to whomever I'm with, always feeling spite towards them when they can endure thinking about it and hearing me talk about it. Still, there is no point in wishing to be immune to thinking about scents - even those who appear to have turned to stone have to cope with going outside each day, and by not mentioning it they must suffer even more. Babies seem to suffer before they can speak. And dogs. Nobody has forgotten the sea, for example, even though they may act like they have: everybody wonders what God could have been thinking when he gave us the sea, that ascends vertically to the horizon, not only me, and I dare you to disagree! The ascension of the sea is far more impressive than the height of the sky.
Did you ever have a younger brother or sister, and wish that you could cut them open to get out of them what they wanted to say? I never did, but I felt something like that, only not consciously. Anyway, I was incredibly impatient for my sister to be able to speak. And I'm still impatient for Jane's dog to be able to speak. I really feel like if I stare at it hard enough it will be able to articulate . . . the basics, with extreme difficulty.
Smell is very difficult to cope with - it's far more visceral than seeing something, there's no way to stop the sensations which scent arouses. I have a good sense of smell: when I used to come home to my house on K'Rd, I could tell if particular people were there from the bottom of the stairway by the smell of the house. If I could tell a particular boy was there, I'd suffer as much embarrassment as if I'd walked into the room and been present to him. Does everyone wonder if they are barbaric, or only those who manifestly lack control?
The sound of people sneezing is unbearably annoying - anybody, even the people you love. It can arouse the desire to crush the person out of existence. This is a shortcut to understanding how you'd feel about them if you'd lived with them for twenty years.
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