Our rooms are clean, sleek, neutral. I move straight into homemaking mode. We rearrange some furniture, set up systems, sort possessions, plan exercise. We have two doors to the outside, each of with receives the “knock” to announce the arrival of food, nursing staff, broom and dustpan as per request, care packages from the outside world.
My mother very kindly responded to my morning plea, after the children had refused their breakfasts, as well as their dinner from the previous night, and brought us full-cream milk, sandwich bread, butter, vegemite and granny smith apples. We are embarrassingly well-supplied!
I talked with someone in the kitchen. The food is amazing – hotel quality, multi-courses; very, very, very, nice food. They cater almost effortlessly for a myriad range of dietary needs and preferences. Clearly, they have the system worked out by now. Menus are rotated, I am told, on a 14-day roster. I ask for less meat for me, simpler food for the children. Still, the amount of waste bothers us. We have a plate, glasses and metal cutlery in our room, but the food all arrives in copious disposable packaging. We are forced to bag the remains and bin them.
Sleep pulls me in, irresistibly and I sink down, do not fight against it. I wake again at 3am. This is my thinking time.
The first night (this is the second) I woke at 4:17am. Thoughts whirled furiously around my mind. I wrestled mentally with our Tormentor, composing my accusations and barbs, exposing my wounds.
I admire the cool graciousness with which Brown Owl smooths into shape, a letter in response to this latest – hopefully last – series of grievances, which arrived one by one, in between the three flights that brought us, over the course of thirty-five hours from Red Deer to Adelaide. Brown Owl is able to set aside their feelings and respond in a non-incendiary manner. They contain their slow burn of humiliation and shame to be resolved somewhere separate, maybe in the darkness. I feel too impacted. I want to explode.
During my thinking time, I transform into a mechanical blue-winged ant. I buzz and fly around our Tormentor’s face, eliciting a frantic, heart-pumping response that almost satisfies my need to fight back. I revel in the knowledge that bugs bother them deeply.
Ha! And I call myself a pacifist.
The injustice rankles: this reduction from clever, curious, caring, responsible homemaker to incapable, voiceless, submissive acceptor of guilty shame. Exactly what am I guilty of? Who gets to say what I should, or should not have done? We know full-well that whatever we did would be found wanting. Our Tormentor has no subtlety, cloaks nothing in softening diplomacy, thrusts hard and sharp and forcefully with blunt words; calculates and catalogues our perceived wrong doings and deliberate damages. I wonder again what awaits us on the other side of quarantine.
From afar, at this hotel, there is nothing I can do. I beat hard with all six legs against our Tormentor’s brittle exoskeleton, which shivers momentarily into a mass of hairline cracks, then cascades in shards around me, littering the floor. Shrieking in triumph, I dodge the debris and dive into our Tormentor’s soft skin, biting it with my sharp little teeth, tearing off long shreds, allowing them to be carried away. I do not wish to consume it. I reject these parts of me.
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