Isn't it! Doesn't it! Wasn't it!

(Image: Todd Papageorge)

It’s quiet again. Aside from the birds, sheep, cows, cicadas, and the occasional tourist van driving a dirt road down to the beach. It’s the heat that is so distinctly North Island to me. Rural and honest. A little isolated and unkempt but not far from all manner of metropolitan satisfaction. One afternoon I walked around in the garden to take a break from work. Plump beetroots busting out from the earth. Bushels of coriander and parsley and mint. Broccoli gone to seed, blooming into tiny flower heads. A microscopic cauliflower beginning it’s growth, split from inside the bouquet of spiralling rubbery leaves. A lone and plentiful lemon tree waiting over there in the paddock through the chipped wooden gate behind the shed.

I don’t own any togs at the moment, so just float in the shallows in my underwear with the park and the bay to myself in the evenings. Some days catching the final glimmer of a wet and clearing plush clouded sunset over the water, my butt atrophied from a day of sedentary working and driving back from the city. Other days more spacious, watching my toes emerge from the water a legs length from my bobbing head, and the undulations of the Coromandel turning a deeper purple in the hazy residue of daylight further beyond them. Not having a care in the world, or a thing I could think of that was lacking. Except maybe in flashing moments: company. Company with skin on, that I could see and touch and feel validated in my realness by being in the scene alongside. Company to hear and echo my exclamations of wonder, my squeals of delight.
​
I talked on the phone to my friend Ilona about this as I walked through the sheep paddocks one afternoon. “I go into pariah mode too easily”, she said. An exiled person. “The days I feel alone and isolated and rejected it’s because I don’t have any intimacy, I just need one conversation to fix it for me. It’s co-regulation - feeling like ‘I do exist’ - otherwise there’s nothing to bounce off.”

I wonder, can the very structure of a conversation be our reason for deep company even? The company of language. Words delivered right, peppered just to our liking? To be 'speaking the same one', on the same page.

Kuru and I were talking over dinner a couple of nights later and a new dimension opened up as he shared of his heritage, and his conviction to be ongoing in living by way of te ao Māori. “Having a second language is having another world view. I only speak and know the words to say in English because of the Māori inside me. That’s shaping everything I say because of the poetry, the way it teaches me to see and know the world.” (Mātaranga Māori.)
Later, albeit contradicting but amplifying the mystery of this resolve as we listened to a song and I asked ‘so what are these guys singing about?’ “I don’t really know what they’re saying. I don’t listen to the words. I just listen to the sound. The feeling..”

Going full circle, perhaps that is all the Me in my undies floating in the ocean really ever needed to be sure of in that fracturing moment of tension between wanting to be alone and wanting to be with others: it’s never really about the substance of the company itself, but the way it filters through our very bones and fortifies us in our stance, our pace and our endurance as we clumsily trudge on forth all the same.