Imagine a society so secret

even the members themselves don't realise that they belong

You live on the edge of vision. You have never felt part of human society, although as a child, you could disappear into the river with a quiet gurgle and imagine yourself shape shifting into an otter.

When you were very young, you were assaulted by an older man, a member of your family. You have some memories of being bathed, but these are vague. This was never discussed. Only when you went to boarding school and found yourself embroiled in a tickling game where you had to lie very still, naked, on the bed, surrounded by other girls, did a flash of dissonance become the mode through which the world became real. Things didn’t fit together, could not, and you withdrew, taking and rejecting, pleasure, or relationships.

Your parents took comfort in your cleverness, although they didn’t understand your outbursts. Why couldn’t you be a good sport and just get on with it, like your brothers (actually, your brothers weren’t doing much better). Never mind! You kept running. Nausea swallowed the pain.

You hid and lied and stole and binged and purged. The waves crashed, the storms raged, and the still dark heart of peace beat at the centre, waking at four to the silence as the intoxication of whatever you had taken faded into an ache. You read the classics and passed some of your exams, enough to merit a place at a prestigious college. A member of a society of solitaries.

Only later, having failed to make the grade, did you unravel, awkwardly barking out home truths at parties, running along a highway naked in the rain, swimming in the sea at night, drunk, You ceased to be invited. Ostracised. Intolerable. You wrote strange words on walls and found yourself among the flotsam, in a squat, pitied, contemptible.

You kept strange hours and scribbled hurried notes in books you later burned. You let him do what he liked, as long as you could get away by dawn, and rinse off in the rain.

You saw an ad in a window for work in a nursing home. You had been jettisoned from the squat for falling asleep while babysitting. You combed your hair and made small talk in the waiting room. A nurse nodded while you spoke and gave you overalls and directions to the dormitory where you could sleep. You took the pills intended for pain relief, but you listened to the people lying in the beds, and held their withered hands, and for the first time, you felt appreciated, even liked.

One old woman in particular took a shine to you. She let you lift her off the bed and wash her, an unprecedented privilege, given her former intolerance to touch. She spoke softly of a world you had both once known, of privilege and pain. She said that she would pin her hopes on you. She was a poet. One day you came into work to find her bed empty. You sat and wept, and then you handed in a note of resignation.

You left to work as a volunteer English teacher in a town in Indonesia. You felt for the oppressed but were tarnished with the same sense of separation that had always haunted you. You spent evenings in the port with prostitutes and timber merchants and military middle men in bars and nightclubs. Your supervisor gave you an ultimatum. You bowed your head to the inevitable.

You began to see how you were shaping what you saw: the unresolvable inconsistencies and contradictions, the paradoxes and the parodies. Only in the end did you imbibe enough poison to vomit up the sickness that had consumed you, and become what you really were: thin pickings, tracing the boundaries of the privileged few.

Still the monsters live inside you, though. Threatening to devour, devouring, and leaving you palpably human, sweating, bleeding, crying, ashamed, guilty, and yet behind the tired eyes a radiance of darkness. The Tao, or something deeper than time, the quality of eternity, endlessly patient, waiting for you to come back to ideas of compassion. Not hope. Not failure. Not fear. Compassion that subsists like space itself, generous and open to the possibility of change.

You are calm, now, and aware of age creeping over everything, the tired Earth, yourself. You don’t mind so much. Things fall into place, or fall, and you do worse when attempting to control and place them, and better when you watch, and wait, and whenever you can, be kind. Your own kind. You know one when you see one, and suddenly they’re everywhere, members of a society so secret even the members do not realise that they belong.