Purest Blue

Peace is a sinking feeling; I’m terrible at fighting the current. Lately my attempts at swimming look like treading water. Worn out, I dip and let it all crash over me. If you stay submerged for long enough, you might start to hear the embryonic hum of your pulse. It’s not easy. You have to really listen for it.

I’m writing this as I gaze down at the sea from the plane window. It’s 5:49am and everything is almost pitch black. Boats illuminated by lights are scattered like stars, a giant mirror reflecting the sky. The bigger ships look like constellations with their clusters of dim lanterns and the highways scintillate like the metallic scales of a great serpent. I imagine the world flipped upside down and am overwhelmed with confronting its immense, unknowable largeness. Before we took off, I searched up astrological movements today on Google and saw the digital footprints of other people, probably anxious in a similar way to me. Someone before me enquired: why is today so crazy 2025. It’s a comforting feeling to know I am not the only one thinking this.

I have a funny memory from when I was younger. My family & I were flying to the Gold Coast and I was amazed at how high we were in the sky. With my nose pressed to the window, I watched kilometres of clouds pass like rivers of mist that resembled marshmallows. I turned to my sister and asked her, with the purest sincerity of a child, where God was. He was supposed to live in the sky, like in cartoons and movies, but I couldn’t see him anywhere. This was very confusing for a girl whose age was a single digit.

This was probably the first time I started to doubt the stories I’d been raised on. From there, I soon deduced that the tooth fairy and Santa Claus were not plausibly real either. I carried these difficult truths within me, even as my classmates shared stories of sleeping with their baby teeth under their pillow or leaving out cookies & milk during Christmas. Even from a young age, I was afraid to be the bearer of bad news.

To this day, I still catch myself entertaining delusion — mine and others — sometimes for longer than necessary. Who am I to deny somebody their truth? I know that sometimes only a good story can keep you going to the next day, and the day after that. In time, everything eventually makes a good story. The secret is in the delivery. As Clarissa Pinkola Estés puts it: stories set the inner life into motion. She continues: the teller never knows how it will all come out, and that is at least half of the moist magic of story.

My friends and I have recently caught a chronic case of the yearn. When it comes up in conversation, we all sigh in harmonic unison and affix our soft wistful gazes in different directions. The eternal yearn. I’m of the belief that the yearn is the lifeblood of everything that makes life substantial and beautiful. This means the source of the yearn must always escape you. The nearer the miss, the better and worse it feels. It’s necessary that these coexist simultaneously. At least, this is how I understand it, in my own language.

In predictable yet charming French fashion, Jacques Lacan reconciles desire into a psychoanalytical phenomenon. Objet petit a, the partial object of desire we seek in the other. It is always outside of ourselves: true desire must exist together with its deep unattainable lack. It’s a feeling that escapes definition, only because it seems to be so universal and deeply personal. Speaking upon it to attempt defining its boundaries only cheapens it. It’s best to leave a little room for poeticism and metaphors; its slipperiness is what keeps it interesting. Maybe this is a little masochistic. Then again, life is brutal to begin with. This comes as no surprise. It’s a fact of life that inside every lover girl is a very deep hole. Dive in without looking and you will quickly find yourself in eternal, blissful freefall.

Just a few hours prior, I was oscillating between floating around and complete submersion in my friend’s swimming pool. I couldn’t stop diving into the water, holding my breath for as long as I could at the very bottom, the sensation of the smooth tiles on my fingertips as I levitated across the pool floor like a bottom feeder. I admit, it’s the most exhilarating feeling to hold your breath as long as you can, then gasp for air above the water, then sink again, beating my personal best each time. It’s a trust exercise with yourself, I think. Each repetition is self-affirming: I refuse to let myself sink down here.

Get over yourself, hope for the best but plan for the worst and don’t expect life to be fair. These are the three mottos Rick Owens claims to live by. Adopting the truisms of others never really works out as I’d like it to, so I’ve created some truisms of my own. I would tell you what they are, but that would be hypocritical. You’re better off trying to find your own truths to live by.

A confession: I used to look down on people who pray. I still don’t really know how to pray, but I’ve been trying. Nowadays, it seems like one of the only things I can do to console myself when I’m backed into a corner.

Now that the sun has risen, I can see everything clearer now. The clouds are dense like glaciers and I imagine little polar bears on top of them. It’s a silly fantasy, but I entertain it because I probably won’t see Antarctica in my lifetime, so it’s the next closest thing. Of course, I know that the clouds are another type of fantasy. Polar bears wouldn’t really be able to stand on clouds. They would just fall straight through. This thought is shocking, sobering and sad, so I decide to stop thinking about it.

The cabin crew announce we are preparing for landing and the restlessness of everybody in the plane is palpable. Bags shuffle around and seatbelts click. I have been a sponge the entire flight, absorbing the conversation of the two blokes sitting next to me. They have been talking about nuclear waste management in Australia and it all sounds quite confidential. I probably shouldn’t be listening but I can’t help myself.

Soon enough, we are flying amongst layers of mist and underneath it all, my home is gradually revealed. Pure 6am sunlight coats the surface of every body of water like butter on bread and I am looking at the sun through my phone camera lens. I can’t stop recording the landing because I am amazed that I can see the Harbour Bridge, Opera House and Centrepoint Tower all at the same time. As we nosedive, I scan the suburbs that fly by in a blur: mansions with tennis courts & swimming pools, copy-and-paste duplexes, shipping containers stacked on top of each other like Lego.

The landing on the tarmac makes the plane shudder so intensely that the two blokes have abruptly stopped talking, and one of them is gripping the armrest like his life depends on it. Meanwhile I am praying the entire time: please let us all get home safe, we all deserve to live another day, not just me, not just us on the plane, I swear I really mean it when I say we all deserve to get home safe, every one of us on this earth, pretty please. Amen. I am an opportunist after all. If I’m going to pray, I may as well make it worth it.

A view like that will never get old. It makes me feel like somebody who is very, very important. It almost makes me feel like God.

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I wrote this in bits and pieces over the whole of October. A lot happened this year for me. Then again, so much happens all the time. I’ve found that seeking clarity is the only antidote to the overwhelm. Eyes wide open, above or under the water. Also, here is a photo from my view on the plane ride when I finished most of this piece off. I wonder what you see in it:

I pray more beautiful times await for u. Anna xoxo