POOL PARTY by JULIA JACKLIN. Story by Gemma Keating.

Thornbury, Melburne. 2017.

In a haze of fatigue I had fallen asleep on the tram again and awoken with a jolt at my stop, toppling onto the street outside the Thornbury Local. The sky glowed with a murky orange-grey. I stumbled along the footpath and up the concrete steps to my apartment door, fumbled for the keys and fell through. It was black inside. My roommate had gone home for the weekend. I knew only because she did that every weekend. I dumped my things and furiously scrubbed my makeup off with a single wet wipe under the fluorescent light in the grimy bathroom mirror. My eyes felt so heavy, I thought they might roll out of their sockets and collect the lint off the floor.

I looked at my phone. Still no sign of him. It was a Friday night, 2am. Every moment I had experienced that day was still floating around in my periphery with a jagged edge. Notes on lined paper, bitter sting of black instant coffee, awkward improvisation class, conversations with new friends, could I call them that? Reflection in the bathroom mirror, no messages. Power-walking cracked pavement, hairspray, hunger. French songs sung into a dark hazy room, vacuuming sequins and feathers off the gritty carpet after the fact. No messages. My world expanding and contracting, minute to minute. A tireless treading of water in a vast sea, in a murky pond. Radical independence, mournful loneliness.

I had moved to the city only months ago. All my things fit into my hatchback and I drove them along the freeway with the surreal knowing that in that moment everything was changing. My old life had given way to something unknown. Divine freedom to be an adult, but with no idea how. I guess I thought we would do it together, me and him. But there I was, in my shoebox flat, alone.

I sat on the floor next to my bed and placed my squashy headphones over my ears. They cradled my skull in a comforting way, swaddling my brain. There was an album I had been listening to as a kind of life raft.

Julia Jacklin’s first album, the first song: Pool Party.

That voice was so gentle, so intimate. She was whispering in my ear. It made the churning in my head suddenly calm; the crashing waves became only ripples on the surface. The seasickness settled. So slowly I paced around under the glow of the pink fairy lights in my bedroom, feeling the spongy carpet between my toes with each step. I waltzed myself around the apartment in a single, gentle act of self-love.

The song reached out and touched a very soft, feminine part of me from which I’d become detached. The mournful guitar solo which closed out the track brought me to tears, every time.

He was the one who told me about the album, about her, about the song. The boy who I’d followed to the big city. I lived up the road from him now, but we hardly saw each other.

Ours was a tender coming-of-age romance. He came from a broken home and had found some semblance of a family within mine, in our dying teenage years. I loved him deeply, but I felt like I no longer knew him. I couldn’t recognise his sallow face, except in moments, like when he’d share with me a song he liked.

It was strange: I listened to it, and the unspoken words hanging between us were suddenly said – not by him, or me, but by this angelic voice from afar. It was an admission, an apology. No, it was a plea. No, maybe it was just a song.

Still, it was hopeful to me. It gave me hope that one day he would open his heart again, let me take his hands in mine and guide him towards a life of happiness which we would one day share. We were so young. I was timid. In the end, it wasn’t meant to be.

Over the next few years, Julia’s songs would go on to capture moments of my life with distilled clarity, as though they were written just for me; a shy young woman carving her place in the world, falling out of love and in love, trying to make sense of it all.

I ran into him recently at the Old Bar in Fitzroy, the boy from The Pool. We locked eyes and it was a strange moment wherein time stood still. Everything came flooding back to me. The same but different. But his face was full, his eyes bright. We talked excitedly, and I left with a warm glow in my chest. It seemed as though he did eventually climb out of the deep end. I looked around me, at a life of lightness and excitement, and realised, so had I.

Stereo Story #826