An Autumnal Grey
Niva Chittock | SHE/HER
The weekend that the pandemic storm broke on Aotearoa, I was sheltering in a small country town, in the heart of Southland, safe from the onslaught of public health updates.
A few days earlier, I had woken to the news that my grandfather had passed away. This is how I came to be stood in the piercing cold, as the sheepskin was hauled to the side and Grandad was laid to rest in a grassy cemetery just out of town.
By the time Sunday evening rolled round, my father began to gently slip back into his business exterior. Being a Civil Defence controller, he always knows more than most. He began to ask about where I would want to be if the alert levels were to rise. It was decided I’d go back to Wellington.
Monday dawned subdued. A pale sun gazed softly across layers of cloud and hill as we drove back to Dunedin Airport. Due to the hastily booked flights, I had a six-hour stopover in Christchurch. Little did I know that this would turn out to be the end of the road.
While a lot of us seemed to watch or listen to the announcement live or receive rushed phone calls from frantic loved ones, I remained blissfully unaware of the rising stress. Soaring through the clouds, I was 29,000 feet above Central Otago’s thyme-filled ranges, admiring the sun’s patterns on the surface of the sea when the lockdown was declared.
Upon touch down, blue gloved air hostesses smiled placidly like normal. In contrast, the airport had this underlying tension resting in the terminal. It was a current running through the carpet, reminding you not to be too relaxed. For the first time, I realised my freedoms were resting on a knife-edge.
An hour later, I’d cancelled the rest of the flight, headed instead to my parent’s house. And that’s how I showed up—standing on the Kia Ora doormat, with the clothes on my back and my former self staring at me from a high school fridge magnet.
I am now stuck self-isolating back here, in Ōtautahi. I have one pair of pants, a sibling's old room, and a borrowed backpack from my flatmate with a few essentials.
When I left Wellington, cases were still in the twenties, everyone was mourning the cancellation of Homegrown and life was pretty much functioning like normal. I feel like I missed the boat on the whole ‘panic period’.
Since then, I’ve been here, balancing respect with independence. Our traditional freedoms have been reduced. That everyone knows. But the freedom I’ve found most challenging to deal with is a personal one: the freedom to remain myself.
While this used to be home, it’s lost its touch now. My room is no longer mine. The spare room is no longer spare. Although I am an adult, classified both by law and societal norms, here I don’t feel that. I’m stuck in the teenage daughter mould, not quite fitting anymore, but still adhering to the ‘you’ll do’ attitude of this bubble.
Layers of character building are personified in old yearbooks; teddy bears from another lifetime and a few coats left in the attic. I have the essentials with me. My values are intact, solidified by the few belongings I hold here. But I’ve become clouded.
How do you explain to your family that you don’t have the same opinions, the same mannerisms, the same clothes anymore? How do you illustrate this when you don’t even have the freedom to choose your clothes in the morning? My current self is roughed up under their microscope, doubt creeping to the forefront of today’s mind.
I struggle with the subconscious assimilation of these people. These people who have known me since birth, these people who raised me. But I don’t want to regress back to a former version of myself. I cannot. That is no longer ‘me’. These points of contention rattle inside, my face struggling to mask the strained harshness in my voice.
But this is not my space; I don’t set the rules. This is my parent’s domain. Respect is a big deal here. I have to change my ways, whether I like it or not. Because you have to remember not to wear just socks. And you have to remember to put the news on at six. And you have to remember to set the table and to walk the dogs and to say ‘yes Mother’. Because here, being the eldest still has a role model clause attached.
The younger one regards me with a strange mixture of eager fondness and vulnerability in their eyes and I don’t know where to look.
Because here, two winds are always blowing.
The nor’wester that spurred me on as I grew, blowing air into the sails of future endeavours. It flowed through the long hair caught in a bike helmet to school and home again. It pushed the clouds to make the arch of a warm summer evening, and it gave a listless adolescence the establishing spark of energy.
And now there’s the competing wind of a fuller life with direction, getting under my feathers and enticing me to fly. There’s an intensity in the salty sea air that pummels into your back. It scatters overcast days across the hills and shakes you. It’s a challenge that whistles through, tearing at your sleeve to ask ‘who are you?’
Amidst these winds of change, I’ve found comfort in another grey area. Contentment, perhaps. It’s up in the ever-changing skies that bring the first rush of winter and the last stretch of summer. It’s in the leaves that catch flame and those wispy evenings that make your cheeks flush.
Even in borrowed clothes, with a muddled sense of self and a smile stretched thin, an addled season wraps me tight in their arms. Autumn understands being stuck in the middle more than most of us ever will.