The Hours
Alison Wong
My husband has gone back to New Zealand to be with his mother on Mother’s Day. I am left in Australia with my son while he attends school. On the phone my husband tells me it is 22 degrees every day. He gloats. He is in his beloved Napier, the small Art Deco city on the east coast of the North Island where we both grew up. Here in Geelong, over an hour southwest of Melbourne, we have gone into a cold snap. It is only 14 or 15.
At night there are hours of dark sea between us.
Christchurch poet, Joanne Preston, calls herself a Tasmanaut. She was born in Australia but makes her home in the South Island’s largest city, a city rebuilding after devastating earthquakes. Like me and my little family, she flies back and forth across the Tasman. Yet I wonder – does this name Tasmanaut imply that the air naturally about us is not enough? That we need more to survive? Or that we are lost over water, belonging nowhere?
Night-time. I make hot water bottles: one for me, one for my son. ‘Have we got more?’ he asks.
Alone in the large bed, I move the warm rubber body wrapped in a blue pillow case back and forth from my cold feet to my torso, my arms. I embrace its truncated existence – no limbs to move with, no mind connected to its slim neck. I cannot wake it like my husband with conversation, with questions to excavate the night. Its silence has its own simplicity, its own reason for being.
I came to Australia for my husband. I am a love refugee in a world of refugees. We each have our own reasons.
How is it that days, years can pass so quickly, yet when we are lost, not hours?
I have lived many lives. Aotearoa New Zealand, China, Australia. It is not just about geography, about land forms, water forms, sky forms, flora and fauna, climate and weather, language and human forms, the chance and commitment and messiness of relationships – though it is all of these.
I have flown across land, across water, across lives, across time.
It takes hours to fly from one country to another. At the very same moment there are two hours between New Zealand and Australia, another two to China.
If I speak to you in another land everything is not quite what it seems. Translations of language, space and time. What is lost? And what is created?