I'm on a plane.

Running away to measure the centimetres of life.

I am on a plane to Vietnam.

Three hours into the trip a passenger at the front yells loudly, “Is there a doctor on the plane?” He stalks up the aisle yelling the same thing over and over. “If anyone has any medical experience at all please come forward,” the air steward reads into the microphone. She reads it from her phone in both English and Vietnamese. I notice her gold glittering case and her long, red, stiletto nails. Four women move to the front. The whole plane stops, our anxiety feels connected somehow, everyone eyes forward, although we can see nothing really; concerned faces, eyes to the floor, bodies bending up and down, a bag is sought from the overhead compartment and passed forward.

I think so many things at once. I think of the helplessness of the rest of us right now. I wonder what happens if someone dies on a plane – is there protocol for that? Would they land the plane in some available location? Or, would that not be allowed? Would you need a visa if you’d died? I think about all the medical emergencies that have surely happened on planes and how ultimately baffling, and wildly brilliant, it is that we can even fly at all. That humans worked out how to do that. I look at the land mass below, a coastline littered with tiny brown houses. I can only make out an air strip and a large roundabout.

I have no idea where I am.

Both geographically and in the broader sense of my life.

And I want to know, Or I want to know where I’m going at least.

I feel lost. Or stuck. Or like I’m running away, and all of it is true at once.

I am forty years old and alone on a plane and I have no idea where I’m going, or why and there’s a woman who needs medical attention and all any of us can do is observe, do nothing, and pray that they will be okay, looking for the clues about how worried we should be, how intense our prayers should be, in the movement ahead.

The mother and daughter sitting next to me fall back to sleep. The woman in front of me continues to pick her acrylic nails off letting them land on the floor like tiny tombstones. I wonder if she’ll pick them up or leave them there. The woman across the aisle from me eats nuts from a Ziplock bag. The babies cry. People chatter. The rest of us resume regular programming, but the four women at the front of the plane work diligently, while even the air hostesses resume service and people buy snacks.

I’m running away.

My impulse months ago when I booked this trip was to go away and be on my own.

I didn’t want to be in Brisbane. I didn’t want to be in my life, or the version of my life I found myself in.

I feel so upturned by this year, by what my life looks like right now.

Nothing is wasted, I tell myself.

I had dinner with a powerful, competent, brilliant woman, an engineer, who earns more money in a year, than I have in the last five combined. She tells me about a visual representation of life she’s seen used before. If our broad life expectancy is 80 years, they get leaders to measure 80cm on measuring tape, and to make a mark on the tape of their current age, if a centimetre is equivalent to a year. They then are told to look at the visual representation of how far they’ve come, but also how far they have left to go. How many centimetres have been and how many are there hopefully left?

I am halfway on my measuring tape. If I am lucky I will get to do this number of years all over again. Only, I wont have the centimetres dedicated to growing, or adolescence, or the centimetres spent drinking Long Island Ice Teas and dancing to reggae and pining for folks who definitely didn’t love me back of my twenties. The next hopeful forty centimetres are beginning from this place where I know so much, and feel so much more comfort in the ultimate discomfort of being a human being who has no idea what they’re doing. No one has any idea what they’re doing.

I think about what this moment right now will feel like in five years, or ten, will I even remember this plane ride? Will I even remember the specifics of this year? How will my fifty-year-old self feel about the heartbreaks of the last eighteen months?

How will she feel about the baby she created and lost?

How will she feel about her divorce?

How will she feel about the person who broke her trust and her heart?

How will she feel about all of the things that unraveled that have felt so discombobulating she had to run away to Vietnam to try and stuff the pieces of her heart back together in some new order?

The version of my heart that sits in my chest right now is the haphazardly crafted one wrapped in gaffa tape and twine. It needs repairing. But my goodness it’s amazing how robust a heart can be.

I am going to Vietnam because I want to be accountable to myself. To my choices. My next moves. My sparkle.

I want to come home. Home to myself.

I want to continue to let go of everything not of service. This was the repeated Bali prayer and as a result so much has fallen away.

My relationship ended.

I got fired.

I had two cancer scares.

My fifteen-year-old car died.

I moved house.

I will have had two housemates.

Book things that were meant to happen fell away.

So many dead weight old beliefs have fallen away too.

There’s been so much good though amidst all of this too. I’ve been gifted consistent income, more embodiment than ever before, a trip to Bali, ideas and words, and amazing opportunities, vital lessons and learning, deep knowing about who my community is and how they love me so, and a new love so startling easy and unplanned I feel stunned by it.

Nothing is wasted.

I’ve learnt a fundamental peace giving truth that I’ve got me…that no matter what happens, I will be okay. I’ve learnt that nothing can break me, aside, from death I suppose, and that is an inevitable conclusion, and all the more reason to just go all in on living. The centimetres will run out, so why not measure them well.

The four women helping, go back to their seats. The helpers have helped. The emergency handled for now. The chaos fleeting in the grand scheme of eighty years of life.

Humans can handle such monstrous things.

There is a rainbow outside my window, a circular halo of light. I try to take a photo but I miss it in the hunt for my phone amidst all of the shit in my bag. And if that isn’t the metaphor for right now…there’s so much shit, and time wasted trying to capture the glimpses of good, that we end up missing the beauty, of which there is so much.

Trust that your longing is real enough and true enough that it doesn’t need proof.

Because you know even when you don’t.

It’s okay to know that you don’t know.

There is no rush.

For now, my heart craves nurturing of the most basic kind…the rest I get, in the water I drink, in the movement I do, in the prayers I write.

So, I shall start there. I shall start small.

Clear the debris. Then keep going, because that’s all you can do. Keep going. And trusting past Claire and the instinct she had when she stood at the front of our plane and said, “we need help up here.”

So, you got up and you helped. You’re helping. This trip is that.

Keep going, loves, and measure your life well.

Love Claire.

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Pearler is usually written and created on the unceded lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal people in Meanjin, and I pay my deep respect to First Nation Elders past and present. This always was, and always will be Aboriginal land. This post was written in Vietnam, Sài Gòn or Ho Chi Minh City.

I don’t believe I can wholeheartedly support sovereignty of the land I live, love, work and travel without acknowledging the liberation of Palestine and honoring the impacts of colonisation, war and genocide of Indigenous people everywhere else.