Too Precious
09.06.2025    Kate Middeleer




1.
Yesterday afternoon was a deluge of on-and-off showers, with enough sunshine overhead that the drops fell like knife-blades to the earth. Closer to the window the branch of a fig tree fought the weight of rain in pulsing rhythm.

I lay with my feet up and a blanket over my bare knees and googled the term ‘immobilizing freeze response’.

People often report feeling numb, detached from their bodies…often automatic and serves as a coping mechanism, usually to avoid distressing emotions, thoughts, and body sensations.

To be clear, this is not me. Or, not entirely.

I will always get up, peel myself out of bed to turn the stove on and watch the flames closely, before the coffee burns. I’ll call my mother back and put the clothes out to dry. I’ll vacuum cockroach shit from under the sink and stir the appropriate amount of ‘Miracle Collagen Powder’ into my morning cuppa.

But to say I don’t fall prey to the sudden bolt of inaction would be categorically ingenuine. On occasion, the morning coffee, the bed made, the percolator hiss, the phone calls back home, are followed by the quick succession of many empty hours.

I fold back into myself with a numbness that pays no heed to temperature change, birds calling from the window; reminders of a world out there! Morning frost melts into 4 pm and I have yet to take even a sip of water.

These are usually days of the week I had reserved for something magnificent; infinite numbers of emails answered, masterpieces written, ten thousand steps and a quota of calories burned.

But the sun has set now, shadows taking over a lounge room that never had its lights flicked on, tongue wedged flat against the roof of my mouth, lofty voice calling down from somewhere high above:

So what have you done? What have you even done?

A wasted day. Go to the sink, drink some water.

Look what you’ve done!


2.

I work at a cafe whose clientele consists mainly of regulars. Much to my pleasure, I know the names of most peoples’ dogs, I know how they take their coffee, and I know their kids.

There is a woman whose beauty is rivaled only by how tiresome her children seem to be. I don’t mean this negatively. I really quite like her six-year old’s husky voice as she leans against the countertop, toes tangled in a plaid dress, commanding “four plain croissants and a flat white with oat milk because Mommy’s not allowed to have dairy either!” I like her son who dutifully corrals his siblings into the car and remembers to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ when the rest of them forget.

One day, mid-morning, she comes in, uncharacteristically alone. The seasons are beginning to change and her large cashmere scarf practically engulfs her. There is a tiny wooden chair with chipping white paint that stands between the newspapers and the sliced bread. It’s less than a meter tall and is usually only made to support the weight of a stack of Sydney Morning Heralds when there is overflow.

This morning the woman takes her flat white to the toy chair and perches there on her phone, right in front of the counter and adjacent to the entryway, a soft smile of self-deprecation as customers brush by.

“I need to respond to emails in public,” she explains to me, somewhat apologetically, “otherwise I never will”.

I laugh and tell her I’m the same way.

People don’t hear from me for months.

We bond over the realization that the faster one responds, the less perfect they have to be. We celebrate the discovery of the handy psychological trick of paying the compliment, “thank you for your patience,” when you know you’ve stuffed-up.

We laugh. But it feels more like a silent, strained, and whispered question: this is me, is that okay?

That evening, after the woman has long-left, I’m just about finished cleaning the coffee machine when a little boy walks in by himself, still in his soccer cleats. He sits on that tiny white stool across from me, with one leg crossed over the other, dignified. To make it more of a funny gag for his mother, I think, he grabs one of the morning’s newspapers and spreads it open across his hip, pretending to read.

His mother’s voice sounds from the darkening street outside: “come on old man, time to head home!”

Without looking in my direction, the kid ditches The Herald and sets off to his mom’s car, idling outside.

I take the unsold newspapers out to recycling. And laugh a little, at the thought of the lady sitting there not long ago, answering emails and doing her best to act like an adult, too.