Sometimes it feels like there’s an ocean crashing and storming away inside me and my skin is the only thing holding it in.

Only a few weeks left on the PhD. December 20. That’s the day.

Watch this space.

We flew the budget airline. My father blithely strolled through customs, waving cheerfully at the guards who waved cheerfully back, took our fingerprints but asked us almost nothing. When we checked in at the hotel, he started pulling half-open packets of biscuits, chocolate, candy, piles of muesli bars—even a chicken wing—out of his bag. ‘In case I got hungry!’ he said. The fridge is now stuffed with food we’re struggling to eat.

In the car, we passed the hospital, a church, open gardens. A man sat on a park bench, asleep, head bowed, next to a shopping trolley full of plastic bags and a sign that read ‘SUNDAY WORSHIP: 9am. 11:30am. ALL WELCOME.’

The beach is bright but a heavy fug clings to the mountains. It rains so much in the hills that the Ala Wai Canal was built to drain the tourist district of Waikiki. The beachfront resorts cluster at the water’s edge, trying to elbow each other out of the way. A week in this hotel feels like an indulgence, but I heard people in the lift talking about how they’ve been here for months. Their skin, which I’m sure was once almost as white as mine, has turned a deep mahogany brown—one layer of sunburn over another.

I went walking. A homeless man was sleeping by the corner door of Tiffany’s. A dead mouse lay beside him. I walked past slowly, feeling off-kilter. A little further down the road, scrawled on a wall: ‘DEVELOPMENT IS GRAFFITI.’

Afternoon winds threaten a storm but don’t deliver. Emergency vehicles screaming sirens hurtle past at regular intervals. My jokes fall limp in the humidity. Our cocktails are poured on land that was once rice paddies. Before that, swamp.

In the Northern Territory, they always said the build-up turned the locals mad. On Oahu, madness is people in hibiscus-print shirts scrambling over each other for the chance to stuff their faces with deep-fried potatoes. Madness is men and women, towel-corner to towel-corner, lined up in rows along the hard sand, trying to change the colour of their skin. Madness is that oil slick formed by a sunken, corroded battleship tomb and the way we flock to pay money to see it. Madness is this food, which seems to be like this city: made only of excess. I’m afraid that if I’m not careful, if I stay too long, the grease will start to congeal on my skin.

A golden autumn morning breaks through leafless branches. The chainlink fences that flank the railway tracks gleam as the sun rises behind them. The footpaths wear mantles of brown and red leaves. My fingers are cold and only seem to get colder as I type. I piece together a couple of paragraphs from the scraps I left for myself the last time I opened this file. It feels like sewing together sheets of rubber.

The last few weeks have been like this. My habits have taken a 180-degree turn. It used to be odd if I went to sleep before midnight. Now it feels strange if I wake after dawn. My old housemate maintains that the elements are the same, I’ve just swapped my alone-time to the very early morning. She’s probably right, but it feels like progress somehow, like it’s worlds away from how I used to live.

I find some notes in my journal: two years ago, a fragrant mid March evening. Cadie and I sat on the steps of the creaking verandah in our friends’ overgrown, bamboo-filled garden in Kangaroo Point. A few feet away, our friends sprawled around the kitchen table half-drunk, making bad jokes and cackling with laughter. The threads of their spiralling conversation had sunk so low beneath the beer bubbles we’d lost sight of them. A possum stalked across the verandah railing before taking a flying leap and landing on the tree that towered above us and canopied the entire garden. Cadie looked intently past her own (discarded) beer and confessed that sometimes she didn’t know who she was or what she was supposed to be doing. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘it feels like I’m living multiple lives.’

I muddle my way through a paragraph, the sentences flaccid, the cadences all wrong.

Later, a friend calls to vent about a mutual acquaintance in an unhappy marriage. The acquaintance: I stayed at her house for a night, a couple of years ago. I don’t remember why. I think I was trying to get to know her. She asked me what I was planning to do after my PhD. I wanted to publish, I said, and then perhaps travel. After that—who knew? I had as much as I needed to go on for the moment.

‘But what about getting married?’ she asked. ‘What about having children?’

‘I don’t want to do either of those things,’ I said.

‘But surely, at some point—?’

‘No.’

It curtailed our friendship: we saw each other as irrevocably different, constantly speaking at cross purposes. I was convinced by our conversation that night that those ideas were hardwired into her: that marriage and children were so much what she believed to be the natural objectives of her life that she didn’t understand—couldn’t understand, I think—why either of them might feel wrong to me.

She now has a one-year-old and is pregnant with twins. Her Facebook feed is flooded with discussion of babies and child-rearing, and status updates gushing about how much she loves her life. It’s a stark contrast to the bitterness that my friend relays to me on the phone, which is overlaid by our acquaintance’s insistence that because these things are right she must be happy, even if she doesn’t feel it.

I want to flog her with a copy of The Feminine Mystique and I don’t care if she hates me for it. My friend insists she has tried and there’s no helping some people. I suppose not, but what does it say about the world when the structure means more than that which is contained within it? That must be my idea of hell: a hollowed-out shell, perfunctory motion, conformity for the sake of the status quo.

I think, perhaps that’s why I gravitate towards the dark, lonely hours. It still feels like quiet rebellion. Off-kilter, out of sync. And the edges are where the cracks are.

This is the worst thing. This dry mouth belly tumbling soul sucking can’t tell if I’m breathing.

People say the art of conversation is dead. That we don’t know how to connect any more. That our relationships have devolved into farce and fancy, as though the rules of engagement are tempered by deliberate pantomime and posing. As though in the past we all embraced like lovers at every occasion and bared our souls at the slightest prompting.

I didn’t always have so much trouble speaking. My father used to complain I spent too much time on the phone. ‘Why don’t you ask your friends over?’ he’d say. ‘What’s wrong with talking face-to-face?’ Then he complained that I never called, that the physical presence of people was trumped by faint blue light, by interrupting jangles and a split focus. By text on a screen.

Well, I’m sorry, Dad, but I know where I stand with type and carefully constructed sentences. It’s freefall conversation I lose myself in, spiralling, spinning, tumbling towards that inevitable uncomfortable end. And how could you say this life is disconnected? Because these lip flutterings and heart poundings and quick shallow breaths seem nothing but real, and I want to know why you think I should go through this, Dad? What life lesson is better learnt by embracing the corrosive paralysis of stress and unfamiliar society?

‘You’re going to learn the piano,’ he said when I was seven. ‘One day you’ll be glad. One day you’ll thank me.’ And Sister Loretta, who was old and stooped, came each week and smiled with her eyes and talked of crotchets, clefs and major chords, and gave me a prayer at the beginning of every lesson. Her fingers always shook upon the keys but her copperplate hand never failed to make me feel unworthy. Why can’t I write like that? I want to write like that.

We took a holiday to the High Country. When we got home I would remember the forest, the curling bark, the cold altitude air and the vast, aching distance. I tried to capture it, to curl my fingers around it. I tried to play what I saw into the piano. It was like trying to pluck tendrils of smoke from the air. Music slips out of my control and I can’t get it to look the way I want. Pianos are cool blue and lavendar. The bush is better served by a deep green bowed double bass or a guitar strummed in a minor key.

I once tried to explain to a friend how a song I liked had ripples of deep blue threaded with silver, ice and bursts of light. She stared at me, incredulous, and said, ‘I don’t think about music like that at all.’ And I thought, this isn’t what I think about it. This is how it is. And I try so desperately to get to that, to represent that, to make it tangible, to understand it, so that when you want to know what I think, I can tell you how I see. And I used believe I bumped mute through the universe, as though every fraught function of my mouth went unnoticed or unheard. But I’ve been speaking the whole time, just not with the right words. Sometimes I feel like my whole existence can be distilled down to one long lesson on learning to speak. And then you ask me how I am, and how is the writing going, and what can I say? A stutter, a stumble, an expulsion of meaninglessness. ‘It’s fine.’

This is the worst thing.

The summer I finished my Honours degree, I worked five days a week and drank six. I remember very little of my day job from back then; in my memory I slept until midday and washed my hangovers off in the shower with the previous night’s conquest. I spent the afternoon jacking myself up on coffee before the first glass of wine at about 5pm as the edge of the January sun was finally blunted by the shadows of skyscrapers. I ate up inner-city evenings like some kind of malnourished socialite.

I didn’t write a word that summer, although not for lack of trying. The pen reluctantly coughed out scribbles and circles—confused, contorted images that represented nothing. I started to wonder if I was suffering from some kind of aphasic paralysis. I drank more to forget about it because when I wasn’t drinking the bad dreams started—violent, jolt-awake nightmares. There were a few of us who seemed to be suffering from similar diseases, and we sought each other out as the sun went down—a text message here, an open chat window there—loosely throwing together rendezvous in half-acknowledged comfort of the fact that we weren’t alone in stoking our coping mechanisms with cigarette smoke and artificial lights. We bought expensive food and pretended we could afford it, eating one meal a day and making up for lost calories with tequila and beer. We read the the news constantly and listened to technicolour trash-pop. We had neon-candy cravings, the bar bug.

Sam was one of my fellow sufferers, one of the few girls I knew at the time whose plans preferenced art over children, sex over commitment, immediacy over responsibility. A leftover from another life. An ex-girlfriend of an ex-friend. She was a hipster when hipsters weren’t quite a thing yet—80s knits and mismatched jewellery, heavy boots and bleached yellow hair. Nothing she did should have worked, at least if you believed in such things—she wasn’t skinny and she wasn’t pretty, not in the way the billboards or magazines wanted—but cool seemed to seep out of her skin, dewy and demure. I remember she cut half her hair off one day—clipped one side of her head into an impromptu pixie cut, while the other side curled over her ear and around her chin. I was fascinated by how that cut changed her face—at every angle she seemed to become a different person. People stared at her—I stared at her. Strangers approached her in the street, just for small talk.

One of those sticky, swollen afternoons was finally fading as we sat at an Italian restaurant in Hardware Lane eating some kind of flippant greenery, plump shrimps, crunchy calamari and buttery pieces of avocado, downing a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc between us instead of water. I tried to convince her to give her phone number to the bartender—I’m not entirely sure why. We made drama to have something to occupy us, like kids playing Truth or Dare, forcing revelations and risk for the sake of momentum. Start a scene, keep busy. Anything to stay distracted. I devised a flirtatious strategy for Sam and the bartender that allowed for minimum embarrassment and maximum potential. Sam listened intently and then said, ‘You just want me to do it because you don’t have the guts.’

I laughed. ‘Maybe. But you’re the one who thinks he’s cute. If I thought he was cute I’d do it.’

‘Fine. Next bar we go to, you’re doing it.’

‘Only if I find someone cute.’

‘Well, don’t make tonight your picky night, okay?’

We finished our dinner and made our way through the city, two drinks per bar, and Sam pointed to people and said ‘What about him? What about her?’ as though the only thing standing between me and an erotic interlude was the ability to make a decision. Open the list, choose your poison. But nobody caught my fancy. By the third bar, Sam was getting fed up with me, and when I shook my head at what must have been the hundredth person she accused me of being pretentious. ‘Your standards are way, way too high,’ she said. ‘You need to get over yourself.’

I couldn’t figure out why it stung so much. Perhaps it was the aimlessness of that summer, the irony of those in between days, thinking I was all that while having nothing, making nothing, achieving nothing. When I got home that night—alone—I was still thinking about it. I tried to sleep but my skin was prickling, my scalp was itching and in my half-doze I imagined there were fruit flies crawling all over me. I was fermenting on the inside and they were coming to feed.

Eventually I moved house and started working on my PhD. Sam and I drifted apart. When I lost my phone last January, hers was one of the numbers that, for one reason or another, I never got around to retrieving. Then about a week ago, I got a text message. I was driving home from camping, drenched in sweat under a filthy-hot sun, and expecting communication from someone else. Instead it read: ‘Are you in Melbourne? I miss our times together. Hope you’re doing SHIT HOT. xox Sam’. And as the waves of heat rolled in alongside this week’s hangovers, I started remembering her again, thinking about that year, how I felt like I was turning inside out—some kind of bullshit nihilistic self-immolation—and how I spent the entire time running headlong into the very things I was trying to escape.

Most of my heroes have been arrested. Many have stood on the wrong side of the law. And the law has not always stood for truth. The law has stood for control, dominance, and sometimes even manipulation. Law, at it’s best, has served to protect. Yet it has also served as a means of restricting growth and has not always seemed to change at the rate of human consciousness. Some laws have some catching up to do. So do some governments. So do some people. And I’m sure that in some regards I am also one of those people. If I was in the military and believed I was protecting and serving my country by fighting in a war and some hacker gave away the correspondents to our barracks or fire-power, I imagine, I’d be pretty upset. Yet, I find it hard to be upset when I think the best support for our troops would be sending them home and enlisting them in college. If you want to help rebuild the infrastructure of a country send engineers, send teachers, build hospital (no preachers)…

But the reason that I’m writing you Santa is because Kanye already rocked a red suit, I wanted to suggest a yellow cape, something with fringes, maybe a few feathers or ornaments. It’s not like you have any connection to Jesus so you might as well change your shit up and get on some newness. The way I see it, you’re another one of them do-gooders. You give kids something fun to dream about while we adults scramble the meaning of things. Things like the meaning of power, or the role of responsibility within it. Things like the power of the imagination and the beauty that can come about when you engage it. Anyway, it’s nice to have someone to write to sometimes and I thought you might like a letter that wasn’t asking you for anything. Do your thing, big guy, my son is counting on you.

—Saul Williams, here.

I’ve become seasonal. Season-affected. Unfolding in the sun, hanging heavy in the rain, a spark-of-sunshine smile cracked through blanket cloud. I watch the cars pause and the people chattering inside, fishbowl tongues flapping. White water, white water, white water.

I sit at the back of the tram next to a man in a long coat. The hem falls against my leg. He moves, shifting his weight, and it brushes the side of my knee. A jolt runs through me. I remember conversations, words caught on breath, like condensation on a cold morning, clouding the space between us and then disintegrating. Here’s a little thing we made together, behind the walls, in shadowy water.

Genius eludes me, so I write a message to myself and pretend it’s from a God I don’t believe in. I write it on my arms, a quiet moment on busy skin.

‘There’s nothing wrong with being cerebral, honey.’

Even this euphoria has wet feet. I pull a piece of apple skin from my teeth—the things you find in your mouth—and I suck on it until I’m sore.

Back in June, these few paragraphs and a meditation on death and animals (that eventually became the ‘Cattle Country’ post at Overland) were originally the same piece of writing. I’m not sure why I never posted this part. Perhaps it felt unfinished.

*

Cadie left me a couple of days ago and I’m sitting in the now-deserted Kalala Station waiting for my cousins to come and tow me out. The Brunette Downs races are on this weekend and the whole station has cleared out for five days of partying 600km away. I was going to be one of them, but after losing the gearbox, somehow preventing my car from rolling at high speed, and not getting myself and my sister-girl killed in the middle of the Territory last Friday night, I have other priorities.

I dropped my detox briefly after the drama. I picked it up again when two beers and a scotch had me waking up feeling poisoned, seedy and in a foul mood the following morning and I thought, I used to feel like this every day. I used to feel worse. And ironically enough, the lapse helped me realise how much I value having a cloudless mind. Alcohol is a strange drug. I wonder how many of us actually enjoy it, and how many of us drink because we’re expected to drink, because we expect ourselves to drink, because we’re told it’s an enjoyable state to be in. It’s a giant joke, isn’t it? That those who consider themselves the most intelligent creatures on earth go out of their way to fry those very faculties that brought them the things they value.

Kalala is on devil-country. Termite mounds haunt the plains and sinkholes collect carpets of dead leaves. A cold wind has started blowing over the last few days, and while I’ve loved every minute of my time here, I’m struggling not to let the exasperation and frustration of car dramas drag me down. Because it’s not just this, it’s the thing before it, and the thing before that, and the twenty other things before that. Nobody said it would be easy—me least of all—but every time I think Okay, it’s sorted, I can keep going now, something else lurches up out of the dust. I’m starting to feel careworn.

I have friends who embrace victimhood, who expect other people to be available at every turn to drag them out, who refuse to take responsibility for their choices and hate the very thought of struggling for something. But I hate not having choices. I hate not being able to fix things. I hate not being able to make things right by myself, for myself. I hate not knowing what is needed to make things right. Ignorance is hell.

1.

My grandmother’s piano has scales. The wood is old and the varnish is flaking. It’s ten years since she died—almost to the day. I don’t know exactly which day. Perhaps it was the day I saw ducklings by the creek and a black-nosed kangaroo peeping through the trees. Perhaps it was the day the storm crashed in, howling wind, lightning, thunder and torrents of ice—rock-hail fit for a fist. Or perhaps I’m remembering it wrong. Perhaps it wasn’t this time of year at all.

I haven’t sat down at a musical instrument for six months. The glue holding the ivory to the D key comes unstuck when I touch it. I’m not sure if I can play the songs anymore.

2.

I found a wishbone, flesh sucked off and dried, three weeks after I set it aside. Let’s put it in the crook of our fingers and pull. Let’s wish for the same thing. Why should somebody have to lose?

3.

In Adelaide, the traffic was an assault. It had me clutching at myself, fingernails carving half-moon gullies into my arms. I’d been buried so deep I felt like the world was just an extension of me. The nodes of my brain felt like they were wired to every screech of brakes and pump of hydraulics. I thought I would need to build walls around myself to keep out the noise. Still some mornings, the sound of the traffic barrels into me, scraping at my skin like asphalt against my knees at six years old. I’m still bruised but more recently by rocks, rain, towbars, truck steps, the hoof of a pissed-off heifer.

Today, however, the city sinks into my skin like topical anaesthetic; misstepped rhythms and unexpected syncopation are balanced by the hissing of the trams, thumps and clunks, snatches of conversation overlaid by smog-clouds and dirty rain. It’s Legacy Week and Melbourne’s streets are peppered with servicewomen and men in camouflage gear selling badges, plastic bracelets and pins. A fat, high-ranked official with a moustache laughs at his own joke. Water drips off eaves and balconies, pooling in the street to be splashed back up again by bicycle wheels and high heels.

On the way home, I dream of careless fingers running down my legs, a martini mouth and pages of words disintegrating into smudges, scribbles, vines, tree branches, flowers uncurling.

4.

‘Since you left I cannot unsee these fucking caterpillars.’

5.

There’s a ringing in the back of my head. I threw up a meal just to see the water sprawling over the saltpans for the first time in decades, heavy like glass, algae green and marbled red—the red of old blood, earth-blood. Birds glide along the surface, wings beating in unison. The desert is alive.

‘Everything that exists has some life apart from itself.’ The universe is a negotiable alliance of things, of relationships: your eyes have a relationship with these words. The steering wheel of my car has a relationship with the orange I ate for breakfast. My fingers have a relationship with these piano keys, poised, tentatively touching cool ivory, slightly out of tune, but there’s still music under the lid. I know there is.

We spent weeks driving through sparse winter sunscapes, in such a rush to be somewhere else, in such a rush to be in a rush, stopping only for salt pans, salt plains, salt lakes, salt rock, salt water—like some giant god cried into the centre of this continent, underscored our apathy with tears that could only sustain a desert and buried themselves underground like you can’t find me and I don’t want to be found. And everything was water and rock, water and rock, water and rock. And it’s not hard to believe that everything was ever only water and rock, water and rock, rushing through the hard veins of the earth, sandstone and silicon, salt and moonscapes, faces in the dark.

Daylight is raw and I wonder if I would rather be back there in the empty sky, on cold granite in cold sun, trying to bubble my blood like girl, you were the snake, the lizard, the three degrees of separation, it was you. I want to be all these things I was told I couldn’t just because I shouldn’t, when will you settle down? like I’m supposed to be happy with three children, a house and a man who deigns to fuck me every now and then—no, fuck you, there’s a desert calling my name, a mountain, a spit-out-sideways precipice. And it’s easy to fall back into that, into love, you are my salvation, love, but out on that rock when the thunder is all that you can hear, the sound of the world turning right-way-up—out there you remember. You’re water and rock. You’re ancient and you’re transient. You’re scraps knotted together and you are whole.

Is it funny that the loneliest I’ve ever felt is between the sheets with someone else? Friends, lovers, sisters, brothers. The same words over and over again. The water in this city tastes like salt, and I want to destroy this thing that eats at me inside but you can’t make a shell bleed, and there’s nothing that disintegrates the desire to create like that self-destructive void, that my life can be nothing, that myth that you can find permanence in hot pulses of adrenaline when everything else is burning, burning, turning to ash. Ash heart. A faultline. A crack in the crust, thunder and the tremors echoing—quick, hold me, I need to stop these rocks collapsing, wearing away, salt and sand and somewhere here, somewhere, a trembling, miasmic, volatile heart. Right now the gulf is roaring and I need to drown it out.