I spent the last nine days in the bush with a collection of family and friends. A party of twelve. I wrote in notebooks with bugs squashed between the pages. My feet are still black from dirt and burnt spinifex, a stubbed toe, a banged-up chin, mosquito bites itched open and bleeding—hundreds of pinpricks that have swollen to welts the size of twenty-cent pieces. Bruises and blood met most days and this song is now playing on repeat in my head:

Delia, oh Delia
Delia all my life

I spent Friday night in secret hot springs, silver fish with red eyes swimming between my thighs, owls swooping low over the water, fingers swollen and scaly, nails chipped and black. My knees ached from rock-hopping. I crawled into my swag at five in the morning, discarding a couple of moonlit tears. But I was drunk and the curlews were crying.

If I hadn’ter shot poor Delia
I’d-a had her for my wife

New friends that had materialised in the last couple of weeks disappeared again, and I thought, how do you hold on to people? How does anyone ever hold on to people? I want to keep you in my pocket. The universe knocks us into each other sideways and provides only scraps of time as fuel—it’s no wonder we all feel lonely. Social niceties are hardly worth the time they swallow, surely—let’s embrace instead like long-lost lovers after five minutes of mirth-bubbled banter.

Delia’s gone, one more round
Delia’s gone

Sometimes I want to turn off these nerve endings, these synapses cracking, these red-raw impulses and sympathies, and when we got back to Darwin I squeezed my feet into my high-heeled boots to hide my mosquito-eaten and apple-bruised legs. Just to remember how to wear them. Just to remember how it felt to teeter, to be your doll. But even then my elbows itched, my eyes were tired-swollen, my face unpainted, my manners lax and my enthusiasm low. Alcohol strips me of my ability to provide a shield for myself and I’m feeling the full force of it now, poisonous drug—nausea and the need for a cocoon, even one spun from mud and sun. Even one as remote as this.

Delia’s gone, one more round
Delia’s gone

If this were a conversation, I would end it with a kiss.

Moonlight creeps under the curtain and casts shadows on the wall of this room. Not light, but its echo. The air is thin and cold but I keep the window open anyway. I press my fingers up against the glass and watch the condensation push out from them. Tiny haloes of heat, and then they fade.

Winter ruptures my insides.

I am dragging this weight around with me, a lump of living flesh that won’t work the way it’s supposed to. Warm, soft, heavy and painful. Created in a moment of madness, like the complications of a kiss. A gasp, the quick paralysis of shock, hot tears and the crunch of bone against bitumen. Don’t watch where you’re going, girl. Tumble off head first.

I remember this girl. I’ve seen her before, half-blind and reeling, a cannonade inside her head. Is this pain or the memory of it? She’ll be back again the next night, back to the spot where she fell. She won’t be on her bike this time but still won’t look where she puts her feet. She knew before she started that it could be dangerous, but people only learn to take care after they fall, and recklessness makes her teeter.

I remember once, driving through an intersection alone late at night. A camera started flashing in the corner of my eye, through the window, bright slaps of white on my forearm gripping the wheel. My heart jumped, blood rushing to my head, and suddenly I couldn’t remember if the traffic light had been green or red, if I’d taken any notice at the time or been so caught up in the song playing, the momentum of the traffic and the smell of summer through the open windows. I kept driving, shaky, breathing quickly, left arm tingling with the memory of that flashing light, like it had stamped itself into my skin, an invisible scar.

Sometimes I think she knows she’s losing, as I watch her block me out with wine and noise, the light of a computer screen, or the hard, fleeting warmth of pills and potions. And all she wants me to do is put her in the car and drive, grip the wheel with both hands, and burn a straight line down the freeway, a straight line to wherever and ever. And I want to be able to do that too, but I have one arm bound across my chest now and it feels like paralysis, artificial inertia. Because I remember that girl; I remember how she felt back then. I remember her pleading with me, trying to convince me that it would be okay, that head first was the only way to fall. But she mistook arrogance for strength, ego for confidence, intelligence for understanding and intensity for passion. And in her moments of shock she listens when I speak. That voice that knows best—that voice in her head—pick yourself up, pick yourself up, you’re tougher than this, pick yourself up. And so we get back on the bike and ride home in the dark, whether from stubbornness or fear, it doesn’t matter. I know what to do, because I remember her curled up in the cold, I remember the smear of tears in the fine hairs of her arm—this arm, the dead weight, a limb and the light fantastic—so while she’s still numb I put a bullet in it, because I don’t want her to cry again.

It’s easy to get lost on country roads at night. After awhile, the red dots and white lines blur together. You talk to yourself, you drive too fast. The only thing between 100km/h and 130km/h is a hair in your mouth.

The last time I drove these roads was a month ago, on a warm Friday night when the sky was clear and the air was thick with insects. The high beams glanced off the ferns and the bark curled in ribbons down the trunks of ancient gums. Even in the night-time, the forest felt alive—whispering and laughing as the car sped through it. Tiny prickles of excitement ran up and down my arms. Bursting out of the heart of the concrete city and straight into the hills, the heady scent of earth and undergrowth was almost overpowering. Bush magic.

At some point the following day, I got caught on the edge of someone else’s story. Four days ago, when I drove through Toolangi, it got stuck in my throat again—a choked moment. It’s not my story; it’s not this story. It’s the corner of another story, an edge protruding from the mess that I scraped up against, that bent February out of shape.

Sometimes, when I’m driving alone down long stretches of empty road, when the moon is bright, the windows are open and the trees arch overhead, I switch off the headlights. It only takes a few seconds—just long enough for the dark to flood in, for my pupils to dilate, for the grey shadows to thicken and spread out into branches and hills as I speed by; just long enough to feel the leap in my chest, to take a sharp breath—for my senses to shift out of neutral. The adrenaline rush is like a reset button. Start again—now.

When I arrived at our property on Saturday night, there was a ring around the moon. Here, two years on, the black scales scarring the trees are wearing veils of green. I spent two days listening to my parents’ vinyl, wrestling with the dogs, studying the Malak Malak native title claim, watching the light dance across the kitchen table and sleeping for nine hours a night. I drove the tractor. I dug rocks out of the earth. I took the corner too sharply on the dirt bike and slid three metres face-first into the dust. A lizard scampered over my jeans. On Monday evening, Jethro-dog and I sat on a rock on the ridge behind the house and looked down into the forest, and I thought, if perpetually bruised shins are the highest price I pay for living this close to the edge of the world, then here they are and welcome! Perhaps that split-second glimpse into the red eye of the February dragon was enough to stop me stumbling sideways and pull the blindfold off. Perhaps I was never really wearing one. The fact is this: that for the first time since I can remember, I’m alone in the world and I feel alone, and I’ve never been so happy.

All my love affairs end in November. I don’t know whether it’s due to the alignment of the stars or the end of the school year or the fact that I’m a masochist who wants to give myself the most excruciating birthday possible, but memo: future lovers. November is high-risk territory.

One particular November, I broke up with a boy in the beach car park at Rickett’s Point. He’d already bought my birthday present but hadn’t had a chance to give it to me, so at the conclusion of my spiel he reached over to the back seat and handed me a small package. It was a notebook: royal purple, covered in hearts, and on the front of it there was a little gold-embossed quote about following your dreams.

It was obviously intended to be a bit special, and when I was eight years old I probably would have loved it, but at eighteen my writer’s quirks were rapidly becoming habits and absolutely everything about this notebook was wrong. It had coloured paper (more like card than paper), wide lines, a designated space at the top of every page for the date and the trite little quote repeated at the bottom. I can’t stand to waste paper – even if it’s horrible – and it took me ages to throw the thing out. I used it for shopping lists and scrap until moving out of home forced me to part with absolutely everything I didn’t need.

We were never a good match. I am a feminist agnostic with a major in Philosophy and English; I write stories about abused girls with illegitimate babies, gay men getting mugged in alleys, drug-taking, sex, loneliness, despair and euphoria – he is married at 24 and studying to be a minister. I heard on the grapevine he writes a Bible name, chapter and verse on the back of his hand before he plays basketball to stop himself getting angry. It always used to rain when I was out with him – every day except for the one we split – and that spring birthed some crazy storms. Sometimes I think the storms were the earth’s way of showing its displeasure. (He would probably say it was God telling him to drop the heathen. It was obviously never meant to be.)

The birthday present, however, stuck in my mind. Perhaps it comes with the territory – being picky about the words you use makes you picky about the surface upon which you place them, because as much as the words themselves are the most important part and don’t judge a book by its cover, quality stationery is all about respect. It was also my final year at school, and at Presentation Night not long afterwards, the principal presented me with a plaque, Stasiland by Anna Funder and a beautiful unruled A5 Moleskine notebook. I would probably have preferred 6mm ruled, but I decided then that my school really had understood what it was all about, just as the former boyfriend so obviously hadn’t.

One afternoon not very long ago, while shopping for books in Brunswick, I had the unexpected foresight to purchase a packet of three pocket-sized Moleskine cahiers. I dithered before buying them – I wondered when I’d get to writing in them. Back in high school, when I believed I was qualified to write what one might (loosely, very loosely) term ‘poetry’, I would swallow notebooks whole; numbering every page, filling them in as short a time as a couple of months, depending on how many free periods and unrequited loves I had. These days I choose my words more carefully. Notebooks are forever only half-full and I have more of them than I could possibly need. But for once my purchases weren’t mere indulgence: one has found a home in the pocket of my satchel and one sits permanently on the bedside table with my alarm clock and a fine blue pen. Too many nights I’ve been wrapped in the lazy haze of almost-sleep when something splutters in the corner of my mind – a spark, a little brighter than the rest – and too many times I’ve thought, “If I repeat this to myself, I’ll remember it in the morning and I won’t have to move right now.” But it doesn’t work like that. I need words on paper or the spark flickers out and the thought slides quietly away.

My crazy MA supervisor once said (although she was probably plagiarising) that if you can harness those moments between awake and asleep – the space between the conscious and the unconscious – that is where the real stories come from. I wonder what I could have found over the years if every time I’d seen that spark I’d climbed out of sleep far enough to blearily scribble half a sentence. For the last few months I’ve tried to get up early and write – to sit in the sun and find inspiration in the patterns of living ‘normally’. But there’s something about the quiet of post-midnight – a solitude you only get when everyone around you is asleep – that really unshackles my mind and gives it space to run.

When I am in love with someone, my writing takes second place. I spend my nights lying awake in a cocoon of tangled limbs instead of the cool blue light of my computer screen or an armchair with a blanket and a pen. It’s okay for a little while but not for the long term. I am not sure how to fix it. Why should writing and love be constantly in opposition? The boys with bad taste in notebooks are easy; not so those who actually matter.

Sometimes I wonder if underneath it all I already know the ending. In Coetzee’s Foe, Susan Barton asks, “Without desire how is it possible to make a story?” On page 9 of my bedside notebook in the loopy scrawl of 3am some weeks ago, it says:

I’m going to be a bag lady one day
with a trolley full of junk.