The sky has been crackling and sparking all evening. I am supposed to be writing but instead I am thinking about the new year, about sticky days with champagne and sweat and lessons on shattering crystal. About seawater in my jeans at five in the morning, numb fingers and an unexpected kiss. About swimming naked across a river to watch the lightning dance through the cloud-mountains for hours, a full moon high in the sky behind me, above the blue-black and grey silhouettes that make up the midnight world. We sat on a mudpan, a field so flat and wide and dry that the horizon looked an arm’s length away. The sky was alive, but the world was silent. Silence that wasn’t silence. Bush silence: the whir and chirp of the night insects and the semitone interval drop of a boobook. The rain is coming, they murmured. The earth is singing for it.

Music has colour, the same way words have mood. It’s like an extension of the sound, another dimension to the experience. A veil through which you can see the world. A veil just behind your eyes. Tonight’s song is the colour of light through rainwater, and I’m never sure if this is love or sadness, but it’s not so much an ache these days, more of a hum. Not quite disillusionment, but its sister, perhaps. And again, again, this mind of mine, despite all its stretching out, it always seems to circle back to solitude, back to the self, still fascinated by the experience of being alone, of thinking alone, of knowing alone—and this song that I can’t stop playing.

Thunder is the sound that trembling would make, in the hot dark, the sparse ground radiating from a sunken sun. Something is trembling now, and it’s coming towards this house, towards me, a rising crescendo. At 3am, the storm hits. The rain pounds, the sky heaves, and there is so much water. It pours down the window pane, rivers against the trunks of trees, and I am swamped by the sheer weight of the sound, each rivulet singing a memory, splashing against a melody, the ground drinking greedily. It fills my head, drenching my heart, like it may as well be pouring out of the walls around me, that rainsong, over and over and over, skin prickling even now as the music ripples around it, and it’s all I can do to throw my head back and be swept along because simple sounds have never changed the world quite like this. I am submerged in it. I am consumed by it.

And now it’s 4:29am. I’ve hit ‘play’ thirty-eight times tonight. I see bare legs, smooth knees, the dim light of my laptop on the bedsheets, slight black scuff marks from shoeless household wanderings, and I am bone dry but I am swamped.

It’s 4:29am and that’s the first glow of fresh dawn through the bamboo.

It’s 4:29am and the leaves outside are dripping, still.

It’s 4:29am and I am, I am, I am.

Or of oranges plucked from a tree at 3am, spitting rain, tram tracks and electric lights, and another woman’s bed. (I never told him, but I found myself then.)

Or of those who didn’t want to talk about it but preferred instead to talk it out; who wanted to hear the words expelled from my mouth, staccato blasphemy: ‘Fuck, suck, cock, cunt. Does that make you feel good?’ (Face forward, kitten. I want you on your knees.)

And there again—bee-stings on my cheeks and things rough to touch, like skin on bark, a man’s chin inside my thigh—a dirty angel face, a beautiful beast. (When I draw, it’s trees: haunted, leaf-bare skeletons, curling branches. There’s more in my head, but that’s what comes out.)

And then there were those stories that made girls like me believe that love and sex made you feel the same way; that a declaration changed the world; that a couple of words were comparable to being pressed up against a wall with a tongue in your ear. Or limbs and fingers and hair, gasps and laughter, knotted together in damp sheets. Or binding someone’s arms because that’s what they asked for. Or coming home after a sleepless night with sore breasts and bruising between your legs, but still so desperately wanting, wanting, wanting, and not able to touch yourself for the pain.

Or was an orgasm the moment when the universe shifted? An escape from yourself; an embrace of yourself. A little bit of another person. A little death; a little life. Rebellion. (Touch me, and we’ll see.)

And every time I think I could make a choice to last a lifetime, I grow some more, learn some more, see the possibilities expand. And sometimes I think I might find enough comfort in a glass of red wine and a drunken stumble into a stranger’s arms—maybe a little taller, a little older, a little further away—because after all, it’s mostly chemistry, and everyone looks good in the dark. But even when it means nothing, it carries weight. Perhaps no more than the heat of your breath—just enough to maintain the push—but weight, nevertheless. Minute momentum.

So I won’t close myself off and I won’t hide, but one way or another I know what I’ll be left with, which is exactly the same as I’ve always had: the world in my head, an open window, and a cool breeze on swollen skin.

Before that: I found precisely eleven post-it notes in my copy of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Eight of them were blank. The ninth, tenth and eleventh read, in this order:

1. The picture being seen,
2. the feather falling—
3. hiding oneself.

Before that: the silence of snow was unexpected. Surely something that so changes the shape of the world should come crashing in, clamouring, announcing its arrival triumphantly, flamboyantly? Thunderstorms break out the symphony. Thunderstorms are the narcissists, the attention-seekers, the drama students hoping to shock and slander and find notoriety in a quickened heartbeat. Snow is the solitary artist in the basement, meticulous and meditative, painting perfect miniatures. The silence of snow was unexpected and eerie. My skin craved salt in the water and sunlight that would burn and blister.

Before that: my hands smelt like soap and the soap-on-skin smelt like being in the bush when I was twelve, in hand-me-down cargo pants and a black singlet top. It rained most of the night. We walked without torches, hoping the adults wouldn’t catch us. I wore a blue jumper under my coat. We sat on the wobbling wooden bench in the mess tent, listening to the rain on the canvas, and I ended up with a mouthful of your warm tongue.

Before that: I was skinny-legged and daydreamy, too tall for my age, too smart to sit on my hands in class, too shy to know what to say to their faces, holding both hands full of dewy bluebells from under the plum tree in my grandmother’s garden. My Dad nailed planks of wood to the arching branches of the fig tree and I sat among the mosquitoes and turned myself inside out. I wanted fairytales, and never weddings.

Before that: my mother.

Before that: dust.

There is a fast-flowing river, heading for the ocean, and the tributaries are growing. Other people’s faith is both buoyant and a burden. My own faith is caged but still flutters wildly. I’ll do one quick revolution—a somersault, a pause—and smile perhaps, then catch the current again.

The lights are off. The tree in the front garden is dead, but the one out the back is not. Dripping birch branches glisten in the wet dark. The power lines and commission flats are silhouetted on blue-black sky. Rain hammers on the roof. The dog sulks, curled up in the corner of the couch.

2.

I dreamt crocodile on Sunday night. A four-metre brute lunged for my throat and I jerked awake, heart pounding, breathing rapidly. Cadie says pay attention.

3.

My last trip home from Brisbane was late summer. At the tail of the plane there was only darkness. In front, pale gold and blue was bathed in cloud, and we raced towards it with the night chasing after us. It was like flying through perpetual dusk—Venus rising hung static in the sky and the grey city we were leaving behind was swallowed by shadow. For a moment, it really felt like edge of the earth.

4.

hey you, gender nectar,
in a tangle, sugar

it’s more than silt
and a lukewarm kiss—
sometimes there’s a hum
a hum
a hum