It’s been about a year since I’ve come back; I keep finding return as insistent as pulse.
I’ve been young in these hills, with cousins like siblings who all moved away and north after my Aunty died. Before the now, I took first shape here: not finite, just sharp. Moving at the speed of eight or nine, body honed by limit, then.
Today I’m here and meeting the weight and bend of this valley in muscle. It’s only about $15 to come up and in from the city. Feels like I lose more than petrol money, though—the trip always cuts so close. We move from stretch of highway through to bush roads and she’s not from here but she drives, knowing me all sore and tremble boned on the passenger side.
The timber mills out on the fringe still purge bitter burnings, and the methodist chapel a little further in still gives to dry rot. But the town hall has a new coat of paint, and so much scrub now splits suburban. I can’t seem to seek so many familiar grooves to rest my hands and this knowing is familiar, but still heavy.
When we pass the snatch of green where the banana plantation used to be, I know she knows I still know to pull off onto the shoulder and take the keys out the ignition. Sitting slow, I’m having trouble swallowing this place as priced and sold.
The air here’s so clear it almost rends. Standing now, I’m still and so, wired. I’m making the spaces between the before and the now ring louder. Waiting for the wait to loose me. Stressing how she’ll find it, and how that’ll prove. Wondering if being back will break voice, for my tongue tells here as home, but her and I have a place elsewhere that we think of as such; don’t want to fail the holding of both truths in this tensile body.
And now, we are here, and she is a few footfalls ahead listening out for the first croon and quarrel of cicada song. To move without check, her and I still have to jump fences one and two and three; timber stake and wire barbed cleave the slopes into deft parcels, though they tell me it’s now all owned by the same.
Kangaroo grass on bare leg, and I’m watching out for the fleeting of autumn crocus. The dip down to the river doesn’t come on as sharp as it did: the mark of old path still shows trace, just in gravel hush. When I was a kid and passing quicker, this ground so often slipped me onto hands and knees, grazing skin from skin, and Is it safe? she now wants to know Are we okay here? and I want to ask her the same, stepping foot through paddock turned young and thick grassland from years without cut or slash.
This last light feels like it sticks for hours two, or three, though it’ll soon give sink. What I’m waiting for won’t come until dark does, and I’ve known this since I was a kid looking up and out for the quick indigo slippage; by now, this sky surely knows me by the throat.
Edging the ease of slope is the river, holding with lap and drain and plenty. After drought, the current would give new pull—baring ridge and root and sky—and I’d let sink, skin all promise, light cut with amber. After rain, it’d fall clear the whole way down, and me and the boys from over the hill would let the sun slice our bathing backs and bellies golden.
The time of year that it is, it’s too cold to swim. This thought does not come easy: being back and around these hills stings eager with the thinking back. Here, where my body turned fraught with why the year I happened soft and terrible, and I wasn’t allowed to swim without a shirt anymore. Here, where—dropping quiet and heavy into the stream—I was stayed and real as stone. Here, now, and still learning how to speak all this. How to call myself. How to know the bound space over breath as true.
She follows me following old step right down to the bank. Mud so slick, but the sandpaper fig stays keeping hold in and amongst it; this tree’s been throwing shade on body sick with new becoming since I first sought space here.
She’s taught me that the etymology of my form finds root in bodi meaning trunk, and the familiar knot and breach of this bark catches in recall.
Before the run and return, I was here and sitting all quiet underneath—rough tongued with coming summer storm, or drying sweat from swelter. I can’t know if anybody else came to feel their spine on this bark like I did mine. Branches in heavy witness with fruit, but I won’t pick any. Careful in taking something more than this body from these lands.
The soil by the river has always been too red with clay for the growing of most other fruit—we’d have to pick those up from the markets on Sunday mornings. Flesh decays quickly, in the summer especially. I learnt fast: if you swallow immediate, the taste won’t linger.
One particular January stands in remembering: swimming in careful sidestep of heat’s fervour and so practically gilled by the time the cool dropped. Mouth sweet with stone fruit that season. Bodies even softer than mine that gave under thumb pressure. Transmutable. It was the most tender refusal, and I had flesh envy.
It’s been a long while since I drew back and onto my Aunty’s front verandah. She was broad shouldered and tough with work and time and she loved the birds with a rare gentle. They were the only creatures she’d let make her breathless—that’s what stilled her. It’s been a long while since I watched her watch them.
When she learnt of the sickness that was to stay and later take, she began to speak of her favourites. She held the sparrows especially close: flighty and supple and high aloft. Things fade from sight so easy. So much made possible in distance.
The edges of this place blurring in flood, or the song stripped back by the raze of the dry: a child, I used to wake before dawn, knocked in startle. Now though, I know that much of here remains; I’ve seen it sing through ash and return from the flash and tumble of the wet season. This ground keeping fast underfoot—turnings immemorial through care and through season.
So, this place still holds space, then. Space for the river, and its beckon. For the fruit just before rot, and for feathers and fine bone.
Space for hazy body, too. And I know this because I am here with mine, and hers.
I catch it in ready hearing before I see it: clipped trill and fleet cry. Overhead, a sudden double dark. There’s new texture thick and skyward. Feels like I am learning this place back in new thrills I remember from old. The creatures above us are rust-furred and winged and they take flight all membrane and leathery span. Flying foxes migrate all year round, in seek of a feed. The flock is so quick but stretches incredible in untold enormity. Sight raves and stuns and I still can’t scope the reach, though I’m taller—and so, closer—than I’ve ever been. I wonder if she’s taking silent fright beside me: she fears the sea, and the fruit bats move in devastating tides.
I can sink into this sensation so easy; I can pick familiar out of the surge; I’ve been seeing this most years since I was small, been wanting after the immensity to take me out of my own skin. These are the skies that storied me and as now, she knows them just in brief. She’s turning quiet and slow, though—she’s turning towards.
*
I’m like the flying foxes in that I’ve been going from this place a long time, and I’ll leave soon again. But I want all this to come back to—if just in recollect—for what are these bodies, if not the space where distant points catch hold?