Like a strange flock of migratory birds we pack into my car. It’s sometime between Christmas and New year’s. Those days that slip into meaninglessness if you don’t find something to fill them with.
We drive through towns that suggest a mass extinction of youth. Outside the entrance of a big open field, we join a bumper-to bumper line of impatient twenty-somethings. A sun flare through the windshield darkens my face and then illuminates it. The line treads forward. The car aircon taps out. A friend in the back hangs his arm out of the open window and blows smoke into the loud nothingness.
When the bags have been searched and walked to the allocated plot, I stand watching him build the tent while I hold the pegs in front of my chest like a steam punk bouquet.
Part Two
one
Night four.
I wear a white dress to ward off the heat. Passing a packet of baby wipes around the circle– a substitute for showers. We paint the wipes red with dust stuck to our faces.
The heat lands between my shoulder blades. He slaps my skin, murdering a mosquito. Scarves draped over our heads to shield our scalps from the power of the sun.
A Wedge-tailed eagle taunts a Cockatoo. In flight, I watch his smoky dark wings barricade the wind. I watch his smoky dark wings and see shards of stained glass, arms draped on the cross. I watch his dark wings spread and look out to his creation: blue hills darkening in the distance.
The first star marks the beginning of our disappearance.
two
The main stage draws a devoted crowd like an altar. Twenty-thousand pairs of bare feet sinking into the giant sheet of couch grass. Eucalyptus leaves cling to our ankles. We pass through a tunnel of bodies to reach the front row. Pilgrimage of skin grazes.
Our feet stomp the ground, once, then again. Topsoil trembles like thunder and heavy rain. Worms pulled to the surface. A moth lost in transit– purple distraction. Ochre dust suspended mid-air.
In the absence of it all: no light, no bars on our phones, no sleep.
What remains?
Breath and a shout too far away to name. We stomp the earth to summon the bass. Reaching for each other’s shoulders like an anchor. Transition from individuals with cut-up feet to an ecosystem in repair, one extended exhale.
three
I watch a girl wipe mascara-coloured tears from her cheeks. Her body there, all four limbs, ten fingers, ten toes, but only to be abandoned.
Her dance contains a thousand stories:
A woman quits her high-pressure job and flies to a foreign country; a woman escapes a warzone and assumes a new identity; a woman flees an oppressive marriage and walks into the ocean clothed.
She moves as if her heart is useless, and the dance is needed to circulate blood. Watching her is like a glowstick crack open in the dark.
I realise then that the confidence I believed I had reached was only the base camp of the true peak. Watching her it’s obvious– base and peak are as alike as one’s first unremarkable fuck and one’s first true orgasm.
In her dance, a thousand stories and, in the centre, stands mine.
Sweat rolls down the back of my neck and knees. White thin lines on red raw shoulders. Wipe my runny nose on the back of my hand and pick up a fallen branch to use as a light post in the dark. Earrings clink inside my swaying head.
Feel my heart rate rise and rise and rise.
Movement becoming more than pragmatic. More than accomplishing. Further than getting from a–b. This involves the whole alphabet. Roman numerals. Hieroglyphics. Morse code. Braille– I must touch to understand.
An old woman who had been brought back from cardiac arrest once told me that death is like taking off a tight shoe. I feel the toe, the heel, the heat under the arch. Relief from thought. Relief from thinking. Relief from mind. Thump of bass moving up and down my spine like a current.
No retreating back to the mild. No more stalling via consoling the drunk girl in the bathroom. No more hiding at the bar or leaning on the back wall. No more perceiving judgement or avoiding the gaze of others. No more half-trying. No more so-so. No more blending into the crowd, no more cut from familiar cloth.
No cloth made of shyness to conceal oneself, no cloth whatsoever.
Naked in broad daylight. The moles, stretch marks, the unplucked hair, all visible. The hourglass, or fruit bowl beside the hourglass, or cabinet holding the hourglass. The body outlined, illuminated.
four
His hands on my waistband, I close my eyes.
View-master clicks, changing in time with the beat. Kaleidoscope fragments blooming blue, yellow, red. A creek bed dried out over summer. Cracked earth splits open beneath the pulse of a Soundsystem stack. Brushing against Yam Daisies on the hike up the mountain. Chanting in the incense-filled ISCKON temple back room; above us a church bell rings a half-second late, hands raised in adoration. My Zia’s rosary-filled fist digging symbols into my spine. Feral dog barks in Krabi, Stringybark shedding strips of itself in collapse. Sweat sticks dry grass to my shins and somehow I am six, watching old women on TV fainting in church; fifteen, kissing someone who tastes like river water and sassafras; twenty-one in a paddock with floodlights and music so loud it cuts thought clean in half. Lichen harvested in a container on the outskirt of a four-wheel-drive track. We climb a dodgy ladder and crawl through an opening into the roof. Sat on a speaker in the corner while he plays to a crowd of three ski season late comers. My cold breath in front of me like an apparition. Fire blazing in the centre of my first women’s circle, boots thundering into the mud. Epiphany collapses the surety of time and place. The dance floor a surrogate church, temple, qibla, forest, a bed where we make love. A confession uttered behind a screen. A communion of disparate bodies, a hill to roll down forever. The only thing holding this film together is the drumline of the song beating under my tongue.
five
The dancefloor is more than an escape or reprieve. Like religion, it provides us with hope that there might be some place better than here.
*
The beat ellipses and the crowd stumbles back to the sleeping quarters. We lie down on the empty ground, limbs collapsed on top of each other. Lie down in the wake of our epiphanies. Earth still rumbling with the speaker’s vibration.
I part the grass and press my ear into the soil so that I can clearly hear the message the land is relaying.
