Alone & Connected

It’s mid 2016 and I’m in the middle of the central Australia desert. It’s 1,200 kilometres between towns. The winter is coming. It’s a few days before my birthday.

We pull off the road to make camp for the night. We gather some wood, make a fire, cook and by the time we’re eating it’s dark. We roll out the swags under moonlight, but I’m a bit irritated so I first flick on the torch, before Karla, my partner, mutters something that reminds me of the moon. After some negotiation we lay our swags in a line with our heads together, rather than laying side by side.

I woke entwined with her heart. Ourselves indistinguishable. A sense of wholeness, a deep satisfaction, I’d rarely felt. It was before dawn, the winter was coming and I could feel the cold desert air on my skin. I look up at the night sky of stars. Then, falling back, I recognise whose heart it is: hers.

Instantly, my heart flips to an intense cutting pain.

I don’t understand why.

All my mind can do is grab: But, she didn’t want to come?!

It is spirit and flesh. Love and fear. Belonging and not belonging. I sensed it would happen here, in the expanse of the desert, on the most remote road. I am touching creation. 

We keep going.

On the evening of my birthday, we reach the Kimberley.

We stop a little early and Karla makes me a raw chocolate cake and covers it in hazelnuts, my favourite, that reminds me I never seem to eat them anymore. She asks me what I want for my birthday dinner and I ask for burritos.

I feel a sense of in between, like the beginning and the end of a tale are laid out in vivid technicolour, like the stars in the desert’s night sky, and the middle is empty, like it was yet to be fleshed out. I could see the signs of happiness all around me, but I couldn’t feel it yet.

In the next few days I walk slowly on the same paths I’d walked in my childhood. And parts of me start to wake up again. The parts of me I didn’t talked with much anymore, that’d gone quiet at the end of a line of connection inside myself. The landscape is like a mirror, reflecting me, asking me to come home to my flesh.

The middle is being fleshed out.

We stop again. We’re at a women’s gathering in the Kimberley.

I am sitting watching hundreds of black cockatoos flying in to roost in the nearby trees. The lore holder walks over and speaks the words for what I sense, “Black cockatoos. It means it’s gonna rain. It might be a few days but it’ll rain”, they say.

After a moment, I feel compelled to the passenger side of the car. I walk to the car and open the door. I click open the glove box and pull out my mobile phone. I turn it on. We’ve been out of reception.

Just as the butterfly flaps its wings and creates a thunderstorm a world away, I see a voicemail. I look at the number: it’s the States. I feel like I know who this is.

After a moment, I feel an almost undetectable state of dread. A moment later, I feel like I begin to spin.

I don’t want to do this here, I think to myself.

Not with the women.

I’ll listen when I am alone.

I put the phone back in the glove box.

The next day, Karla and I stop on the outskirts of a town, in a grassy park next to a lake. We finish our usual wraps for lunch and I gather myself, pick up my phone and walk towards some rocks near the shore. I pick a sturdy looking rock. I sit down overlooking the lake with my bare feet on the earth.

“Black cockatoos. It means it’s gonna rain. It might be a few days but it’ll rain”.

I dial my voicemail.

“Where are you?!”, she asks. She is anxious and emotional.

She is under the impression I would be in the northern hemisphere by now.

I didn’t say I was coming, or do anything to give that impression. But the lore of nature is exact, for it is just a few days since I woke entwined with her heart.

I call her back. But it’s her voicemail. It is like a gantlet of an answering machine message. The message envelops me like a thick, invisible fluid far more viscous than any air I’d felt before. It curls around me from all sides, the words are jabbing, luring me into survival mode. I can feel the tunnel my nervous system wants to walk down into the dark.

This is not what I need right now.

No! This needs connection.

It needs a conversation.

Then the voicemail message ends.

I do what I can.

I leave a message.

“You haven’t lost me”, I say, responding as genuinely as I can to the tone I felt in her voice. “I’m coming back”, but as I hear those words leave my mouth I don’t believe what I’ve just said.

Now, a day or two later, I am back at camp in The Kimberley with the women.

“Black cockatoos. It means it’s gonna rain. It might be a few days but it’ll rain”.

I am tending the fire. It’s an hour before dawn. I am giving everything I feel to the fire. I am giving her the pain. The pain I have carried with me and not been able to let go of. The moon is getting close to the horizon. She is full. The stars have faded except for one, the morning star.

Now, the moon is moving faster, she is nearing her final arc around the earth. It’s happening now. I stand up, put my back to the fire and walk towards her. I plant my bare feet in the dirt. I dig my legs deep into the earth and I take my eyes to meet the moon. I am open and so is she. I stare into her. I am drawn with every cell of my being to say:

“Enough.”

“No more.”

“No!”.

For a moment I am speaking with him. But then, I drop deep into water and I am speaking with her.

Peacefully, I am tending the fire. The morning star has faded, the moon subsided and the day has broken into light.