11. Broomerang

How about I write a diary on my computer and see what comes? Because my fingers talk faster than my mind. Because I’m in a pivotal time of my life in which there will always be a before and after.

I put on the Landlord’s polarised sunglasses and skirt the old veggie patch, avoiding the still vicious glare coming from the blue half of the sky. I look to the cloudlike mountains about the roofline. High up, right above our heads, on the edge of the mountains, the clouds become lighter. They’re finer. I’m in awe to see a small, harmless crack of lighting go across the finer clouds and blue sky. I’m reminded of how euphoric and assured my mind feels.

Sometimes I close my eyes and feel like I’m still floating. 

I could be seeing all sorts of things.

A picture in Beyond the Lattice (by Susan Sickert): a bungalow on the corner of Stewart and Walcott Street, just down the road, where a wealthy white family pose on the steps and to the side stands a middle-aged indigenous woman. She leans against the lattice, her head downcast and face in a frown. Whereas the family are bright in white, wearing the sombre expression of the day. If I had been born in those days as this girl I am now, I wonder, would I have been like this too?

—

When I first came to the house, when I was cleaning the house, securing my place, goosebumps came when I hung in the corner of the house the Landlord had indicated. There I swept the floor, spot cleaned the grime of the wall, and in the corner of the corner, below the lattice on the verandah, I placed the plastic green chair from my upstairs room and heard myself say aloud, ‘You can sit and think about what you’re doing here.’ 
Since living here, that corner of the house seems flat to me – unexciting, uninviting. I don’t feel this spirit there anymore. There are no goose bumps, there is no sense of being watched. Still at night time when I come down the stairs to the bathroom, I scare myself with ideas. 
Would I have felt this had he not asked if I felt the presence of spirit? 

All these different male figures. And different conversations with these male figures showing me—this younger girl absorbing the information and mulling over what to pick, what to choose, and what to throw away—different ways to approach and live life.
Are spirits known in this town because of so much disruption? This history is not the romance of the mainstream novels we read. The reality was ugly, with conflict rife amongst the racism, segregation, bad working conditions and slavery. All the male figures tell me of the spirits. To what these male figures tell me, I nod and make noises every so often, but for the most part, I make up my own mind. 

—

When I was cleaning the walls of the room Rob is to stay in, the walls were trying to tell me stories. Because there’s a story in this house and I won’t move on until it’s written.

—

We’re in the kitchen of Broomerang talking about how there is one soul and all of us here right now are an incarnation of our one soul, influenced by gender, family, country, time, etc. 
Is this soul eternal? Or does it get to a point where we go to different places.

—

Dogma. The dogma of language.

Already I’m the villain (but I’m not trying to capitalise on this). I’m the Queen (learning as I go). I’m setting a basis for a household that flows, a household that is equal and respectful. To create this environment will not be easy. Sometimes there will come people who aren’t on the same path, people who don’t hold similar values. Sometimes there will be people who are not living the same life. Like with O. We are on two different journeys and at different stages on those separate journeys, and it is here at Broomerang we meet. And in this meeting, with me as the villain and me as Queen, I note that we are not in competition. And I commit to leaving the drunken, condescending text messages in 2016. For this tone and act of aggression will not be tolerated under my rule. Such behaviour will not set the parameters of our home. 

—

O cleans his room. Liv and Tom sit at the outdoor bench—Liv reading and Tom on his computer. I walk the stage stick the landlord gave me through the house. The smoke floats, lingering and dancing with the rays of late afternoon through the louvres. The hanging leaves of the vine on the verandah turn gold with the light. In two days the house has begun its transformation—with my reign of full creative freedom the placement of artwork and furniture are integral. 

I want to spread my wings, I want to expand, and I want to meet people.

—

O: First I liked him and now I believe his understanding of the law of attraction needs to grow to truly see what we attract into our lives. Maybe I’ve come into his life to challenge him? And him me. 

O lacks awareness. He doesn’t know how to read situations and how to monitor appropriate behaviour. 

O still tiptoes around me. And it’s where I want him to be. I haven’t forgiven him and when I’m upset with someone, I ignore them until I invite them to Lachlan’s BBQ at the Old Croc Park as a reliable sidekick who isn’t a couple. 

I come through the gate and Rob’s unpacking his grey, shining, new Toyota Landcruiser. It’s not long before we’re discussing the problem with race relations. How the problem may very well lie in how we see this problem. The fact that we see it as a problem. That we may be the problem. 

—

We chuck a uey at the roundabout and come back to what we think is the entrance to the Old Croc Park. We’re standing at the gate when an older white AWD flies in and slams to a halt near us. Richard comes out with lopsided glasses and sweat plastered across a creased forehead. He tells us he’d spent the day running around starting to organise his new home: the old tin shed of the abandoned Croc Park. 
Rob and I look to the shed, Richard ’s new home. This is a part of history, I tell Rob. 
Nah, Rob disagrees, it’s just an old shed. 
In the old tin shed there’s an age range from bored teenagers to respectable elders. We, the house, are seated on camping chairs, drinking our wine alone. I walk over to Rob, who has returned from a tour of the park led by Lachlan, and he tells me that he saw crocodiles, real crocodiles, here in the park. And, he further shares, Lachlan’s mum confirmed that this tin shed is special because it’s part of Broome history, taken from another building in town by Captain Ansell Gregory.
Out in the dark of the park, we walk through the overgrown weeds of the old paths. Rob searches for the cages still housing crocodiles. We stop to a crashing sound to our right. An old wire fence separates us from a crocodile hanging off a piece of blue string, his mouth open, still as the night. I am told their brains are the size of the join of a finger. We take out phones and take photos that do no justice to what we are amongst. 

The Sunday quiet of our house. We sit in different spots doing our separate concentrations in silence. I clean the back room ready for a new body. I eat too much. I fall asleep on the daybed reading the DaVinci Code. I float in the pool. This is the life I yearned. I am happy in this moment, right here, right now, in a time of non-writing, a time of experiencing. 

—

I take greatest sanctuary, whether it be physically or emotionally or spiritually, in the concept of being entirely alone.

—

The DaVinci Code: ‘The Catholic Inquisition published the book that arguably could be called the most blood-soaked publication in human history. Malleus Maleficarum or The Witches’ Hammer – indoctrinated the world to ‘the dangers of freethinking women’ and instructed the clergy how to locate, torture and destroy them. Those deemed ‘witches’ by the Church included all female scholars, priestesses, gypsies, mystics, nature lovers, herb gatherers and any women ‘suspiciously attuned to the natural world…during three hundred years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women.’

Today at work, Alex mentions that Kununurra have lost their Kmart or Target or whatever it was that gave them a cheap department store. To the rest of the team, this is an outrage. Kellie tells how Broome could have a surviving Kmart and Target. 
But Broome is so isolated, what about the waste, what about the production? I wonder. How does the world not see this? 

—

Here I am, early in my journey, worrying about O telling people bad things behind my back. Yet, there is power in overcoming these fears. There is power in being a good person. A good person whose gestures come from a good place where they’re not caught up in the fear of judgment. Because the hardest part of this life? It’s sharing it with others. It’s caring what others’ think. It’s being sensitive to others’ emotions. For here in this life, in this realm, I cannot tell people my thoughts like they are correct. My thoughts are not correct. They are my thoughts. And I don’t have the answer; my thoughts evolve. But I’ll tell you a secret: I know something. I know there is more. And I know this, all this, is meaningless. 

Last night we went to Greg’s Astro-intro out near the New Croc Park. Richard was there, drinking beer and speaking loudly without consideration to the volume of his swearing when around children. Richard makes me sassy, sarcastic and quick to reply. Because he can handle it. Because he has the intelligence of a really intelligent person. 
We sit on the stands, family and friends playing with the telescopes before us. Richard is drinking another beer when I tell him that he’s been talking so mathematically or scientifically to me and most of what he had been saying went over my head. Because my mind doesn’t work like this, I tell him. To me, science doesn’t answer the why. It is too practical a way and practicality isn’t the answer. Because we are, what, orbiting around one star out of the 2000 million that are in our galaxy. There is so much more, I reason. Because I know this. I saw this, I think. 
We’re back at the telescopes and night has fallen. Richard brings up the topic of time with Greg. Or had Greg brought up the topic of time with Richard? Whichever way it went, I stood between them; two great minds in conversation. Richard refers to a theory of Einstein’s, whereas Greg challenges Einstein’s theories. Meanwhile I understand where Greg is coming from through his suggestion that there are other ideas and perspectives to consider. Because this is what I’m coming to understand, what I’m coming to think. And yet when I would come to voice this, I give half sentences. My ideas, spoken aloud, feel mediocre.
On leaving, Richard drives with haste, slamming to a halt, disappearing into a cloud of dust. He opens and closes the gate so fast that not a particle of dust is left behind when we approach the gate mere moments later. Liv is a slow driver. Cautious, actually. Liv is a cautious driver.

Marelle and Rob are here. In the evenings we sit in the kitchen and talk. Tonight, there’s the burning sound of Rob’s vape. We are a slight stoned, talking about the parallels of time. How people can come to later lives and once they complete these later lives we can go to another parallel. Rob describes an old soul as someone who can walk into a room and assess the situation easily. I know I’m an old soul. And I’m starting to believe I’m in a later life. I can’t unsee what I know. But I can share it in the way that Greg talks at his Star Shows, that way that appeals to the masses: simple and slow.

—

As a house-group we go to the beach. There are three cyclones off the coast with only the waves felt here. I swim alone, floating until one too many waves barrel me over. 
Back at home, eating take-away, we drink beers in the kitchen. Lachlan comes around in his skinny jeans and cons. He is well-spoken and polite, telling us the town talk on building up the sand dunes with sandbags and creating cafes along the beachfront. Lachlan tells us of planning proposals to put nine storey buildings on the site of the Old Croc Park. He tells of projections of Broome being a 100,000 person city overflowing with ugly buildings, selfish people, mining and the Kmart life (my interpretation). 
I think to the future generations and no words can describe how much our selfishness bewilders me. I’m becoming repulsed by this system of money, with the extent to my resentment meaning there’s no going back. But, still, at this point, I must accept this way of life. I must learn jewellery. I must tell stories. I want to tell stories. I want to capture the absurd moments and share them for others to learn. No, I won’t go into teaching. One day, one day I will teach, sure. But no, I won’t go into teaching. Not with the current curriculum. 
First, I need to learn. 

‘Oh God, get off the road,’ Liv says, her body close to the steering wheel, her shoulders hunched over. Liv wants to be a documentary filmmaker; she works closely with indigenous kids. Yet it was the indigenous she was telling to get off the road. To look at the world with the white lens our white culture has imposed. 

—

An afternoon at the Old Croc Park. Richard (of the Old Croc Park, Swimmer of the Night) offers a beer straight up and I accept it straight up. When he tells me about his job in the simplest of terms—something about software and consolidating and making it easier and something else—he asks the same question in return. I could be good friends with Richard for it’s someone like him that I feel most comfortable, retaliating in conversation where my wild ideas are understood and debated. But it is absolutely entirely nothing physical.

Sunday the eleventh of April, two-thousand and twenty-one. Another night in the kitchen. Intelligence and a combination of interests are present. Greg’s there with his white hair and beard so long and straight. His sentences move through slow breaths and when someone says something he doesn’t necessarily agree with, it seems he replies with ‘Okay.’
Rob asks me, ‘Did you know there’s a ghost in this house?’ 
I did, I tell him.
The conversation heads in this direction. 
O pipes up his rudimentary understandings. To ghosts he says, ‘I think they only exist by you believing that they exist,’ or something less insightful but basically calling bullshit to the whole concept. 
O asks Greg what he thinks. 
I watch the interaction and decide with certainty that O clearly isn’t a great judge of character. 
Through slow breaths, Greg responds to O with talk on spirits and lives being trapped. He mentions reincarnation. 
But my understanding is we keep going in reincarnation. To different places. Then a new thought strikes: maybe a ghost can go forward or backward between lives. Maybe we can rewrite history. I propose this idea through questions to Greg, ‘Do you think lives can only go forward, or can we go backward too?’
This conversation led to another conversation where Rob the believer told a story about a ghost at his old house. This story brought more unprecedented opinions from O, who spoke like he had a startling new prophecy: ‘You see for me I believe we just need to live in the present moment.’ 
Nobody much responds, we already know this. 
‘That’s my belief, don’t think about all these things about death, just live in the present.’
‘But maybe sometimes people’s present moment makes them think about these things,’ I offer O.
‘Don’t need to be all worried about death,’ O says again, this time with a smile and waving hand movements. ‘Just the present moment. For me, this is what we need to do. Don’t be worried about death.’
‘But you’re saying death like it’s a negative thing,’ I argue.
‘Look I’m just saying what I believe okay.’
But what O believes doesn’t make sense because he misses the entire point, I believe. Here I am, in the present, placed with someone who triggers me so violently that I don’t know how to approach the whole situation of having him in our home. I keep biting my tongue in lieu of a reaction, or should I calmly explain my view? Of course the latter is most practical no matter how you look at it. And yet I find the latter challenging. 
Rob goes to the fridge to have some of his tiramisu, but it’s all gone. 
That morning when I woke up, I saw the empty tiramisu container on top of the bin. The night before, O had stayed up beyond the rest of the house, smoking joints, drinking beer and playing his music loudly until Marelle asked him to turn it down. Now, sitting there in the kitchen, O, Marelle and I all deny eating Rob’s tiramisu. Rob jokingly comments that the absent and fervent vegan, Liv, who is in her room, ate his tiramisu. 
‘O ate it,’ I accidently say.
‘But he said he didn’t,’ Greg calmly says.
Listen, Greg, sometimes a woman’s understanding is more informed than that of a man because she sees different viewpoints, sometimes all at the same time. To me, it’s not hard to work out who ate the tiramisu. And as meaningless as this situation remains, it only compels me to face this problem with O.

Whenever there’s talk of femininity, I feel the band of women around me. I know that only we can fully comprehend just how much power we hold.

—

This spirit. I want him to know I’ve been human too. That he is not alone. That I care.

—

Still I think of the mass. About how systems will be threatened, how change will be inevitable. I dream of more people questioning, like we do here in the kitchen. I think of writing for the mass in undertones to which they could relate. I want to share an ability to go beyond ourselves. Go far enough to see the bigger picture of humanity’s sicknesses. And for that we need the female’s nurture. 

—

Going into work with sweat soaked skin and hair in the same place on my head—curly or dirty I can’t decide. I wear sleeves to hide my underarm hair and while I don’t care what people think, still I see their shooting looks. I decide: first I can learn all I can about the process, production and intricacy of jewellery. Then I can blaze a trail by challenging general expectations of how retail assistants should act.

—

Time passes and routines form. I don’t put pen to paper, I barely stretch my fingers over the keyboard. There are weeks’ worth of notes I wanted to take. Notes that will be irrelevant. Notes that could lead to bigger stories. 

When I come to Richard’s, I greet Agro although Richard never greets Agro. But I do, of course I do. And Agro greets me too. And when I’d first met Romeo, oh dear Romeo, he asked if it was me he overheard in conversation with Richard at Greg’s Family and Friends Star Night. 
‘Ahhhh,’ I pondered. ‘Dunno, might’ve been. What were we talking about?’
‘You were saying that you talk to animals and they talk back to you.’
‘Ahhhh, sounds like something I could’ve said,’ I think back. ‘And kinda sounds like the sort of chat I have with Richard —he probably commented that he never talks to animals and that had me flabbergasted.’ 

—

With Richard, I see my sass and I swim in it. I like it. He is a friend. He is 52. He can hold many forms of conversation and I can argue with him. In saying that, it’s when I don’t care what people think that they seem to love me most, which I should learn from. (Still I care what strangers think more than I care about what I think of myself. You may be deceived by how vivacious and outspoken I can be in person but really, it’s best I keep much of my voice to myself. Because it’s not always nice.)

—

On a Saturday afternoon I’m at the Old Croc Park, sanding, and Lachlan comes by. He tells me the door is jarrah and that his parents salvaged it from a factory that was being demolished in Perth. 
Now the desk, so precious and fine, is in the boot of Richard’s old white AWD and is being driven like a madman through the park. 
It took me a week to create this desk. My future. 

This morning I decided I would be early to work; enough time to comfortably get changed and assess my presentation as I think I should assess it. Instead I get comfortable at my desk, and I cook up eggs and mushrooms and I’m racing around and around and I’m getting shitty because I don’t want to spend all these hours at work. Although I don’t hate work. No, I don’t hate it at all. I like having purpose in my days. But I’m going through some sort of transitional phase as I work out how to execute my beliefs so I’m not offensive or passionate or sassy like I am with Richard of the Croc Park Swimmer of the Night. I’m realising too, that while I once thought work best in the mornings it is actually best in the afternoons. Because in the mornings I like to write. In the mornings I like that time with Sarah. And when I’m setting up jewellery, watching my arm go into the cabinets, I think about a day when I have so much more knowledge of jewellery inside of me that it complements my writing because I’m spending a few hours a day meditating while creating. But I’m not meditating right now, I’m talking with people around and around and I’m distracting myself until I catch myself. 
Be positive. 
This whole work situation, my whole life, all my memories and all my beliefs, they rely on me being positive. Positive because I want to learn. Positive because I want to grow. And to grow I must learn and to learn takes time, failures, dedication and moments when you want to throw it all away. But instead you push on in the hope that one day, in time, it will all pay off. So I have to be positive right here right now.

Go with confidence away from being a product of society.

—

How precious this one life is. How emotional it makes me.

—

My friend Richard and his intelligent company. Already he knows me so well that it scares me. It pushes me away. Because I don’t want him to know me too well. I don’t want him to fall in love with me.

—

I’m so aware of other people and yet I always forget how other people can observe me in return.

—

The spirit isn’t in the house at the moment. Yet there is presence. I don’t know why up every single step to my room my knees creak. Never have I ever stepped up one of these stairs without each knee creaking. 

Bruce is talking about the diamonds and crystals in the rocks of the islands: ‘my old people they tell me that one day I do what I want with them.’ When Bruce tells of the bigger patches of stones he says, ‘Big mob of them.’ He roars with laughter when I tell him he can deliver the gems and that I’ll run away with them.

—

In the night I wake to the light of the moon coming through the palm trees and window. When I go to the toilet, I put on the light (the first night I had gone alone to the toilet, I had felt fear/something but I haven’t felt this since. Instead, with acknowledging the spirit, I’ve felt sadness and hurt and a great desire of not wanting to make him feel uncomfortable in his own home). After the toilet, up the creaky stairs I return to my room and switch off my light. But still from outside there’s a bright light. Standing at the wall of windows, I squint in search. The light comes from where the bikes are. I move around, duck around, dance around, looking at the light from different angles, thinking it could be a reflection. But it’s not a reflection. It’s too bright and it’s too consistently bright. I work it out to be my bike light, still on, after I’d put it there in the afternoon with my handlebars facing toward my bedroom. 
In the morning, I tip toe over the dewy grass to check the light, which is off. I turn it on to see the difference and yes, it’s definitely off.

I slept peacefully through the night, as I had done the night before. The time of the bike light is already mismuddle. When I stir from my deep sleep, I’m on my back in the middle of the bed with dreams light and kind. 
Last night around the kitchen we had come to talk of the ghost again. Liv recounted a story of Rob coming home from one of his men’s breakfasts, where he had been told tales of this ghost—there are many people of Broome who have been involved in this house. They (of the men’s breakfasts) say he isn’t the nicest of ghosts, that he is a bit of a larrikin ghost. This might explain the landlord’s description of him, the ghost, coming to the house when the house is more in turbulence, as it had been prior to us moving in. He, the ghost, was a heavy drinker, probably. If this ghost was a larrikin, I don’t think he was a bad person. Instead, he would have been a lost person, a misplaced person, and/or an angry person. After all, life would have been tough so how can we, from our 21st century appliances, judge that. 
Isn’t it funny how my imagination gives me a white character when there’s a high chance that the ghost is not of European descent?
I share this idea, but Tom and Pippa don’t believe in ghosts. They aren’t “spiritually” inclined. Whereas I’m curious to see if the ghost—Graham? Kohei?—makes himself known. For it’s his house too. And maybe we’re living in parallel worlds. So come Graham, come Kohei, you can join us, but if you do, I want you to think about why you’re here and if you want to stay, what is it you need to complete? What makes you caught between worlds? And tell me, ghost, why do I feel so sad when I think of you? Why do you make me want to cry? I don’t feel haunted, I don’t fear, I feel sadness.

Last night at the Roey I got talking to some other Aboriginal blokes. Like those in Fitzroy Crossing, they made a comment on how I get along well with blackfellas. It’s in the humour.

—

Waking Sunday morning after an early night is heavenly. I drink an iced calendula and liquorice tea and read The Boy on the Mish. It’s Anzac day. I think of their service. I also think of everyone through history and what has been sacrificed. But who can I talk to about these things? Being so politically correct is tiring, particularly when people who are caught in themselves and their immediate surroundings cannot see the bigger vision.

—

The Italian’s note is sweet, like a child’s: Dearest Sarah. Hear are some things for you. Some books to read, sage for new home, some hand crème to help you when you get those irritation. My favourite chocolate that have love proverbs inside and a film to catch that beautiful land your in. Thankyou for being you and awakening the side of that I have kept away. I hope over time more beautiful things shall come to surface. 

—

Last year, as I sat drawing pictures and dreaming of what I’d want, I’d put community. About coming together at nights.

—

I call Dad and he asks where I am.

It's my Friday on a Wednesday and we go to the moon markets. They are the first markets of the season and there are lots and lots of people there. We sit on the overly green grass with average vegetable noodles that I eat too quickly. As the supermoon rises it is big and squished, burning red and staring straight at us, the phones come out. Shame, for a phone screen that will never do the rising moon’s natural beauty justice.

—

I wake early in the morning, about 5:45, my new natural hour. There are regrets. There are messages I had ignored because I was stoned. Stoned, thinking on time, time and time again. How long this life ahead of me scares me. Yearning for a mentor or guide to help tap into my abilities. 

—

It takes me time to write emails as it’s harder to write short then it is long. After the whole ordeal, I always regret the longer emails. Is having them shorter to fit into men’s styles? This manmade world.

There’s the shift in seasons; I wake to the drip drip drip of condensation off the roof, which takes me back to Cygnet Bay. The sky is held by low clouds, fog bridging the green trees out my windows like a rainforest, as the day warms slowly. Somewhere close by someone calls ‘Ohhhhh fucking hell’ and I think someone is in the yard, but they’re not. I’d passed out from smoking again, after getting to the point of not being able to respond to people. Creeping off to the safety of solitude in my bed, I lay in wait and thought of this house. I don’t want to be a dictator; I don’t want to be a money maker. I want people to feel in harmony with themselves and with each other. I want to make it so that we all benefit from this experience. This is my shift: in all transactions I seek genuine spirit.
When I climbed out of bed on another misty morning, having slept until 7am, I went to my undies bag and rustled through, drawing out my black period undies. Why? I don’t know, I just felt like wearing black undies okay. My knees creak—but they don’t hurt like they had the day before when I’d gone many times up and down the stairs—as I go down the stairs to the toilet. I’ve got my period, a week and half early. In reflection, having gone through stages of extreme hunger, plus being surrounded by strong feminine, it makes sense. 
Later that morning at 11:11am I’m at work and Liv texts me to say she checked her calendar and that her period is also due. The day continues much the same with synchronicities. My first clients are Lois B, and then Louise B, and my first sale is a Staircase to the Moon pendant, and the next lady is going on about wanting a Staircase to the Moon pendant, which we’d also discussed when setting up that morning.

And so the ex-con enters Broomerang: David, Bruce’s nephew who has been living on the land, came by last night. I’d replied to a message he’d sent me days before asking if he could drop by while he’s in town. He pulled up out the front with his boys or cousins or relatives or whatnot from One Arm. They stayed in the car while David came to me and got me to open the gate for them to drive their car in. 
In the kitchen, it is the first time I’ve seen David’s fiery side, the first I’ve seen him drunk. He talks of Cygnet Bay, of James Brown knowing not to fuck with him. ‘You don’t fuck with this motherfucker.’ 
‘But,’ I protest, ‘is it possible for you to do this in a nice way? Like, not to do it at the same selfish level of James’s ancestors. Don’t play their cruel game, man, because we need to evolve from that.’ 
It was a winding conversation, where his anger to Cygnet Bay kept returning and I kept voicing my disturbances both to Cygnet Bay (who are very much part of the problem of this system ruining land in the name of wealth for the minority) and the fear of fighting fire with fire. 

At the Old Croc Park we stood in the dark on the back verandah with Richard, illuminated by the computer screen and lamps on his cord-filled desk, sitting before us. He was elaborating about the operations within the Old Croc Park like he was the tour guide and we were on a tour led by a mad scientist whose desk allows for monster crocodiles to stare at him working away behind the illuminating computer screen and lamps.

I can’t stay in this room. 
The ghost, it’s in my knees.
This creaky house has given me creaky knees.

—

Stoned in the shower I think of the absurdity of moving here and having this happen so soon. Is this larrikin trying to dispel me? Send me from the house so I don’t make them think hard on their squandering past, drawing attention to their angry and sodden actions having them caught between worlds?
Propped up in bed resting my legs, I keep having this sensation of myself rising, coming into tune with whatever power I could have, accepting these powers and moving beyond the confusion without ego. Meanwhile here I am, moving slowly towards my greater purpose, not with fear but with sore knees.

My friendship with Richard with our opposing minds and our different sorts of intelligences. Oh but how important these different sorts of intelligences are. Where Richard thinks of the how, I think of the why. I think of other worlds, other lives, history simultaneously playing out. Although I don’t think much of that today. Today is one of those days where I wake with aching knees and the world noise buzzing beyond the windows and life feels long before me. 
I listen to Fuzzy. I don’t know why I feel off, I don’t know why I feel so excited for something and yet excited about nothing. I’m on the other side of my period but my stomach hurts with the stress of moving rooms and the possibility of more writing. At nights, when my body and mind are sore and I want to switch off and chat and cook and share some jokes, be social, there’s a sense of loss. 
A new sense of hope for nights strikes: I can ride my bike, read a book, share dinners, make love. At nights, I can be absorbed in connections and be reminded of why I get up in the morning to stretch to strengthen my body. And write.

The first step back up the stairs your knee creaks and your joints crunch and instantly it hurts again. You know there is a reason but you don’t know what that reason is yet. You refer to the ghost as Kohei and he’s a joke to you. But you know he’s not a joke, and you are not convinced he’s a larrikin. 
You are downstairs now, you are transforming different areas, your path has changed. You are in the pool room. It is cosy with your plants and carefully curated decorations. You are accepting that you will not return to the upper room. Even if you do the exercises the physio recommends, there’ll still be damage to your bones or joints or whatever it is that is more important than having the best space amongst the trees. You are writing in second person because you are reading a book in second person.

Notes from a Croc Park Party: I drink too easily, I ask Lachlan about wrestling crocodiles, I hang with Romeo, who is shining in his flashing crocodile necklace (he bought his first day in Broome without knowing what occasion would come to wear it). Together, me and Romeo, Romeo and me, we fierce. In the kitchen, the former shop, Romeo whispers to me that he’s so honoured to have been invited. Before the party, he’d called his family to emphasise that he’s going to an exclusive soiree at the actual old croc park of Malcolm Douglas. 
I’m talkative. 
We sit on a tree log, Romeo, me, Richard. When Romeo talks, everything comes back to ‘us blackfellas’. When Romeo talks, my mind spins in the understanding of time, drawing a mental diagram showing where this conversation plays out in history and how these conversations are part of history. Because here we are, not long after the atrocities that played out in Aboriginal Australia, and still we are trying to enforce white culture. Culturally speaking, we are not properly meeting in the middle. With defences raised, Romeo struggles to understand my point, but Richard gets it. 
We go on. 
I explain my problem with the sun and my skin, with culture and emotions, of the world beyond this point of racial divide. Still Romeo struggles to understand, still Richard gets it. 
When O defends Richard’s explanation to Romeo that he genuinely wants to understand Indigenous culture, Richard shuts O down out of preconceived ideas. As O walks away, I feel a pang of guilt because I’m understanding him more. How, just like the three of us sitting on the log, his own ancestry plays into his current struggles. 
Romeo tells me: earlier in the season O had told him there was a housemate he didn’t get along with. That housemate would be me. Now, it’s Liv who gets frustrated like a sister, while I laugh. 

I write this from beside the pool beside my new room: last night hopping into bed, my knees had a bit of pain. But I’m happy down here. I’m curious to see why I’m down here.

—

Lou’s friends come in dreadlocks, vans and French accents, smoking weed with the same dress code and interests. 
There is Maggie, so incredible high on life and so naturally beautiful. She wears a feather in her hat, a rashie, and short denim shorts. She goes to her van for instruments and unravelling them is like Mary Poppins’s bag. 
I walk from the kitchen out to the silence of those watching fire in the backyard beyond the vines. Marc’s on the black couch thing and I take a spot beside him, sharing jokes about him sitting with a mosquito zapper at his camp. When Lou’s friends spin, playing with fire, living life to their own beat, I’m transfixed: children of the revolution. 

We (Robyn, Andy, me) are at Greg’s tour. Greg’s giving his spill, talking about the importance of language, which is how we understand the Earth to be flat. Then there’s is the notion to spell something and to put a spell on someone/thing. Spell-ing, restricts our language. We are under a spell through spell-ing. When he reminds us that the stars are suns, I look to the sky, 18 degrees from the equator, and know without doubt that we’re not alone. 
After the show I get in the car and there’s a message from Marc; he has a tumour, he’s being flown to Perth in the morning.

—

In this room there is the pool filter, the traffic, the airplanes. It’s cold, and I don’t sleep much thinking of Marc. When it’s light, I do a quick yoga by the pool with knees still creaking and monster mosquitoes still around. There feels too much to do with my time. Time. Greg had emphasised this word last night too. I will coordinate rooms with Pippa. 

—

I expect people to see through me, understand me, and for them to in turn do the work to get to know me. 

All it takes, all it will ever take, is to be brave enough to look people in the eye. I will break this spell I will. I will look people in the eye I will. And for those who are capable, I will let them see my wisdom and courage and the right person will look back to this, and not be afraid.

—

I come home to an empty house and imagine everyone having fun together and me not invited. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what I can be bothered doing. I take my bike and go for a ride. 
Across from the hospital, a shadow lurks. I turn to see Romeo. Last night at the stars he’d been well presented with his shirt tucked in and hair combed across, but he’d been reserved— not his usual self. Romeo tells me money has gone missing and that after being wrongly accused of this in past jobs he feels responsible. He is aware of his stresses and his reactions, and that he needs to accept what he can and can’t control. He is afraid of the moonlight, he tells me. 
‘But I’m the moon,’ I tell him. 
Romeo emphasises the new moon when I tell him I feel wrong. 

Lou has that hippy touch with how she says that we’ve crossed paths for a while and who knows if we, the household, will stay in touch long term. I go to bed early, stoned, and wake early. Lou’s words play in my head: ‘But not too much Sarah,’ she had said. I thought she had been talking about food or smoke or something, but she was talking about the amount of people in the house. To this, I gave her a brief explanation of me looking at the house long term, a whole year. Then when I tell her that I would have accepted Marc’s request to park his van inside while he had to go to Perth (it’s at Wil’s instead), Lou says, ‘Ah Sarah, no.’ 
Because Lou wants her van parked inside. 
‘That’s my realm, Lou,’ I tell her. What I also want is to tell her to mind her own business, but I remind myself it is her house too (despite her paying the littlest rent). 

Stoned in the hammock, drinking Maggie’s cacao that she made slowly and thoroughly, I understand the beautiful things Maggie says in the way I don’t understand them when I am in a sober state. She’s talking of that buzzing feeling of being alive. A feeling that, for me, first came with the DMT. ‘I hadn’t known how to explain this,’ I say to Maggie, looking her in the eye. And when I see her there, raw—hair redder, face whiter—she surprises me with her description of her love for the wind. She just loves it. The scents and the sounds blowing in and how alive this makes her feel.
‘But what about the part where it’s annoying,’ O and I wonder.
Maggie talks of going along with things, waiting to see what happens, and how in doing this it always works out for her. To achieve this, I believe, (although I can’t remember if I found the words to say it at the time) comes with her belief that everything is going to work out alright because everything is alright.

I’m setting up the house, setting the scene; cleaning, rearranging and sweeping the outside area. I’m letting the story play out. And I don’t need to justify this, I don’t need to speak it, I just need to trust it. 
I’m hosing down the verandah walls underneath the lattices when O comes to me with words of warning about taking in too many of those “hippy backpacker sorts.” 
‘Because they’ll take over the house,’ he says. ‘…because they do that,’ he says, ‘one comes and then they all come and we have this different thing going in the house.’
Trust me, I told him.

The house creaks with character.

—

How many others know that we’re part of so much more? 

Ideas form: The Gemstones of Broomerang, a grand old sharehouse (ghost included) where a wave of people pass through over a season. It documents people doing positive things rather than the mass consumption we are fed through the news. It shows the politics between the people doing cool things, creative things, unknowingly demonstrating hope for the future… Welcome to Broomerang, an Old Master Pearlers home where people from all over the world come together, for high season in Broome, to share stories, to bring hope, to show differences and engage in conversations. Each of us here are on our own paths. Through it all, something bigger is at play.

The Gemstones of Broomerang: 

• when everything has to go wrong to make you see it as so right

• about globalisation and how we create communities that span the seas

• the passing interactions in which we can take so much

• we come from all corners of the globe and here our paths cross

• a focus on the hope, to the beauty unfolding

• we are connecting the dots, we are an alternate future

• connections that challenge us and in which we can grow.

The time has now come when I want to go to bed to pull the blanket over me and wake up in another time. A time when I am not this strong independent female who thinks that her way is the right way (while knowing that I have deeper intuition than some or possibly most. Thing is, I don’t yet know what I think I know). 
And so it combusts, and the only way to make sense of it is this ramble: O’s on the outdoor couch, he’s not talking to me, he won’t give me a drag of his joint because, he slurs, ‘You don’t like me so why should I give you something.’
Noted, I had told him, like I had told Lou. 
I remind myself that we, the household, will not be worse off losing O. And that surely O is aware he needs to leave. Especially after today, where he proved himself as a young boy demonstrating a lack of empathy.
Actually, no, it had been Lou, my most trusted, who was the one to bring me down—she jumped to conclusions, she undermined me, she disrespected me. And it is now Lou who I am most disturbed by. For she, a short term tenant, here working for a few months, is talking behind my back before I even have the time to come home and explain myself. And she’s talking to Pippa, of all people, vocalising her belief that she deserves a reduction in rent with the addition of new housemates, despite being three days late in rent at the time of asking.
Yes, Lou is a strong woman like myself, but she needs to learn to pick her battles (as do I) because I swear to God if she goes talking more shit behind my back and stirring up the house, she too will go. And I will have to let that go.
Then again, I hope I don’t lose Lou. I know there is something more to Lou. I know that she, like O, is here to teach me lessons. Perhaps the first lesson is that I must come to terms with standing my ground. Another is her shining the spotlight on my understanding that leadership includes the ability to trust in one’s own judgment while seeing the bigger picture. Because it is the bigger picture of this house’s equation that is most important. 
Empathy. Empathy is the word I think of in bed, a word I have become stuck on, a word I want to remind O, who was ‘too stoned for these sorts of conversations.’ 
‘But I didn’t move from the top room for fun and games,’ I had wanted to scream in reply. I moved because I needed to. And when I moved, I cried for a week. When I moved, I wanted to run, run far far away to the mountains, where I wouldn’t be this person in a position of power. But with state borders closed, the world still reeling from this virus, I couldn’t do this. So instead I need Pippa’s room. Pippa, who understands this best. Pippa, who gave me a hug when I cried for a week and wanted to run for the mountains.

The afternoon holds nostalgia. It’s in the smell of sweat and frangipani, in the feeling of my stomach skipping home to something exciting going on. Yesterday on my way to work, I walked through another time, like I’ve already lived that moment before.

—

I’ve made a herbal tea and I’m preparing for the shower. I've calmed down. I hear someone get home and wonder if it’s O. I hope it’s O—I don’t want to send him a message. I walk out from the bathroom and around the verandah to the darkened front. O’s at the permanently-opened doors to the pool. Behind him the spotlights turn the palm trees from pink to blue to yellow. ‘Hey are you okay?’ he asks. 
‘Hey O, am I okay? Are you okay?’
He talks to me calmly, telling how he’d heard from the Landlord that I hadn’t been sleeping well and had been out of sorts with concern to the house and specifically to O’s position within the house. 
While I have been deeply bothered by his erratic behaviour and the strange energy that had descended into the house, this is, of course, somewhat exaggerated. But the exaggeration works nicely in my favour. 
I let O speak.
He likes me as a person, he tells me. He doesn’t want to make me feel bad, he tells me. And we have friends in common, so we don’t want animosity between us to cause friction that reverberates beyond the sore points between us. ‘I’m human too,’ O reminds me like I had been blind to such a notion.
I feel a greater grasp on the notion that he is still learning, and this learning takes time. 
We agree we can’t live together.
He gives me a hug. 
Later, he gives me another hug, a kiss on the cheek. It’s the week of the supermoon and the solar eclipse.

There are now a lot of people in the house. The new Spanish girls work in fast fashion, they wear a face full of make-up and blow dry their hair. Last night, O and I sat outside smoking with Alex. It’s her first night here and her first time living in a small town—she knows nothing of Broome. 
‘Welcome welcome,’ O slyly says lying low on the outside couch. 
I laugh loudly from the hammock. I like this place, this company, and if things ever again explode with O, I hope we remain friends. I want to give him a farewell party.

We’re in this small, coastal, isolated town where the world is colourful and casual. Amongst us, there are mining firms and op shops saturated with Cotton On. At the Mangrove, The Mexicans play to people who are dressed up. A plane comes in over the head of the creek, its lights reflected in high tide. 
In the shower the hand towel falls from the hook. In bed there’s a presence. It isn’t one that scares me, but one that makes me enter into the eternal void, like I’m standing in my mind looking at wide and empty plains. Power shivers through me and I know this is only the beginning. 

—

Whenever I wake, the house is on my mind. I was kidding myself to make it work smoothly and have everyone like me. It is all part of leading, right, this part where things don’t always work out as planned?

—

I still get so nervous about the O thing, but it’s all learning curves in trusting my intuition, standing my ground. 

—

I want family. I want the ability to do good in this mad world.

—

There’s a bit more of a doof vibe on the Sunday potluck, with Lachlan, for example, a little out of place. But I like my small group of good conversations. People who have names like Simba and Wolf and Roser (like the wine).

Greg is there for the reconciliation dinner. I show him the rock, like a large quartz, that Bruce has given me. It is from the islands; light orange in colour, heavy, and sparkling like sunlight. We wonder what would happen if I opened it up. After we eat dinner, I stroke the rock. It feels good to stroke it. 
O and I walk through the front gate towards Matso’s. Someone has put the miniature recycled bin out the front and we lose ourselves in laughter. 
We turn down the street and in the sections of clouds I see a shooting star. 
Love love love. 
On the walk I start to feel sick and by the time we’re in Matso’s; my face is flushed and my heart is beating fast. I’m anxious and uncomfortable amongst the crowd of backpackers. O comes home with me and my headache. I lie in the hammock and look down the verandah, to the stone sitting on the bench in the kitchen. This ancient, large quartz I had been stroking, tumbled and smooth, full of power. Which island is it from? Was it this rock that made me so sick and funny-feeling?

What I love about Broome is that it’s an event to go watch the eclipse. The moon is an orange ping pong ball in the sky. If I reach out of hand, I feel I could take it, put it in my pocket. ‘Deliciously cold,’ Pippa describes the night as we sit in long sleeves.

—

Since the eclipse, I’ve been feeling better and better. When Richard had told me he liked me, part of me felt guilty but a bigger part knew I didn’t lead him on, that I treated him like a friend who I love and respect and have fun with. Whereas he was emotional and sensitive, always telling me to be nicer to him. 
Later, lying in the hammock looking back to the moments that led to this eclipse night of Richard telling me that he liked me, I see how I had grown increasingly cruel to Richard. I attribute this to the unacknowledged realisation that we felt differently about each other. I didn’t want this to be true, I didn’t want Richard to ‘like’ me. And so his constant desire for my attention and space, suffocated me. I became short and rude, pointing out things like how Richard would come into our social situations and start loudly screaming swear words. In hindsight, I was full of spite and could have handled these situations more maturely. I could have confronted it directly. I could have remembered the good heart and humour Richard always brought into social situations.

We’re outside under the fairy lights—wound around the branch hanging on the wall and wrapped along the eves—and we’re on rotation between the hammock, the floor and the couches. Lou talks of time, of us having another 40 billion years. ‘And yet we struggle to get through some single days,’ I say.

—

Ride to Cable, high tide swim, potter at Broomerang, a day of joy.

—

Lou comes home in a good mood, peaks through my curtains.

—

O telling us to stay happy. He’s clearly not female.

—

Spirituality in the material world.

—

The passing of time, the maturing of women.

—

Sometimes, it is those who are ultimately more lost that attempt to appear to seem more found. Don’t trust these people—they don’t trust themselves.

I had been warned that Spanish people can be cheeky. Alex, Monica’s friend, overstays by five days. I’d told her Friday, and when I see her Friday evening, she doesn’t ask me about staying on but tells me she is finding out about accommodation. 
She keeps talking loudly to her phone in Spanish, her footsteps heavy on the verandah. 
I chase her down the hall, and in the same spot that I had spoken with O, I tell her, ‘I’m sorry, but ya gotta go girl.’ There are so many people in this town needing somewhere but with Alex is not where my allegiances lie. 
‘But I’m paying rent.’
‘You’re paying rent to Monica, not to me.’ 
She starts crying and I attribute it to my tone. Awkwardly, I hug her. She stiffens. I let go and hang there, looking to her without feeling great amounts of empathy. 
I am finding firmness. This had been a test to stand my ground. Because Alex didn’t ask, she told me. And so I shut her down, sweep her out. Later, she will give me a bottle of wine and we’ll be all good. 

It's another pizza night. O works his pizza magic, and I’m flitting between people. There’s a different vibe tonight, more lowkey. I’m wine’d and confident. I talk to people, I move on. Two different guys request a tour of the house from me. Romeo tells me that he doesn’t know how I do it. ‘I’ve always been a host,’ I explain.
Boys appear from the woodwork; the cute French guy I met behind my work, Leo in his daggy trousers and sandals, Wolf on the couch at the end discussing how we don’t care for the doof music or Matso’s on a Sunday, Greg standing around talking about language. On the lawn, Roser, a French, a German and a Swedish guy play their instruments and I make up lyrics in my head. 

—

It's the 31st of May. Lou’s on the laundry step smoking a cigarette, O’s in the hammock with his headphones and computer, Liv and Tom are in their room, as always. Liv and Tom are serious people, whereas Pippa is the opposite, and Lou is excitable.

It's another night under the fairy lights with Lou and O. Lou is in the hammock, while me and O rotate between the couch and floor. Here, we have grown more comfortable in each other’s company, reaching a point of being able to share fleeting thoughts and give half sentences as a delayed response: ‘…Yeahhhhh totally.’ 
Tonight, Lou vocalises her poetic ideas—saying things like ‘there’s something smooth in the air’—while constantly apologising for the restrictions in her English translation. But I always understand what she’s saying. She’s speaking of another world, of being able to learn from each other in this time at Broomerang. And when she’s speaking this stuff it was like she was reading my mind. Then we’re talking about Broome, about how we all came to Broome and the magic of Broome. In response to another of Lou’s insightful, poetic remarks, O and I say ‘time’ at the same time. 
Suddenly, young girls appear. The three of us—O, Lou and me—stay in our happy corner. ‘OMG this is the coolest thing ever,’ one of them says. ‘This scene,’ she points to us, ‘this house, your life.’ They have freshly arrived in Broome. 
I walk to the bathroom, where the gaggle of young girls are congregating for an overdue shower. I hear one of them explain into a phone: ‘the fairy lights, the setting, it’s so cool.’
I understand: that buzz of driving all day and arriving at a new place with all these new people and cool experiences and you’re so excited for something as simple as hot water in a beautiful bathroom with a hanging plant and stoned bottomed shower.

Liv and Tom, PHD students, serious and focused, valuing stress as success and locking their door whenever they leave their room to stay within the house. And this locking the door thing, it gets me. For there are people coming, the house is inviting them in, and I feel we can learn from these people. But who do you think we are, Liv and Tom? 

—

Lou’s lying back in the hammock and when I give her an idea to play with, she taps her temple with two fingers. She goes on to do something extraordinary about creating her work shifts according to the moon and her cycle.
O’s been thinking of cycles too, after the gardener explained to him a bit about his weed plants. Then we’re all talking about cycles, of going through them and accepting this. Because for me, right now, I’m in a time of presence. Right now there is no project pulling me away. 
A girl comes through our outside setting, she asks what we all ‘do.’ 
‘Pearls,’ I say when it’s my turn. 
‘Cute,’ she replies. 
When Lou tells that she does hospo work, the girl says, ‘Oh that’s great work I think I might…’ and then she rattles off a list of possible work she might look into. 
‘You’ll calm down,’ Lou tells her. ‘You’ll be fine for job, it’ll be accommodation that’s the problem.’

—

Richard tells me that he’ll continue to like me, and despite me acting weird (feeling like I’m being psychoanalysed while kinda wanting to be psychoanalysed but also not wanting to be psychoanalysed) we work through our friendship nonetheless. Richard tells me to be more wary of O because he is talking shit about the house behind my back.

The house is super clean, the cleaning roster working much better than anticipated.

—

All the magic from the hardship with the knees and the car. 

—

The importance of community.

—

Pippa: ‘I’m so glad you’re Queen of the house.’

—

Here, we move with our hips and our hearts. We tell each other our cycles and we exude empathy. We know moods work in ebbs and flows.

—

Overhear Lou explaining the concept of Broomerang to someone.

—

I love going to sit in the cinema when I’m feeling low.

—

The struggle to sleep, the presence in my room, the noises from outside, a drop of water to my chin, a bug flying to my chin. Why my chin? 

In the morning I go to the kitchen and Pippa is there. I had told myself I would look her in the eye, but I don’t. I do yoga on the lawn as O sits on the outside couch smoking cigarettes after a doof. The day rolls on, the Sunday afternoon arrives, people flitter through. I don’t bother showering; I swim in the pool.

—

I do yoga by the pool, my returning-aching knees creaking through it. Lately, there have been signs of loneliness. Sure, I’ve made new friends and acquaintances, but now I seek one for a deeper connection.

—

The town is booming: dogs barking, cars churning, people screaming, music blaring. Underneath the palm trees, I lie on the boards and…and what, amplify myself? Make myself so small that the town’s booming becomes a buzz and I’m a speck of time in which I have this magic potion where I take these great risks and in the great risks things sometimes go wrong and when they go wrong it leads to things being so right. In this speck of time, lying on the boards under the palm trees, I am happy. I am seeing the beauty of worlds uniting.

Maybe I should think of the guitar like writing, where my hands dance over the strings and I discover the story as they go.

—

To embody my power I must trust in other’s abilities to see the truth for themselves. I don’t tell them how it is, I give the clues, I give riddles, and I trust that time will allow for them to see it all for themselves.

—

I haven’t been eating much. O continues to deceive me, manipulate me, talk shit behind my back. The latest O’s done is tell Lou that I bring him down with all my issues. 
My issues?
To this, I do not argue for I know this is true: I have issues. I’m battling through my issues. Issues that at times run so deep that I gross myself out through my own wallowing. Which is why I write, why I create. And as I write, as I create, I deepen my understanding that we all have issues. So should I really be making great apologies for my issues? Nah, not really. Especially not to O, who remains to be possessed by issues of his own. Because he’s human, remember?

Time and time again, time comes back to me. How we experience instinct, how we ignore instinct, and how instinct always comes back through the passage of time. And as the eversowise Pippa Kern pointed out, I had to place trust in others through this passage of time.
For first, it was Liv who took pity on O. She gave him a chance and he failed her, he insulted her, arguing about the objectification of women. Through this argument he regularly used himself as an explanation (although I do this too, so I can’t judge harshly there). 
Next it was Pippa who wanted to give O the benefit of the doubt. And she did. Until he accosted her in the kitchen, insulting her, yelling at her, cursing me. 
Through all this, Lou held out empathy, allowing for O to share with her his own understanding on matters. Then came last night when he crossed her path too. And in their heated kitchen conversation, he used that tone.
Now we’ve all seen that there’s something unhinged about my friend O. Something he doesn’t (yet) see himself. Now we, the witches of Broomerang, are unified in our quest to have him gone from our kingdom. To have him calmly exit the house and allow peace to prevail. And it is up to me to do this. And in doing this, I can pre-empt that I’ll be the evil one, the crazy one, the one with all my issues. Nevertheless, I hereby therefore trust that time has unravelled O and his true objectives.
(I totally forgot to eat my dinner when writing that! I remember the time, not so long ago, when I lived to eat. It was in the time of the early-pandemic when I had wondered how I could ever get to the stage of losing my appetite. Now, in my nervousness, I’d had three wines and three cigarettes instead. Maybe I should go live under a tree somewhere in Australia and live out the rest of my days without impacting others’ lives).

I’m all about promoting the reality of our internal minds and yet, at the slightest idea of someone possibly undermining me, I want to prove them wrong and have them understand that it’s not me that’s crazy, it’s the world.

—

There is a storm cloud over my head, waiting to unleash its rains, and yet I hold it in. I lie in the hammock, miss dinner, drink wine. I need to lie in the hammock and look within, to why I miss dinner and drink wine. 
O continues to play me like a game. Lou continues to articulate herself well—she is a strong character in this game. And O, as the male, holds a different power despite being totally powerless as the minority. As for me, right now I’m totally knackered as Pippa becomes my closest confidant. It is with Pippa I share how depleted I feel. 

There are men around, beautiful men with intricacies and smiling eyes. There’s the waft of weed, the sound of a hammer. N’s making a weaving board. Liv and I go across to inspect the citronella lamps and from the veg garden I go across to N and his hammering. When he shows me what he’s building, I see he has the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen. 
As I’m sitting on the outdoor couch, he comes back to talk to me so I get to see his beautiful eyes again. He tells me about the colour he’s using in his weaving—blue and yellow. Something about the greatest contrast to the human eye.
‘The colours of the night sky,’ I comment. 
He smiles, he’s shy. He hugs me goodbye and his calmness jumps across to me. Feeling safe, I inhale it all, and look into his eyes again. 
‘See you soon,’ I tell him. 
‘With pleasure,’ he replies.

I want community. It’s starting, but it’s not there yet.

—

I’m playing guitar. Lou comes in and blows me a kiss goodbye—she’s going out to Marc’s camp.

—

My hands speak and my words shoot as I simultaneously contemplate the execution of my ideas and the underlying message of it.

—

Constant talk of temperature variations: it was a little cooler last night, the night was calm otherwise. 

—

It’s up to me to make life magical. I have the power for this.

—

To become more attuned to the reality of my poetic soul.

—

The fifth dimension.

—

We talk of society, we avoid politics, not believing in the pettiness of this system. We read books; we befriend anyone.

—

‘I have nowhere to be but I have to get there quickly,’ hangs above the toilet.

—

There’s an Indigenous man walking along Frederick Street without a shirt. His big belly hangs over his trousers, and there’s a huge cancerous growth hanging from his belly button. It’s absurd to step back and observe what we’ve done to those who so recently were living in harmony with nature.

Lou and Pippa remind me to ‘Please get O out.’ The next day, I see Liv in the kitchen, and we finally have time to vent. ‘O makes Tom physically sick. Like, he can’t be around him anymore,’ Liv says.
I tell her what I’ve heard of all that he’s said about me. What I’ve been told he says of me. 
‘That’s weird,’ Liv begins, ‘because you’ve been nicest to him. And isn’t he the one with problems?’
‘We’re all the ones with problems,’ I explain, which is later proven as Liv, Pippa and I later sit at the kitchen bench; Liv worrying about tomorrow, Pippa not giving much, Tom doing the dishes with abundant, gushing water. 

Richard is angry by the way I scowl at him in social situations. He tells me I’ve been hurt a lot. ‘Do you push people away?’ he asks. 
I don’t want to answer, so I push him away, knowing that his prying stems from a place of his own hurt. 
What Richard doesn’t understand, and can’t seem to understand despite varying explanations, is that I too came into these new and unfamiliar social situations at the same time he did. So why, in these new and unfamiliar social situations, are there greater expectations placed on me to constantly perform? I’m trying to juggle a whole new house with multiple people and responsibilities too, you know. Plus, Richard, can’t you consider that my attention could be reasonably divided in social situations where there are new people to engage with? For Richard has had more personal time with me than anyone else has. Yet Richard is so hard on me. And this irritates me. Because to know me properly, Richard, you will see that I like making these new connections and that I feed off these new connections.

Coming through the red gate, you enter into another world, another way of life. Here, we compromise. Here, we don’t assess what you do for paid employment or how much money you make. Here, we are beyond what the world is now. Here we are human and we are together.  Here we don’t need money to create.

—

From the country music of the roadhouse with durries and road trains and How ya goins, to the doof where dust turned to mist, people swayed with eyes closed and O kissed and hugged me telling me he loves me. I don’t know if he’s playing me or there’s a true element of care.

It’s Sunday, lowkey, the people tired from last night’s doof. I don’t drink, I don’t think about a drink, and I don’t smoke. There are rugs on the kind-of lawn, with low tables holding chips, biscuits and cheese. Snoozy partygoers lie on each other. There is confusion about pizza. Instruments are here but timing isn’t—the mood too somber. Bobo, Momo and Toto pass acai smoothies around. Roser (who had been at the doof too, although she doesn’t usually go to doofs) notices the different worlds together, and she loves this. Wolf, who has become a key player at pot luck nights, disappears and reappears with Byron and a cooked chook.
The end of the night, a core group forming, are the best times. Around the kitchen tabvle there is Greg, Wolf, Byron, Roser, Monica, Monica’s friend, Patricia, O and O’s startling laugh. Wolf flicks his long hair, gives lingering looks and wears boots in the house because I told him he could the first time he came on a Sunday, and I’ve been too shy to say different since. I do dishes and listen to them speak about making change. About some people following trends and some people being the change. About people following trends to be the change. Patricia is articulate and insightful in her explanations—she studies psychology. 
At times I twist around and nod agreement, murmuring, giving half-formed ideas on this life we are fed. Like with advertising and marketing and how we are chasing this false life infested by mental health. ‘The medicalisation of our sorrows,’ as Helen Garner says. 
To the kitchen group, Wolf keeps a straight face and uses hand movements to declare, ‘I have something for you guys. What do you think of objective morality?’
‘…Wh-what do you mean?’
‘Objective morality,’ he repeats without breaking his poker face.
I laugh. I still don’t get it. We all stare.
‘So you know what morality is?’ Wolf asks us.
We nod, although I still can’t work it out.
‘So objective, morality,’ he repeats.
Roser speaks up, but I can’t remember what she says. Patricia gives insightful ideas. I remain confused. We come to the conclusion that morality will always be subjective.
From the pool, staring into the town’s night, their kitchen conversation remains loud. I consider Lou at the end of the hall with her flynet doors, but they’re having fun. Patricia is now talking of different cultures coming together, similar to what we had noted earlier. I consider this time of covid. Of travellers stuck to a country, crossing paths, connecting cultures, forming new communities and sub-cultures. We are globalisation on a whole new scale.

With connections between new worlds, Liv and Tom remain fearful to enter. They’re safe on the outer, putting people into categories and dreaming of documentary filmmaking. (But to be a documentary filmmaker, couldn’t it pay to be open to other worlds?)

—

The thought last night: of being stuck in that state and losing my mind. In bed, my brain ticks. Like electricity running through me, charging me. From the sharp whole-body jolts, I vow to look after my body for the next while.

—

The Gemstones of Broomerang: a house with soul, a house that gives you a feeling more than a place. 

—

I’m told there are always vaccine ads in the breaks through footy.

—

My head and neck creak.

—

Check the cleaning roster for recent ticks. All up to date. We just have a lot of people, I guess.

—

Lou babbles through her English, making a half effort and saying she’s too tired to interact. With time I am handling her better, less sensitive to her spontaneity.

—

Clouds hang in the sky and my mood is gentle. I make my coffee, retreat to clean my room. There are backpackers about, taking showers, making breakfast. I like their presence.

—

Sometimes I read Facebook to feed a deep anger to humanity. Like responses from a Broome Noticeboard post about a break in to the Guy Street Post office: 
—What if we ran into there house and took all there belongs. No doubt they have no belongings we want!’
—Don’t think the tourists did this. Gotta stop making excuses for these little shits!!!’

—

The house works so well with the ladies. Then there’s O, who uses the house to woo the ladies. The ladies he brings are always so impressed, saying how cool the house is as O laughs louder than a hyena.

O’s on a phone call by the pool, right outside my window. He can’t make it to Lachlan tonight, but he’ll be there for the men’s breakfast in the morning (insert emoji face with eyes towards the top of the head). ‘I just can’t be in this house,’ he says. In my head Lachlan offers him a place at the Croc Park. Because a lead is what he needs. Any old lead, so we can get this over with and all move on with our lives.

—

It’s after work, grey clouds cloud the sky and there has been intermittent rain—a different day. The light is like a dream. From the hammock, I look towards sunset and the sunset trees are glittering. Literally glittering, like a Christmas tree decorated in lights. I drink wine and smoke a cigarette that makes me feel sick. 

Last night, Clem and Alize’s beautiful French friend with the pearl earrings and a bow wrapped around her head, got on the guitar and sang some French song in a gravelly French voice full of gust and vigour. She was beauty I could experience over and over. Yet pre song and post song, she was downing the ciders and chain smoking the cigarettes. In her, the way she so effortlessly rolled her cigarettes, how she was giggling, so expertly flicking the ash between large gulps of her wine, I saw myself from another’s perspective. I wanted to befriend her but instead I was stoned, swaying to Wolf and Max and Byron playing guitar. Not knowing an instrument, I continue to observe. If I knew my way through an instrument, I would join in more than the finger percussion I’m finding.
Wolf explains key progression to Max, ‘It’s relative, it’s all relative,’ he repeats. Wolf seems highly intellectual when speaking, using long words and vague sentences I easily understand (I’ve had this problem recently, you see, where I want to simplify my words and sentences, but still formal words and accurate sentences are expressed aloud). I mumble and laugh my way through telling him how I don’t comprehend what he means by key progression as relative. ‘It’s a physics or mathematical thing,’ he explains, as he’s standing up, gathering his instruments to leave. To me, Wolf explains his song writing process and from what he describes, I understand them as ‘downloads’ (what Natalie in Alice Springs would call them). Wolf keeps using the word gemstones and I keep smiling because of my recent thoughts of gemstones.
Pippa comes home from the Women’s Retreat to the scene of soft music on the verandah. Under the dark verandah to the sound of instruments, I see her shifting and flowing. She whispers that on the Monday of the retreat they will discuss solutions centred mainly around the youth and trauma. And with this youth trauma, we need women power. With this, I answer my own questions on Beth moving in. This house would like more feminine energy.

Last night was the quietest Sunday night and it turned out to be my favourite Sunday night. Roser and Marc and Byron and Wolf and Max in the kitchen. When I came to the kitchen the next morning, Tom’s smirking at me. 
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Get on the bongos last night?’ he chuckled.
‘Why is that funny?’ I snap. You should try it sometime, I wish I had said.

—

Lou tells me how she liked the Sundays when we would sit in the kitchen and talk about literature and the arts and politics. But I can’t remember it ever being Sundays in particular that we would sit around talking about literature and the arts and politics. That happens any night. And when she says that she wishes her backpacker friends would make an effort with the ‘others,’ I argue that the ‘others’ could also make an effort with the backpacker friends (instead of walking through the Sunday scenes straight to their rooms). I do yoga by the swimming pool to quell these judgments.

O’s by the clothesline and I’m on my lunch break from Cable Beach Club. I walk out in a serious manner to have a friendly chat about his movements. ‘How you doing?’ I ask.
‘Good and you?’ he answers. ‘You look good,’ he carries on.

—

I don’t know where home is anymore. But here I find comfort. Here with the simplicity and natural beauty and the people and freedom. Here I love my job and my lone time and waking on cold mornings able to put on a jumper and hop back into bed with a tea and a book. I love knowing that the warmth will soon return and this will all be a memory.

—

The moon is full and so we walk from Marc’s camp down Cable Beach. Roser and I laugh about the feeling of walking without moving. I love this company: Roser, Marc. These nice and interesting people, laughing and talking and putting up with my bullshit.

Vedam clearly knows Karen but they don’t acknowledge each other.

—

In social situations Richard is intense, looking forlorn. I know it’s because of me. But I wish he’d leave me alone in the way that we can be friends and I can be myself without pain.

—

I light an incense and open the windows. Smoke dances with the wind, wafting through that Saturday vibe with most housemates home.

—

There comes a time where everyone keeps whacking me in the face and saying it’s because of a mosquito.

—

Walking into the kitchen and thinking Lou is Pippa.

—

I meditate with tears. There is a vengeance. I can do this: find my language, speak my truth. Not the way it’s meant to be done but the way it feels to be done. 

—

I want to make jewellery.

I’m in the future and I’m looking back at this moment and nit-picking. Who had the right to a voice? Who had the loudest voice? In the future we are beyond struggle on gender and race. In the future we don’t need to say shit like, ‘I won’t read another story by a white girl.’ In the future we are one as humans. One day, skin colour really will be obsolete.

—

I walk home from a Sunday shift and notice N’s car out the front. In the kitchen, my body tilted atop my right hip, left leg bent, N walks from the bathroom and looks to my room. In my room I change into bike shorts. In the kitchen, we pass and I see his eyes move down my body. On the verandah, we cross again. ‘See you,’ he smiles.
‘See you later,’ I smile back, walking past without turning around to share chemistry.
It’s mostly guys, I feel, who take a deep breath to tap into my energy. They want to swallow you, taste you, know your flavour.

Hearing Lou and Beth in the kitchen and hearing myself in Beth. Her shyness, and how daunting it must be to be forward and find courage to cook dinner and interact in a house like this. It takes time for people to know you, honey. So don’t give up, for here you can take so much. 

—

The challenge of a work dinner. Wine’d, I start to speak out about different ways of living while trying not to be grossly philosophical or political. After, dazed and confused, I questioned my place at work. How long will I last? Will I get fired? Be put in my place?

It’s the morning of my birthday and I meditate. On the bathroom mirror there’s a note from Lou. In the kitchen there are flowers, a present and a handmade card from Pippa, Liv and Tom. There are pancakes and people and I’m bursting with joy. Today marks a new chapter, one where I dance around the house. 
That night, we congregate around the table full of pasta and O, drunk and loud, sits down next to Tom. O starts telling a story with hands that keep going before Tom’s face. When O says something funny his laugh goes on and on until the walls are vibrating. I see Tom breathing through the moment. Watching the discomfort created in those who have their ears pierced by the noise has me wiggle in my seat. It’s one week until O leaves. One week.

—

My heart is full with people who were at my birthday dinner (yuck, the cliché). I don’t need quantity, I needpeople who make me happy, who stimulate me, and who drive me crazy. Richard drives me crazy with how loud he talks when he’s drunk, and how he swears and struggles to get things out, then growing frustrated when people cut him off to make their point, hurry him along.

Last night at Grave Robber’s Union, I spun around on the dancefloor and was nice to Richard, who was deep in gossip with Liv:
‘Did you know Greg’s an anti-vaxxer?’ Richard asks me.
I roll my eyes in protest: ‘Don’t start that categorising business, not now.’
Richard says something about people like anti-vaxxer people being judgmental. 
I conclude that that comment alone is no different.

—

New kid Jac slides in comfortably and confidently. When we drink scotch on the verandah, he is chatty, clearly ignoring O. God he reminds me of Melbourne. In Melbourne we think we’re pretty good. Jac’s pretty good.

A Sunday:
I start on the herbs, my medication for my still creaking knees.
When I tell Roser and Lou the story of Kohei playing funny games with me and the plumbing, Lou notes that it’s ‘cool’ that such things come to me. Well, is he trying to tell me something? Do I have the capacity to listen?
I ride to the supermarket, alive from the afternoon sunshine and the music humming through my ears. In the veg section of Woolworths, I see Abbey working. Next, I see French people I’ve noticed from the house. One of the French girls asks if they need to bring dough, or just toppings? Then, I see Wolf and Elsa, who show me what they bought for pizzas. I rode home just as happy. 
Behind the red gate, on the big table, pizza dough rises. Pippa strolls through the house to where I am, saying how nice the house vibe is. I smile and agree, looking around to see how all the uncomfortable times were worth right here right now, with everyone harmonious and comfortably creating. It’s magic, really: Beth reading in the sunshine on the lawn, Alize on the rug painting and Clem lying in the sunshine by her, Tom reading on the edge of the verandah, Jac in the hammock with his guitar, Liv in the veg garden, Pippa sewing at the big table, and Roser and Lou by the pool, Roser practicing drums and Lou’s hands beating the table in timing. 
Late afternoon descends. O comes to me, bursting with a joke: ‘It looks like a Toyota dealership out front.’ People have trinkled in and at height there are maybe fifty people there. Considering the number, it’s a chill vibe with a lot of people making their own pizzas. I make mine with N, whose eyes smile when he talks and who is undoubtedly the most beautiful boy I’ve ever seen. I laugh loudly with his sense of humour.
In the yellow light of the hallway, Wolf inspects the cabinets of artefacts I put together from pieces collected from around the house. We talk about the large size of the atlas that sits atop the cabinet. I tell him and Elsa that there’s a ghost here and that the night before I lost my mind a little with the dribbling coming from the shower head of the second bathroom. I slightly wobble as I ask them, or myself, ‘Would this have happened if I was sober?’ Because I had been stoned. I mumble on, unsure if I’ve reached the peak of my story or not when telling them about my DMT experience. Wolf saves me, talks of going into another consciousness, and I think I understand what he means. I’m pretty sure I know what he means. But I must have still been mumbling, my heart must have still been beating fast, for Wolf and Elsa are still standing in front of me, looking at me, smiling at me, and Wolf takes a deep breath and I take a deep breath too. Because I need this support if I’m going to be going into other realms.

Went into work without wanting to be there. As the day went by, my mood picked up and I’m dribbling shit: ‘Time is money and money is…time.’

—

I kinda can’t wait to get old so I can stop caring about what I’m eating and staying slim. I’ll grow old and come to a point where I’ll drink wine and smoke cigarettes and joints forever. I’ll have chocolate for dinner and fruit for dessert.

Lou throws out a tiramisu because it made her feel sick. It could have been the dairy, it could have been anything, it didn’t necessarily make other people feel sick, Lou.

To get Lou, you have to get her impromptuly.

Lou is ‘unpredictable,’ I explain to Marc. But Lou describes herself as spontaneous. Sometimes, though, between you and me, I see spontaneity as selfish. You see, while I try my best to look out for everyone, Lou only has herself to think about.

Lou holds up a tobacco-less joint, ‘I’m going to go smoke my hippie smoke,’ she declares. She uses the word hippy freely and confidently. Whereas other friends, like Paul, Mia, Piero and Richard, use it condescendingly. 

Lou, a mover and shaker, inserting herself into different worlds. She doubts herself and she apologises for her English-language limitations despite the universal language of her messages. Then there’s N, whose English is amazing. 

Lou has currently decided that she is going to stay for the wet. But even if there were rooms available, I’d hesitate to give it to someone with such unpredictable behaviour. I mean, she’s already made me wary with her unmediated questioning to rent quantities, plus her moods, her gossip and her talk of Good Cartel (relaying to me negative observations from her colleagues about a good friend of mine. ‘I don’t care,’ I had said in response to her gossip. ‘I know she is weird, but to me she’s a good person.’)

Bats fight in the roof and they drive me a little mad. In the early morning the cold comes through the slats of the kitchen. I make a Chinese herbal tea and at the fridge, I hear a distressed flapping: the dead butterfly on the fridge. 

Last night, when N saw the room, his eyes were glassy and he looked exhausted. I wanted to ask if he was Okay but instead I asked how his night was—it didn’t look like he had slept much. Despite his sleepy appearance, his spirit is genuine and his energy is comforting. I offer him a room. Under the tropical shrub of the yard, we hug goodbye. He’s a gentle hugger. A gentle hugger who might be my neighbour. And a neighbour, I hope, who doesn’t judge me for sitting out at my desk, doing my thing.

It’s mid-afternoon on a Saturday and Lou and I are both home from work, talking in the kitchen after Liv and Pippa go for a swim. Lou says she feels like a glass of wine, and I agree. 
We ride to the supermarket in her old cream van, dusty and undecorated besides a couple of shells and rogue feathers. 
Back in the kitchen, Beth and Pippa join us and when Jac returns from the beach he joins us too. We drink wine and eat cheese. 
When O comes home, I’m drunk enough to repeatedly scab cigarettes that I will regret the next morning. We smoke a joint. We talk about the house. We all say how lucky we feel to be in this place. Beth keeps calling the goings-ons intentional. This leads to talk of the town and how it feels to be bursting at the seams. O starts saying ‘Greg thinks this…Greg thinks that…’ He relates how Greg made a comment about Western Australia having the space to start afresh. I think of the Indigenous with this, and their knowledge of country. Pippa makes a comment about it before me. A comment about how we’re here on this forgotten, magic land, riddled by history and vibrating with hope, in our sanctuary in Australia, in the heart of Broome, where different worlds have landed together.
Stoned, thoughts are racing and I dwell on these ideas, zooming out from the moment, further and further from this time and this place. But I’m still in this time and place because O is still talking at me, about this time now, about the present even though he's not listening to anyone else’s point and I don’t really understand what he’s saying, and I don’t think he understands what he’s saying either because to make his point, he is needing to shout it out. When I ask how he will productively share his opinion with people, get them to listen to the good message he thinks himself to possess, he doesn’t understand what I mean. 
‘Well I’m going to write,’ I interject into another of O’s spills of sharing the good word. ‘What are you going to do?’

In a rare moment of time I have no idea what the future will bring. With what I’m going to do. Sure, I have my dreams—of family and love and trees and nature and water and art—but I don’t have the steps. I don’t have movement. I don’t have the next adventure brewing in the corner of my mind.

—

I’m at Richard of the Old Croc Park’s after stopping by impromptuly—going for a ride on my bike to help my crushing-bone knees and to see if Richard is okay. We’re sitting at Richard’s desk on the back verandah. Happy (whose name we had thought was Agro) is staring at us and I’m hearing the goss on JaZaza leaving the Old Croc Park (well, being kicked out by Charles from the Old Croc Park) when an unknown number starts calling me. It’s Sammy, from JaZaza. Lou had given Sammy my number about a space to park his van. ‘Hey Sammy, I’m sitting at the Croc Park with Richard,’ I tell him. 
The world is getting smaller and smaller as it gets larger.

In the morning, I’m seated on the front verandah (or is it back verandah?) watching the dust through the lattices. Last night, we’d sat under the fairy lights, me in the hammock, and had spoken about Kohei the ghost. I had been drunk and a bit stoned, talking loudly and saying random things without fear that I was portrayed as weird. Jac, the true blue Aussie, had even noticed that the verandah side of the house has presence. ‘Not scary, nothing bad, but something’s there,’ he reckons.

—

O represents the resistance, as do the weekly ‘men’s breakfasts’ that we’ll never be invited to.

—

Jac tells me he’s never met anyone whose whole body laughs with an all-consuming shaking, an eruption, like O’s does. ‘N you can see it coming,’ Jac describes. ‘You wait for that moment when he drops his line and the whole body starts shakin.’

When I spend an afternoon pottering about the yard, my knees start cracking like crazy. I have my herbs and do my stretches; be conscious in every step I take.

O leaves. I smoke the house. Walking to work, I swagger confidence and experience through the grounds of the courthouse. There’s an old indigenous man with legs like rakes and a hat like the scarecrow. As I walk by, he looks at me and our eyes meet. I see wise eyes, like Bruce. Eyes that, I imagine, hold transcendental knowledge of living with this Earth. His kind once left such a little footprint that the land was declared Terra Nullius. The old man nods to me and I smirk.
Metres later, at the roundabout, I cross the road and lock eyes with another older indigenous man.

—

The easterly wind blows in more travellers. Quintessential travellers in overloaded 4WDs scraping the ground. There are too many of them, clogging the roads and caravan parks and stripping Coles and Woolworths shelves bare of the basics. Still it remains a small town: as I’m driving out of work, Richard appears beside me, doing a uey, both our windows wound down.

Trusting more in being surrounded by women rather than trusting in the input of men.

—

He eats cookies for breakfast with a coffee and cigarette as a side. He is skinny, a meat eater, with a gentleness that rattles me. He understands words easily.

—

I walk away wondering if they know I’m being sarcastic. I turn the corner and forget wondering if they know if I’m being sarcastic. Because if whatever I said was important enough, they’ll understand one day. 

—

I swear to God that recycling week was last week but because half the street has their recycling bin out so I feel the peer pressure and put mine out too.

—

‘You know all sorts of characters,’ Beth says to me.

—

How can I get along so well with so many people and yet feel I connect with no one?

—

Richard is dead to me. Again and again. How much leeway do you give to someone with mental health?

Frack Free Kimberley. Around me is immense beauty and familiar people, the sort who dance when no one else is dancing. It is Marc who dances first. Marc is always dancing first. Next, Pippa joins. Marc and Pippa are dancing. From up on the hill, I edge my way closer, coming to join them to dance barefoot, green grass beneath our feet, the beat amplifying the interconnectedness. We dance until a lady tells Pippa to move because her dancing is in the way of her stage view. 
John Butler plays and I dance and dance and dance some more. I feel eyes, I see eyes, beautiful eyes in different directions, beautiful eyes smiling back at me, hugging me—a hug that lingers, a hug that lifts me up and twists me around to see the community spirit of Broome. In the music and the culture and the being told by a traditional landowner that we are all here together as one. 

I am violently, violently ill. More than I’ve ever been. Purging and cleansing and awakening and scared to go into work. N gives me an iced coffee with heavenly timing. It makes me want to cry. How sick I was. I eat vegemite and tomato on toast and stare into space. Today I feel complicated. How much I struggle to see why I can’t do my job easily. What am I doing? I want four days a week.

—

Romeo comes around. I ask Romeo if he’s seen Richard. ‘Nah I haven’t really been to Woolworths or the post office,’ he replies. He talks on and I see why I like Romeo so much: he’s articulate and when he gets going on his articulate explanations, he shares deep insights. Like the presumption O possesses that everyone likes him. 
When I walk Romeo out, barefoot like I always am around the house, I step into the darkness and onto a frog. It’s the first time I’ve stepped on a frog. Romeo hates frogs.

After a swim we go to Bunnings and I see Marc’s van. As we’re walking in, a barefooted Marc is walking out holding a bucket. His bucket broke, he tells us. Kamali’s in town, he also tells us. Arrived last night, staying out at camp.
Back at home, we’re pulling into the driveway when a ute with a cockatoo feather drives past and pulls into Wil’s. ‘Wow who was that character?’ Liv comments.
‘Why?’ I wonder.
‘Looked like a real character.’
I twist around to see Kamali in Wil’s driveway.
Today, I laugh regularly and loudly. This afternoon brings creativity’s calm. I sit at my desk, my hands covered in ink from shaking my pen, and N does his string art up the verandah. I love how comforting it feels, him there. When he heads to a beach party, we chat. He tells me that he spins fire and describes the entrancement of the act—the roar of the fire and nothing else moving through your mind. 
For the very first time, I walked around the house in just a t-shirt and bather bottoms. Like what I used to do at Kamali’s. Later, I see Kamali, who takes me into his adventurous-interconnected stories.

The full moon tides take five cars from the doof. These people, these doof people, are blinded by youth, caught in a game to have fun at any expense. Two of the lost cars are N’s friends and he laughs at their loss. I laugh along while commenting on the environmental impact. After, I look over the road: which side do I lie?

—

‘What is empathy?’ Lou questions as she lies in the hammock, messaging her boss. 
Empathy is not getting so annoyed by her responses, I want to say. And isn’t empathy the power of understanding where the boss is coming from, I want to ask. This isn’t a language barrier here, Lou.
Lou keeps saying that the messages the boss is sending don’t make sense, but to me they make total sense, as do the expectations to give appropriate notice in a job. 

I say Goodnight with a smile. I hope that my eyes say more: I see you, and I don’t fear you. 
It’s different with Sammy. With Sammy I’m sarcastic and honest. Able to be myself.

I watch a Netflix doco on three great thinkers:

Marx, economic and social order
Nietzsche, the morality of God
Freud, the essence of who we are.

Of the three, it is Nietzsche I’m most enamoured by. His understanding of the acceptance of the modern world with mediocrity; our drill and thrill to live in anonymity; to live in routine where we don’t push boundaries but do what we’re told, our lack of wild imagination; being overloaded with personal choices that emphasise the empty values of our herd; and filling the void with a chaos of cultural preferences.
The humanity that came after Christianity was fervent fury, where people turned their backs on challenging ideals to lead a banal existence. There was limiting of joy or sorrow, making their concerns trivial or narcissistic, and with timid mediocrity, they were fooling themselves that they were happy. 
The new religion? Comfortableness. 
In this comfortable world, people stray from the risk of striving for greatness, shun higher values and celebrate the mundane. In this comfortable world, people look at the star—the fiery potential of full lives and the meaning of existence—with no desire to pursue it. They merely blink. 

The point of our lives is still one of the greatest challenges of the modern world. 

“If you stare long enough into the abyss, the abyss will stare back at you.”

—

At the table, Jac talks of his day and my true thoughts race: the production of this society, the final monologue of Nietzsche and this mundane society.

—

How much we can cling to the identity we give ourselves! How much we can get lost in this! 

Lou is missing $50 within her rent. She talks a lot about saving money. I stay quiet.

—

There are the Australians and there are the backpackers. I straddle worlds.

—

Beth is in the kitchen. ‘How are you?’ I ask.
‘Heavy,’ she says, looking to me with tears in her eyes.

—

Yesterday everyone was saying they had a shit day at work. But my day at work gave me a breakthrough: I want to create a new language, a new understanding.

N is on the verandah, weaving his string. Him and Lou have a nice chat and she moves on to practice poi in the backyard. It is here Lou realises she needs to leave. And so Lou begins to leave in rambles and twists, telling herself again and again that she’s a free spirit. But the more I see her, the more I see a trapped spirit. One fitting the part of hippie with her attire and barefoot, symbolising impermanence as a lovable and clumsy character wrestling purpose and direction.

—

I sit at the big table and looking out to the backyard I subtly glance around. N’s at the kitchen table on his phone, like he usually is. Reading the news, probably. He’s told me he’s not a morning person. Up close he has a smell to him, like days of no shower and cleaning. But it’s a smell I like, like his quietness. 

When I’d come home from work, I drank half a bottle of Janz with cigarettes. Sammy came by and we had fleeting and vivacious chats (God he reminds me of Anton) and then I called into Beth’s room, and she told me she absolutely was not going out. I invited her to the verandah for a drink.
In the moment of smoking another cigarette I feel I want to drink and smoke forever. To Beth I start revealing terrifying depths of myself that I don’t often reveal. I’m talking low and ominously about being caught between worlds. 
‘Does this affect you?’ Beth asks. 
Water fills my eyes. I express my yearning for someone. 
In her precocious and wise way, Beth notes that with me having such a ‘rich inner world’ she imagines that I don’t just let anyone in. 
This idea settles, and I inhale it. 
N’s now in the kitchen, whistling through a good mood. 
A white cat appears beside the pizza oven. ‘Hey there,’ I call out. But it runs across the yard and disappears into the bike area.
I prematurely go to bed, gripped by weariness and wine. At 12:30am I wake for water and the toilet. Back in bed, I try for sleep on my back and I try for sleep on my left side and I try for sleep on my right side, moving my pillow from side to side with every turn. Hours pass. I curse myself and my lack of intimacy. Frustrated, I head for the lamp and pull a card: Rest. I end up watching a YouTube video in which a girl describes how she manifested her boyfriend. I make a vow: to lighten my mood and to not go out looking for love but to embrace intimacy. 

After the worst sleep in the whole wide world, I sit at my desk. Light comes through the lattices and drowses my face. I see a reflection in the computer I think I am happy with.
I walk into the kitchen and Lou is telling Beth about going into work to explain her leaving to her boss. ‘Woman to woman,’ Lou describes, which Beth understands and supports. 
Lou looks to my fragility. ‘You’re not okay,’ she says. 
When she gives me a hug I realise that I needed a hug. Because it’s true, I’m feeling fragile, a little silly, very helpless, and yet full of hope. 
Roser comes in, Liv appears. It’s a Witchen morning.

—

After smoking a joint with Jac (after his wild bender the night before) I had curled up on the couch and watched the projector. When N came from his room, he hovered at the end of the couch and nerves washed over me. If I could have curled up even tighter, I would have. When N moved on, I felt the end of the couch vibrating, like he’d put something down. But when I glanced over, there was nothing.

—

Jac admits to having been on a bender to death—he’d woken star fishing on the side of the road, pieces of the night slowly coming back to him as a passing lady drove him into town.

It’s the second night in a row that I can’t sleep, the intensity of insomnia is something I haven’t experienced in years. The tension is felt in my jaw in waking, that sensation of holding onto something, worrying about something, needing to clear something.

—

At Marc’s camp I’m a heightened version of myself, laughing loudly with Marc like we’re old friends. Going across to Kamali’s camp, Greg was sitting there naked. At first I had hesitations, then I got over it and moved forward. 
I could stay out at camp for days. But I have to go home. I have to jump in the pool, I have to smile again. Because when I don’t smile, and when I be shy and withdrawn, is when I am mostly likely to lay awake in bed at night cursing myself. 

Time unfolds and feelings grow.

—

We are in the same place, but we are in different worlds. 

—

For someone to feel at home in the beauty of my inner world.

—

It doesn’t make sense, this attitude I possess of acting distant and cold when all I really want is the opposite. 

—

I feel I try so hard. 

—

How do I know if he’s teasing my directness or noting its presence from annoyance?

—

I make a tea before everyone is awake and retreat to finish my book in bed. A figure passes my window. In the kitchen, the stale smell lingers. I sit at my desk with books spread before me of jewellery and ideas—what to create? I crave stability.

—

I find a moth on the stairs with love heart wings. I go to the fridge at the same time as N and he agrees that if he too finds a moth then he too will stick it on the fridge.

O appears at the house, his laugh from the kitchen sending vibrations to the ballroom, where I sit before the projector.

—

At work, I still wear shirts in respect to Bill. But a day will come when I parade my underarm hairs.

—

Minimalise my possessions.

—

When I stand in my bathers and my sarong, making some random and loud comment, Lou laughs to the beauty of my masculinity. The contrast.

—

We’re lying in the outdoor living room. I burp, Jac burps.

—

Richard returns my call and straight up he depresses me. I hate how he uses my name; I hate how he tells me to not cancel on him again.

—

It was in Byron Bay, when I was eleven, that I first got my period and when I first decided I wanted to grow up and be a hippy.

—

There are days where my phone explores with messages from people I don’t know asking about rooms.

—

Still I cannot sleep and still I feel like the best version of myself that I’ve been in a while—loud and spontaneous, dancing and floating around the house. 

—

When I make a coffee and tell Beth I’m going back to my room to pissfart, this sets her into a fit of giggles, having imagined something far more whimsical to come from my mouth than pissfart.

Neil Young plays through the old speakers. I dig a hole in the veg garden with my hair high on my head and my bathers and shorts matching the flowers behind me as Josie, seated by the pool with Sammy, points out. Today, there is that Sunday-calm at the house. A calm I want to say that I don’t know where it came from, but I do. It comes from intention and good faith. I had wanted to be surrounded by creativity and people who go with season, and here I am, in the greenery of our sanctuary, where people comment in awe upon entering, where our hearts beat together, where everyone is content in their creative zone. 

It’s the worst Monday at work ever. I come home to Alex sitting in the kitchen—Lou had forewarned me that an Alex had come by the house insisting on talking with me. But I couldn’t work out who Alex was. 
Alex hugs me and I remember him from a jamming pizza night—he’d been the one passing around the acai smoothies, one of the coconut boys, living in the bush, meditating and smoking weed. Alex says things like ‘Everything you need is within you, man.’ He says man a lot. He’s here because he’s wanting to emerge from the bush and return to the normal world. For this he realises that an important first step is finding a place. ‘And this is the best house in Broome,’ he reckons. ‘I like your energy,’ he says, nodding towards me. ‘This place gives opportunity.’
I respect his determination—if this had been me, I wouldn’t have even come by to begin. And I like what he’s saying. But after the shit work day I’ve had, my energy is direct. I talk straight about the house’s operations, and Alex takes this in his stride.

— 

We’re in the kitchen at the end of the night and conversation is soft—N and Lou’s friend has been in a car accident and she’s now having brain surgery. We get talking on our entries for Shinju Matsuri and I joke about picking our favourite number for the price. ‘Seven,’ N shoots. Seven, my birth month, my numerology number.

N mentions having his friends by on Sunday, after the doof. That’s fine by me, I say. Although I don’t warm to this doof crew, these people are not my tribe.

—

‘I don’t think she’ll be here much longer,’ I say to Liv. ‘I’ve loved Lou’s energy but simultaneously had absorbed the uncertainty she felt.’ You can love someone’s company and still it can exhaust you.

Thursday off work, the French boys sleep in, dust blows across the paddocks by the Boulevard holding caravans. As I make a monster breakfast, N is in morning mode—bleary eyed and bushy tailed. We engage in very important conversation about how good the Nothing But Carrots juice is. The night before we’d spoken more profoundly, though. Well, he had spoken more. Once you get him going, he really does have a lot to say. 
N leaves to get ready for the doof, Sammy comes from his van, Lou returns from camping at Marc’s looking like someone has died. She has a strong odour. ‘When Sammy gives Lou a hug, she resists. Instantly, her energy drags me down too. What’s wrong?’ I ask.
‘How did you know?’
‘Well it’s not hard for us to see such things in each other, is it?’
She’s undecided about what to do from here: does she stay or does she go? 
Lou sits at the big table to work on her tax. I float through the house and walking through the kitchen I turn the corner to face her, still at the big table: ‘I think you need to go, Lou.’
She starts repeating herself: that she’s a free spirit. 
As she speaks, I regret calling her a free spirit. She’s clinging to this identity. And I’m always sceptical of people who constantly spit their identity at you, ‘I am this… I am that… I am this…’ 
‘But I’m in a good place here,’ Lou debates with herself, ‘I like being around people like Marc and Kamali and you. But this,’ she says, pointing to the soles of her feet, ‘these they want to move.’ 
My thoughts start repeating themselves: that the free spirit is in contradiction to her mind. Lou is a free spirit without purpose. A contradiction to which I am familiar.
At Lou’s request, I sit at the table with her to help with her tax. When Jac comes by and touches Lou’s shoulder to say Hello, she says a short ‘Hey,’ making it clear she’s in a bad place. Watching on, I take another mental note to Lou’s treatment of people. Because I don’t like how she treats other people, like we’re so often a burden to her tiredness. 
It’s later in the afternoon when Liv and I go out, and Lou sends us both text messages about getting her beer. Then, when we come home with beer, Lou takes the beer for the doof. And, when she leaves for the doof, beer in arms, she stops to look at Liv and me and say, ‘Thanks for the beer, and thanks for helping me. There’s my food in the pantry…I will come collect it Sunday, maybe Monday.’
‘Maybe then you can thank us properly and say goodbye properly?’ I bite.
‘No of course I’ll say goodbye,’ she says, misinterpreting the implication I had thrown into my tone.
‘PLEASE GO!’ I declare as she walks down the front steps. And I mean it, there’s no question. She can’t use all of us here in this house for her own purposes anymore. She needs to go.

—

At night I do that thing where something bothers me and so I think about it obsessively. It’s about Lou, about all her selfish actions: coming to me to dispute rent, about the tax, the amount of time she’s eaten other’s food but not shared her own, her comments on parking Marc’s van inside while he had to be flown to Perth for hospital. This free spirit is excessively selfish, trapped by words and hindered by language. This free spirit won’t be easily welcomed back into the house. 

Saturday afternoon dust hangs in the air. I dive into the pool and swim underwater laps. Seated on the edge, the reflection of the dying vines wobbles in the water. 
I’d walked home from work quickly, not knowing the rush when so many people were at the doof. Coming to the house, Lou’s van was in the driveway and I released an audible heave: ‘WHAT is SHE doing here.’ 
In the kitchen I stocked my wine and scotch away and looked down the hall to Lou charging her phone. I don’t acknowledge her. 
Lou comes into the kitchen with a note she had been writing as I arrived. ‘Thought you’d be home at two,’ she says. Seeing her fragility, I don’t respond. ‘I got to go,’ she carries on, passing the note across. ‘Was going to leave a note for you because I can’t wait any longer, I have to leave.’
‘I know,’ I say, holding my face stale.
‘I can’t keep doing this to other people and carry this energy,’ she says, tears welling in her eyes as she shakes her head.
‘I know,’ I say.
‘I’m going to Darwin and to Cairns and I’m moving on, I can’t do this.’
I hug her and hold her tight, feeling her trembling breaths slow down. I keep holding her, passing through whatever assurance I have in knowing that everything will work out alright and that she needs to leave. 
I would have been so offended if you had left me a note, I tell her.

—

The love felt when dancing with Marc and Kamali. Giant swirls, giant smiles, everyone else at the doof.

A Sunday passes smoothly and methodically (methodically, like N, methodically like the song by Nils Frahm we share appreciation for).  
At the beach we’d (a few of us witches) swum in the waves and after, I briefly lay on the sand. At Broomerang, Lou’s note flaps around the floor of my bedroom and the house carries on almost like her presence here never existed. In the afternoon, Roser and her friend come by. We sit by the pool, talking girl talk—her friend’s happy to meet me after being told about me. I tell Roser of Lou’s leaving in confusion, with visible demons swirling around her. I draw cards. They leave, I dance around. Beth edits my story, Liv plays the piano and lights the fire, Jac plays guitar, Sammy wanders amongst it all seeking interactions, Lou’s room lays empty, N sleeps after four days at the doof, gone into this other world I do not know. I pass positive thoughts to him.

There has been torment throughout the weeks spent at work. I have tried to accept my place there, but the reality of my mind is filled with racing moments and reoccurring dreams. Dreams away from work. Then, when I come home, I enter into our sanctuary, and I believe in the good that is to come. For deep down I know myself, the feminine and the masculine, and I know my capabilities. One day I will hone in on my nostalgic nature and share these moments. I accept that it is to happen. But first, first I will go cook dinner.

—

Elsa messages for a room, which is fitting with Alex having disappeared.

—

Tonight is clean sheet night. 

—

Those few moments of eye contact, the sparkle of another universe. When it’s gone, I want more. 

—

N goes to work, passing by my desk. We don’t talk or look at each other. Frazey Ford plays. I feel a body behind me. I turn. ‘Hey Sammy, what are you doing up so early?’ I ask. 
I need to pee, he tells me, kissing my forehead.

When Kamali comes by to take me for dinner, I’m with Beth and Liv in the kitchen, holding Neil. Marc calls Kamali and I shout into the loudspeaker for Marc to come by. I suggest cooking at home, but Kamali wants to go out for dinner, it’s his special day in town. 
Kamali and I are on the back verandah (or is it front? The one by the pool) when Marc coo-ees through the house. 
When we get out of the car near Little India, Kamali looks to me: ‘You’re dressed very…Melbourne.’
‘Well you look like a hippy,’ I react.
Crossing the road to Little India, a familiar bus glides through the roundabout and a man is hanging out the window. ‘COME TO INDIA,’ Kamali and Marc shout out. 
‘Who is that?’ I ask.
Kevin and Crespy, they tell me.
‘Kevin and Crespy? Sounds like a comedy duo.’
Inside the outside area of Little India, Kevin of Pemberton and a Mark I’d met in Denmark appear. Kevin and I hug awkwardly. Seated at a round table, we raise our glasses to clink before drinking. ‘To old acquaintances,’ Kevin says. 
I tell Kevin of my job, the house, of losing my car. 
By the end of dinner, Kevin’s referring to me as a Strong Woman. When he goes on to describe an upcoming festival at his property, he comments that ‘all the women can be in the talking circle.’
Matso’s is packed. I see Stav and Matan, Roser, Edward, Max and Josie. Roser and I sit behind a young boy singing on stage, the crowd love-hearted eyed before him. He keeps glancing back to us, to Roser. In his next song, the stage has become a 360 display.
In the morning, Roser is in the kitchen, having slept in her bus the night before. We make coffee and sit around the table. N is there, shy and reserved. When he goes to work, I awaken, edging towards writing but not quite there. Today it’s windy and I’m wired.

Helen Garner talks about giving the truth no matter how grim and embarrassing. So here it is: it was another night lying in bed, stoned from a joint with Pippa, my mind doing that thing where shocks go through the back of my head and it sounds like electricity and feels like my whole body is jolting, and I’m yearning, I’m seeing, this enigma, this guy so close to me—right outside my room—and still so far away. When our eyes talk, the silent conversation is the intimacy I crave. Sometimes I think about creeping into his room one night. Then I think, Nah that would be heaps creepy. Instead I carry on putting on a show for the rest of the housemates. 

Liv says she doesn’t care but she clearly does care and I can’t be bothered to care. Liv is socially conservative and I’m experiencing a great desire to break away from this social conservatism for a while.

—

Sammy’s by the pool with the young and beautiful Swedish guy.

—

Moneybags Beth.

—

We play Banangrams at the big table. The French guys are competitive.
Sammy standing there pretending to box and telling us he has a super early morning. 8am.

—

I shower for the first time in days.

—

Just chill, Sarah. Be vulnerable, let people in.

—

With Roser. We sit by the pool and I read her my story, leading us into deep conversations on our upbringings and the similarities between them. When I shuffle the cards, Om falls out. When I draw a card, it’s Autumn.

A night at Broomerang. N comments on being the observer and listener in group situations. He references the beautiful French girl who’s been hanging around the house, one who I imagined him to be interested in. ‘She talks too much,’ he says of her, while he is happier to listen, which I already know of him. When N and I talk about the connections we are making through the house, he says ‘this person and that, they go on to get married.’ 
For a second, I imagine it is us getting married.
Chat continues. 
‘…the ghost in the corner writing a book,’ he notes, and I wonder what else he has noticed about me. Then I get drunk and talk shit. I think I’m talking about the ghost when N suddenly stands, goes to the kitchen, takes his phone and retreats to his room. Yet again, I’m left wondering what I said so wrong, wondering what I could have said instead. I think I might have chocolate in the fridge.
I’m stoned and I’m drunk and I’ve had too many cigarettes and I shudder inside. He is moody, this one, with eyes like he’s stoned, and a sense that I annoy him. That he silently loathes me. Hearing footsteps past my window, I’m scared: have I ruined my chances? Because I’m trying to work out how to communicate so much but I can’t find the right time, and I don’t know who else there is, for him, and I keep digging myself into a hole. 

I wake early, as always, still wondering. In the kitchen I tell the witches that I have a sore stomach. We stand around and watch Neil cry while trying to eat his food. In the toilet, I have my period. I go to my desk and the sun is different today. The reflection in my computer screen is clear, lattices behind me and my eyes bright blue.
It’s afternoon. I walk out from my room and N’s sitting at the big table with Neil. I stride past them and join Liv in the outdoor lounge. I stare aimlessly into space and through the lattices the afternoon sun shines on N’s face. I don’t want to look too hard but there’s a sense that I’m being watched in return. He takes Neil to snuggle on the couch. 
I move from the outdoor lounge and our paths briefly cross. There are raised eyebrows and no smiles.
We get ready to go watch Sammy and Kalle play at Matso’s. I play the Sister Act soundtrack and sing along. N appears in the kitchen in jeans and actual shoes. ‘Yeah I might tag along,’ he says, just as I had been ready to write him off.
Our gang is at Matso’s watching Sammy and Kalle. Kamali and Marc and co are there. Leo too, and he is drunk, kissing me on the cheek and trying to pull me to dance. I keep pulling away, looking to N looking at me. By the end of the night I’m feeling much happier having spent time with N, knowing I’m not hated, feeling it could be a mutual attraction. I can’t un-imagine what it would be like for our bodies to connect. And even if another girl were to come along, I think there is something between us that would still hold me in higher regard.

It’s not that I believe, it’s just that I don’t not believe.

—

Us girls in the kitchen, talking. Sammy sitting on the outdoor couch, glaring at us in wonderment: how are they like that so early in the morning?
I think Neil takes after Sammy. He isn’t a morning doggo.

—

At work, I befriend the postman.

It’s Sunday morning and the band-boys are playing instruments on the back verandah. Liv is in her room, working on the shipwreck doco. Beth is at the table writing. Us girls go out and return to Metallica being played in the kitchen as Sammy cooks.

—

Monday mid-period sadness. There is no energy to smile, no energy to make eye contact, no energy to engage. However there is energy to be annoyed by the dirty house—the floors have that feeling of uncleanliness. There is energy to be annoyed by Sammy’s late rent and Sammy’s shit lying around the house, despite his great personality. And there is energy to lie in the hammock. There, some girl appears from nowhere and starts talking talking talking at me. 
Last night had been a pizza night. Giulia swung in the hammock, and I sat on a chair with N on the floor beside me. He was fluent and astute in explaining his science to me until the DMT conversations came and led me back to the seeming meaningless to life. Once N left, I had three drags of a joint, became self-conscious to my boob tube and sarong and hair on top of my head, and looked around to see a house full of people I should say goodbye to. 
I ghosted. 
In bed, the laughter from outside wafted through all the open doors of the house, and I cried and I cried. Maybe I should just take DMT again and float and float and float far into space, where I don’t need to say goodbye to people and I don’t feel so terribly alone despite the laughter and happiness created in this magic house that supports me.

—

The Taliban takes over Kabul.

—

If I could go away from this entire life, I would. I really would. Just cease to exist so then I don’t have to break anyone’s heart.

At Matso’s. I’m talking to Sammy’s ex-girlfriend and N’s close by, on acid. I nearly trip over from drunkenness and impulsively leave with embarrassment. In bed, I can’t sleep. I obsess. I regret leaving like that. He was right there. RIGHT THERE. 

—

Imbalance hangs in the still-messy house with overflowing rubbish. Matso’s ghosting regrets live on strong. A few of us are seated in the outdoor lounge area. Conversations ramble and I stutter, saying I’d had a shit sleep, saying I had woken in the night thinking of hot chips. 
‘Wait, what,’ N says to this statement. ‘Thinking of hot chips? Wow, that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.’
I can’t reply because I don’t know what to do. I can’t tell him the truth, can I? 
In typical Sarah style, I suppress my heart, let my yearnings grow to atmospheric proportions, whisper my fantasies to the wind. I don’t know where I stand.

—

There is my studious side and there is my rowdy side. I can go between.

I like how jewellery is a reflection on time. I don’t like how modern jewellery is a fashion statement of wealth or how the cheap and crappy fast fashion jewellery fills the Earth. What happened to jewellery as meaningful, as symbolism?
I sit at my desk:

‘Many pendants reflected the whims and passions of the wearer, as well as the expanding world of the sixteenth century.’

‘The Renaissance was a fervent period of European cultural, artistic, political and economic “rebirth” following the Middle Ages. Generally described as taking place from the 14th century to the 17th century, the Renaissance promoted the rediscovery of classical philosophy, literature and art.’

— from Jewels & Jewellery, Clare Phillips (Thames & Hudson)

Thoughts on the symbolism in jewellery reminds me of being at the Mangrove with Richard. We had made our amends and enjoyed heightened, alcohol-fuelled conversation about the world and how it is, in essence, quite fucked. When I visibly disagreed with Richard's statements, he cut in to tell me that he knew what I was going to say. ‘And what’s that,’ I had asked, amused.
‘That you can point the blame to the manmade world.’
‘No,’ I bit. Although there’s truth there, that’s true. And it’s true that the time has come when we need women rising to fix the imbalance and environmental damage resulting from this imbalance. But it hadn’t been what I was thinking. ‘What I was going to say is that if we all sat around with this attitude then the world will definitely be fucked.’
With more wine, the conversation goes on to me giving examples of how all through history we have lived through moments of great change. Imagine all the revolutions that have come before us.

Someone is eating Pippa’s bread and Pippa is tired of someone eating her bread without asking. Order needs to be enforced and I’m not in the state to do this. People are everywhere. Everyone feels like a stranger. The house feels like a guesthouse. I’m spaced. 

—

Who am I when I enter into all these situations?

—

A certain sort of breathing takes me back to that place of intimacy with creation. How deep my thoughts have become on this life and these people around me, who anchor me to this life. People. There are people all around me, people I cannot escape. 

I’m searching for a word that describes an unscripted, humorous situation. Like what happened last night with Rachel and Cody and acid—the absurdity of Cody and how his muttering and laughing made me laugh even more. 
At first light, I rode home and I felt like I was riding between times, like I’m back in Melbourne and I’m Melbourne Sarah instead of riding back to Broomerang while realising that nobody knows Melbourne Sarah. But I’m at Broomerang nonetheless, and there are way too many people around me and I don’t know where to hide and so I lay by the pool to stare at the yellow morning sun on the palm trees until Pippa appears above me, showing off her gorgeous new pants and earrings and anti-fracking t-shirt.
Pippa goes to work.
I move inside. Think of a baby, a baby called Charlie. Charlie’s coming today, I just know it. And here I am, wild Aunt Sarah sitting at her desk, letting the sunshine through the lattices soak her face, realising that Shit, there’s too many people in this house and they’re appearing from the woodworks like cockroaches.
Wild Aunt Sarah thinks the house is empty, perches herself in the hammock. But you’re never alone in this house. She hears Jac coughing, sees Sammy’s van shaking, looks to the dragonflies around the back lawn, and she is so sure that Charlie is being born, that there is a bebe called Charlie and he is being born today.

—

I’m nearly at the foyer of Cable Beach when I realise I’m wearing two different shoes. For me, it’s a euphemism of being caught between worlds. 

Saturday. I come home and see cars out the front. Stav and Matan are at their van. Silay arrives. Inside is Kalle, the coconut boys, Jac, Pippa and some strays I don’t know. 
A gentle acid trip and the afternoon meanders. The Australian’s are by the pool and the travellers are out the back. I go between, down the middle hallway that cuts the house in two, holding my old Minolta and seeing rainbows of light when taking pictures. I’m laughing so much. What am I seeing? Made-up things or real things? 
Preparing for Bust Out, Pippa and I pry Alex for a joint. ‘In exchange for us having you into our home space, you give us a joint?’ I reason. 
Pippa sniggers besides me but Alex doesn’t understand what I’m saying—he’s not willing to share. When I hear him in the kitchen telling someone that he doesn’t have a phone so he can’t exchange numbers, and then when an hour later I’m seeing a sketch at Bust Out on a backpacker who sells coconuts and doesn’t have a phone, my life explodes with fireworks of laughter and a deep deep happiness. It’s like I’m already missing these times as I live them.

—

After all that joking on the mockumentary, when it comes to the time of drama it is Liv who is in the middle of it.
She walks into the house sour-faced, radiating judgment, offering no friendly Hellos to all the people, all the alternative people, here. Because there are too many people here, too many alternative people here. 
In the kitchen, Marc walks in through the open kitchen door. He takes one look at Liv and says, ‘Something’s wrong.’ She starts to cry and tries to quickly leave. I hug her and agree that we’ll talk tomorrow. 
I wake in the night thinking: I feel more at home with those who are wild and free. I respect how people can go with the wind enough to blow through our door, stay for a drink or dinner or an afternoon, and blow out again. Because when that is me travelling, I appreciate such spaces and how they can be welcoming. So I question, how long will this busy time last? And where do I sit amongst it all?

For me to be productive, like I keep telling myself I desire, it would be best I left this house. But this is not how my life currently stands—these are not the circumstances in which I’ve been placed. Instead I’m here, in this odd position of power, being open to varying characters, embracing opportunities, giving space for creativity and connections, and waking in the night. No, I will not be that person who is stressed all the time. No, I will not give all this up for one person who is stressed all the time (someone so stressed that she is forever locking her door even when it’s just the Australians home).

—

I’m moving away from the girls who were initially my support network. Because these people, these other people, they’re the gemstones.

—

It had been another dusty night at Matso’s. N appeared before me as I was perched on the rock to the left of the stage. When I was ready to leave, N and I were standing with some of our people. I looked across the group to him. We gave each other a nod. On the way out, Elsa joined us, staying with us for the walk home and staying with us as we ate N’s pasta and sat outside for a cigarette. When Elsa finally went to bed, moments later N turned to me, ‘See you in the morning.’ I had been so prepared to say something. If Elsa hadn’t been there.

I’ve been delivered rich characters. A story:

Sammy is cleaning the kitchen (finally).
Kalle is sorting band equipment.
Elsa is writing—one day she will be something, she will be famous.
Beth sticks more with Liv.
At work, the lack of fairy lights in town is accredited to the ‘doofers.’ But I don’t understand the goss—when I go to Bunnings there are lots of fairy lights. On Facebook, there’s another post discriminating backpackers.

It’s after work. Most of the house are at a beach party. I lie on my bed. Max comes by, I tell him that most of the house are at the beach party. I find myself in a whirlwind, laying on the outdoor couch, listening to music and crying. When Beth gets home, I get drunk in front of her again, expressing my sorrows and my yearning for just that one person. ‘Do you have your sights set on anyone?’ she asks. 
No, I tell her with a smile. 
I go to Rachel’s (now living in old Broome with Cody). Riding home, I’m a little stoned, loving the whole-body feeling of riding a bike. I’m going down Guy Street, doing the calculations of the route I’m riding, the time, and N driving home. I turn down Herbert Street, I lift my body and pedal harder. Cars pass. I feel eyes on me and before the car is before me, I know it’s N. Even when we are separated—from a car to bike—the energy that passes between us is palpable. 
In the kitchen, N’s sitting there. I’m too stoned. I bend down to pat Neil and N is looking at me, telling me he saw me riding, and I’m bursting with all I want to say if we were to lie naked and exposed but there are other people around because there are always other people around and I’m feeling vulnerable and sad.
I turn and go down the dark hall to hide in the safety of my room. 

I’m back in the hammock, back talking with Beth about the house, about all these characters and how sometimes it can be too much despite identifying them as golden moments as we live them. Beth keeps using ‘charmed’ to explain the microcosm we’re in. 

—

I send a reminder to the group about maintaining chores considering the amount of people through the house. Sammy doesn’t read this message and complains about having ants in the quiche he left on the bench. 

—

A note appears on the third fridge, ‘DON’T eat food you haven’t bought unless you ask.’ 

—

The weather is changing, my fan starts spinning, I change my room around, make my safe space in the middle of the house even sparser. 

—

Through the speakers another Spotify playlist vibrates the old speakers. Cat starts crying to a German song that starts playing. ‘She’s on her period and feeling sensitive,’ Danidoo tells me. 

—

Liv and I go to buy dog beds to use as cushions by the pool area. On our return, a song that N had showed me vibrates the old speakers.

Before the Shinju Matsuri Art Opening, in which N has entered his string art and me my photography, I sit on the verandah with a beers and cigarettes, ‘I’m lost, I don’t know what to do with myself,’ I tell him.
We waltz to the civic centre in our household gang, us all dressed slightly refined and kind-of sophisticated, down Stewart Street. A route we often walk with variations of gemstones. 
At the Civic Centre we get excited by the free wine, and each take a glass of free wine, dispersing with our free wine to walk at separate paces through the artworks with the free wine. 
After the loop, we all return to the tables that are holding the free food and are close by the free wine. We quickly take over an entire table and promptly flag down the fresh dumplings coming out. We take more free wine. Sammy’s hat appears above the crowd and then Sammy appears around the table with barefeet, taking dumplings and a free wine. ‘Had to sneak through the kitchen,’ he says with a full mouth. ‘They wouldn’t let me in without shoes, and I left them at the beach.’
We, the household, laugh about who we are amongst these people who take such sophistication so seriously. Because we are only slightly refined and kind-of sophisticated.
We walk in convoy back to the house. Standing around the kitchen, we speak of our want for a joint, but no one has weed. Sammy’s phone rings and the person on the other end offers to come around and smoke a joint. We sit around on the verandah and smoke a joint. 

Holy Smokes! What is happening to me! How much longer. All this drinking and smoking.
We tiptoe and we morph. From smiles to ignoring.
You say you observe, but what is it you observe? What do you inhale?
We’re two internal people, which makes this hard. Imagine, to sprinkle confidence on us both and how this story may unfold so differently.

Saturday comes back around. Max is in the kitchen declaring that he’s leaving today. We go out the front, through the gates, and assess his car; an old Rav4 covered in dirt, its belly rusting from Max never cleaning the seawater. Under the bonnet is rusted too. 
Walking through the markets to work, I see familiar and smiling faces and wish to spend the day hanging around the markets rather than serving rich people. 
On my return to Broomerang after work, there are cars out the front, although not as many as the week before. I distribute free sushi, Silay shares the leftover Filipino foods from the markets, and Guilia cuts melon. In the kitchen there are people all around me. When N comes in, he places his coffee cup in the recycling, and we lock eyes for a second.
It's the lantern ceremony at Gantheaume Point for Shinju Matsuri. Alex and Kalle jam on their guitars, nearby a tourist sits in a camping chair and films them. When the lady shows Alex her video, so happy with herself for having witnessed their impromptu music, Alex tells her that he doesn’t care about footage but that people often find what he does really ‘cool.’ 
Later, the household is at the Croc Park. Lachlan’s face doesn’t look quite right. Richard trips over a fire. People take their instruments and jam in the shed. We stand around smoking a joint and Alex tells how people always see him as a character.
In the morning I’m woken by N getting home from the doof, where he had gone from the Croc Park, and playing music by the pool. He’s still high on acid. I know in the days to come he will be moody. When he goes to bed, I take the opportunity to sit undistracted at my desk.

—

A moth flies around the kitchen, zooming past my face, back towards N and his fish and chips. When the moth lands on his wrist he furrows his brow looking at it as it clings to his wrist and then his chest. While I laugh, he stays serious. While I find it amusing, he’s not impressed.
After our fish and chips, we sit in the outdoor lounge smoking our cigarettes. Silence descends. I stare to the empty space, to the fairy lights, wondering how to vocalise this: Want to come cuddle? But Beth appears in the kitchen, and he leaves.

These moments are already dripping in gold.

—

Sammy: ‘It’s super easy, only seventeen chords.’

—

Sammy juggling in the kitchen then walking outside to speak Chinese with Niang Niang.

—

With a roll of the eyes, Liv tells me that Alex had been around the house all day.

—

There’s good music through the house. Gypsy music, instrumental music.

—

Pippa has innate wisdom that stems from upbringing.

—

When Sammy tells Alex there’s a party on, Alex replies ‘Fuck yeah.’

—

Haven’t messaged Richard after he fell across the fire.

—

Alex comes and sits in the middle of me and Kalle, making the three of us snug on the couch.

—

Walking to the bathroom, Alex comes in naked from the pool. He has a good body. He’s pretty, luring.

—

I see Elsa in the supermarket. It takes her a while to notice me. We talk about the house being a parody.

I’m on the verandah with Sammy and N and we’re talking about being hungover and carrying on with drinking: ‘I see myself as a plane. You don’t need to just drop from the sky, you need to come in for landing,’ Sammy explains.

—

Max had scabies. He gave them to Roser. Other people now have them too. Alex gets defensive when Roser wouldn’t hug him in the kitchen, telling Roser that he has it too but they haven’t been so bad with him. Roser protests that it’s about the transmission, about the other people, not just about Alex. Sammy hugs Roser anyway.

—

Beth is heavy moving around the house. She walks without zest whereas I walk lightly and fast and often. I ask her how she is. She talks about her slump, or her rut, or whatever word it was that she used. I don’t think this house is right for her; she’s too shy, not engaging enough.

Foggy mornings, fans whirling, the start of September. Alex and Kalle are asleep on the daybeds. When they wake, I know what needs to happen. 
Alex and Kalle are in the kitchen. It’s time to have a conversation with them and the role they play in this house that they are absorbing. I come in from the outdoor lounge and ask Alex, ‘So how did you come to be here?’
‘Amazing thanks,’ he replies.
I laugh loudly. ‘No. How did you come to be here? Who are you here through? Who’s paying the rent for your being here?’
They both express their gratitude for this space. Alex, who has now decided to go South with Kalle because he ‘just needs people man’ is now welcome to stay until he leaves. 
The next day, Kalle transfers me rent.

It’s a Monday night. At a work dinner within Cable Beach Club I feel like I don’t belong. The girls gossip and I cut in, proposing our misconception of time and our reaction to the virus and how the world needed shaking up and now there’s a shake up here and all we still like to do is sit around and gossip. The girls keep referring to doofs and asking questions about the sorts of drugs etc. I can’t remember what explanations I give as I sat there, my tongue wine-sharp, so deeply comprehending our absurdity, yet aiming for silence. I’m so desperate to go home.
Back at Broomerang, feeling numb from my misplacement, I take myself to the hammock and lie in the dark staring into the dark. I would love a joint. I think I hear someone at the gate but the silence that follows is too long. I return to the dark. Someone slowly appears from the shadows. It’s Alex. He’s just finished work flipping burgers and needs somewhere to stay in town. He’d messaged Elsa but hadn’t heard back. I’m glad to see him. Days before in the kitchen, he’d said how he often reflects and compares modern day to, say, the 1700s, and instantly I respected him for this. Because I do that too.
Alex joins me underneath the branch of fairy lights. Without me asking, he declares he has no weed. We chat, asking each other questions. He discovers what sort of place I come from, the sort of things I’ve done, and how I can move between different worlds. We both philosophise, our conversation a maze of riddles. In speech, he refers to himself a lot, which people often do when they’re on a journey. I acknowledge this, let it pass. 
Headlights appear, the gate slides open, JaZaza are in their vans returning from a gig at the roadhouse. I stay swinging in the hammock when they join us. Sammy wheels in Beth’s bike and holds up Alex’s bag, telling him not to leave it out the front in these parts. Alex says, ‘Yeah man I believe in cosmic forces with these things. Like I’ll feel it coming if it’s coming.’ 
‘Whose bike is that?’ I ask him.
‘Ah I dunno, I took it from there,’ he said, pointing to the bike shed.
‘Well if you’re taking other people’s bikes without asking, you might have some other cosmic forces coming your way.
Now we all want a joint, but we don’t have any. Alex, Cat and Danidoo go to buy weed from a sweet aboriginal boy at a house in Old Broome, while Sammy and I go into one of our rambling conversations about spirituality and India and our vulnerabilities and sarcasm. Kalle listens on, sometimes nodding and smiling.

Bloody Tuesday. Going into work I remain a little numb. I’m no longer angry or mad on being there but disheartened by having to interrupt the writing flow that had slid through my veins that morning. Some of the conversations with these work girls, who I love, are also tedious. As they talk, I think about the design of pieces and what I want to create. When a lady comes in and tells me the story of the engraved pendant that hangs around her neck, I relish in the symbolism. 
Back at Broomerang, Danidoo tells me the story of the ring she wears. Around us, the house is a boy’s house, with recycling overflowing the recycling bins, dirty dishes near the sink, shit on the benches, outside ashtrays full. I lay in the hammock with a beer and cigarette, talking with Kalle. N comes out in a sarong and messy hair, shyly joining us. He’s been in bed for the past three days with a staph infection in his knee. He is waiting for an appointment with the doctors for antibiotics.
Coming home from Matso’s, where a failed appearance turned my mood to be fixation on weed, craving the gentle high that strips my giddiness, I see lights on in the kitchen when I expect it to be dark. Damn, I don’t want someone there. I don’t look up when I come through the sliding door into the kitchen. I already know who it is. N is sitting at his spot at the outside bench smoking a cigarette. We eat our respective, crappy food in silence—he seems annoyed by me.

Wednesday. I call in sick to work so I can spend my day writing. I think it’s good to call in for personal/health reasons, and today is a day for this. Because today I would be a burden to the work girls when I’m so desperate to expel my energy on something that holds greater meaning for me rather than serving those rich people. 
Instead, in our bustling home, N won’t look at me anymore. He must be angry with me. I want to tell him I’m here for whatever he needs, but I don’t. There are so many people about. When people ask how he is, he responds ‘okay’ with a whisper. When he’s scrolling on his phone, again, I ask: ‘what do you do on your phone all the time?’
‘Read.’
Of course, because N will read anything. And this is exactly why I’m so drawn to him. I say something about being told that wide reading is key to an expansive mind, and I let my lazy sentences linger as I stare to the oven clock. Time is killing me. 
Jazz plays. Sammy’s dirty towel is spinning with my load of towels in the washing machine. I sit outside with Elsa, Alex and the band. Alex’s hands are all beat up from climbing coconut trees and cooking at Maca’s. He’d had a night on ket and is now back at ‘the house he’s staying at.’ When I ask him about hoisting up the fairy lights around the coconut trees by the pool, he says he’s ‘properly kangaroo tranquilised out.’
Lunch is being made in the kitchen and Amalia, the gorgeous French girl I recently met who told me I always look so beautiful, is there. Last Tuesday night, riding home in Old Broome, she’d been pushed off her bike. She seems so fragile and sad she could snap. I leave the social setting of the kitchen and return to my desk. I stare at the decaying flywire door N lies behind. I hear a bang and turn my attention towards my computer as N comes toward me and butterflies grip my whole being. I don’t look up. I muster the courage to return to the kitchen and give Amalia the hug she needs. For here, as the Queen of Broomerang, I enter into situations in a different way. A way where I can make the rules and I have no fear of holding my own (usually I would be far shyer and far more hesitant). 
In the kitchen I take Amalia in my arms and tell her she isn’t alone. 
I’m back at my desk, deep in writing, when I hear movement and a coughing. A girl appears. She looks familiar. ‘Hello,’ I say, taking out my ear phones. 
‘Hi there,’ she says with a big grin.
We work out that we’d once briefly met in the carpark of Cable Beach—I had been with Roser and was eager to get home while Roser and the girl who now stands at my desk friend had a big conversation. The girl who now stands at my desk tells me she’d noticed my irritability at the time. Then the girl keeps standing there, looking at me in my personal desk space. 
‘So are you an artist?’ she asks.
‘Ah, no,’ I say, shaking my head although I’ve had this question before—is it in the way I dress? How I act? I don’t know.
‘What are you doing then?’ she asks in her upfront Australian accent.
‘Writing.’
‘What are you writing?’
‘Ah,’ I begin, unsure on how to handle her prying. ‘Just a story…’
‘You’re very mysterious.’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be. But I’m just here working and you took me by surprise.’ Because you know, sometimes I feel like a tourist attraction in my own home. And here I am on a day off in my house and my space and I’m being asked all these questions I prefer not to be answering right this very moment in my own home.
Back in the kitchen, we’re eating super delicious pasta that Alex cooked when Liv walks in from the table room. She’s wearing her thongs. I hadn’t realised she’d be home all day. ‘Yep, working,’ she says, her serious eyes scanning the room to the seemingly outlandish characters. 
I know that this isn’t forever. That most of these outlandish characters will be gone by next week and so it’s time to savour these moments that won’t last forever.

Thursday. It’s the woman's kitchen this morning, eating breakfast with Dannidoo, Cat and Roser. We talk about the coordination of the house and the coordination of gigs—how to go about such things. Later, back in the kitchen, Dannidoo freshly back from the beach, she thanks me again, reiterating how amazing the spirit of the house is. 
When the house is quiet in the middle of the day, I sit at my desk and write and wonder when N will come back from the doctor and his errands. When he’s seated at his spot on the back bench that overlooks the palms, I go to him declaring I’m off to ride my bike to Short Street Gallery to buy some Aboriginal Art for my nephew. We talk more lovingly than we have in days but still I’m saying things I wouldn’t say if I wasn’t so nervous and hopeless. 
When I see Liv, we snatch moments to converse. She notes how Alex has been around the house a lot, she says how her and Alex understood each other when Alex had spoken of the bloody hippies stealing from the supermarket. In response, Liv had been like, ‘Hell yeah, totally.’ The thing is, Alex is a bloody hippie who steals from the supermarket, but do I tell her that he’s totally having her on or is that cruel?
I’m lying on my bed, listening to some tunes, when the back decaying flywire door opens. I look out my window, to the lattices and the full afternoon colours. When N walks by, his eyes go to my desk. Should I leave him love notes? Because if it was anyone else here who was hurt, I wouldn’t be so embarrassed to express my concern and tenderness towards them. So why him? Why me?
Late sunshine falls on Sammy and Jac with their guitars in the table room. I move about, taking photos. Out on the grass, Niang is cutting Elsa a fringe. Pippa and I discuss the relationships we hold with older men. Later when she next walks past my window, I call her in to offer the idea that with men we can argue back.
Lazing on the verandah amongst the creativity, we all move to the night markets, where we laze on the grass watching Carles and JaZaza perform at the makeshift bar. N comes on crutches and sits next to me.

Friday. Some say there were 80, maybe 100, at the concert. The space had been full. The back grass is now dead. 

It’s a Saturday off work. There are all sorts of people about. People like Alex, who says, ‘Fuck yeah, loving it,’ and Niang Niang the pocket rocket hippie full of energy, who tells me about playing guitar and how much she loves this vibe. 
At the markets we’re all there. I buy oysters and retreat home.
At home, N decides to make a big lunch. But there’s sweat on his face and a loss of colour to his skin. He’s holding his knee as he—the observer, the listener, the enigma, happy when he’s high and quiet when he’s low—fights back tears. I give him an awkward hug from behind when I see his hurt. I resist using this opportunity to demand he please take better care of himself. I want him to feel supported. I fail.
The gas runs out.
I organise a new gas bottle (from Wil) and leave N to cook while I take a little bit of acid and go to the pool. There, Leor and Jac float, Elsa reads another book, I lay on the tiles and watch the palm trees sway. When N comes to tell us that lunch is served, Leor blinks from his floatation device, ‘Wow I forgot a whole other world exists outside of this one.’ We are slow to move until Alex comes to round us up, silently chastising us for not coming to support all the effort N had put into his gorgeous food considering the visible pain in his face. Alex really is a wise soul in the younger years of his life.
On the back verandah, I’m twirling and twirling, not caring but feeling and floating, saying to Silay the voluptuous Filipino with gust and fervour, ‘You know I once would have been so shy in situations like these.’ I glance to Cat, who’s listening on, saying how comfortable she feels in this space like she is responding to me. 
Later on this Saturday, Cat and Dannidoo gift feather earrings to the housemates. Elsa and I choose our favourites. Elsa puts hers into her ears for the beach doof. Elsa is always getting out there, active and social. Elsa’s eagerness and curiosity and youthful thirst are qualities I admire in her.
The night gets a little weird. We’ve taken more acid, N, Alex and me, and we climb the roof. N perches himself on the high peak, watching the orange light of sunset over the ocean and snap, and I steal a photo for my memories. We speak at random until illusions hit and the world’s gently swaying. Back below, the doof music stiffens my mood. I’m stoned in the hammock. N keeps showing me photos until I run out of words, while Alex makes insightful comments with arrogance—him and I go back and forth with smatterings of philosophy and history and declarations on how life could be. 
N, Alex and I come to conversations on the different traumas that led us to travel. We all have stories. But it is N’s story that trumps the rest: his girlfriend in France died in a car crash. In the wake of this, he wanted to kill himself. I can understand wanting to die, I can’t understand the depths of such pain. The gasping for air, the pleading for release, the heartache that goes on despite all the people he finds himself around. Travel was the help that he needed. The community around the doofs his saving grace.
And there’s the acid. Of course there’s the acid, invigorating the mind, pushing boundaries, keeping imagination and curiosity alive. But when is it too far? Eleven tabs in one night? Or when your shorts are falling down because you’re so skinny, ribs exposed, knee infected and bandaged.
I see him in a new light.
The band returns from Matso’s. Out on the verandah, still, N is on the couch scrolling his phone, Kalle, the young blonde Australian-Swedish dude with an adolescent-allure, is lying on the floor, and Alex sits nearby him—being innocent with his fancy friends. Alex and I continue in stoned riddles: ‘We’re moments passing, Alex, and one day I’ll be nothing more than a fuzzy memory to you, if that.’ Then there’s Sammy, who’s slumped on the couch next to N, getting quieter and funnier as the night progresses. It is Sammy I speak with easiest; he knows not to believe what I say, to retaliate with wit of his own. When we’re talking about masks and Danidoo is saying how they’re actually really bad for you and Sammy comments, ‘Yeah I don’t know about that.’ For this, I respect Sammy more.
Things take a turn.
I overhear N telling Danidoo a story of something he finds really funny, like he’d done with Alex and the flame float. But Danidoo can’t understand why it’s so funny. I’m wriggling in discomfort: this is all when the night gets weird from me, when our independent mad-ness plays out from the drugs.
We’re in the kitchen.
N the doof king is giving out doof advice in total seriousness: 10 litres of water, snacks, first aid kit, alcohol, drugs, and other stuff I can’t remember because I don’t care for the doofs itself (just N’s passionate explanation of them).

Sunday. Going from my room to the bathroom, the curtains are blowing and footsteps are creaking—Liv is in the kitchen making Jac sweet birthday cupcakes, and someone is getting home. I hear Liv ask Jac, ‘Did you go out for sunrise?’ 
I retreat to bed. Drink coffee and be hungover. There are still people around the house, ‘coffee and ket’ being chanted in the kitchen, although I would like a lazy day. I think of health and prosperity, of riding my bike around and writing. I think more on intimacy and how I’m not interested in just a fuck or a three-way, how I don’t want to be riding my bike like a porn star, and how I don’t want to be on acid going so high into the sky that you can’t see the ground that holds your mind anymore. 
In the kitchen, I appear. N is in his kimono amongst the people on the back verandah. He suggests Bloody Marys by the pool. But I’d smoked a joint earlier that morning and I’ve just got my period. I re-retreat to my room, the heart of the house, and slump underneath the fans. 
Out in the halls, the noises of the house continue to sparkle: people are doing the dishes, someone’s in the hammock, another is calling out to see who has weed, some dancing and admiring the colours of this gemstone, the house, bringing people together in harmony.

The wind blows in change to a slightly irritable Monday morning. Last night, the Sunday night after the acid-time, I opted out of Shinju Matsuri closing ceremony to have a bath, listen to jazz, burn candles and remain caught in my own thoughts.
At the bath, I turn the hot tap on high and the cold tap on low. I leave them running and go to talk to Jac in the kitchen. We chat and I half-forget what is going on, that I’m waiting for the hot tap to run for a while before turning it down. Finally I go to turn the hot water down. But both taps were turned off. 
I swear I left both taps running.
I’m in the bath, candles burning. The predicament lingers: I don’t know what to do. I know I don’t want a fuck for fuck’s sake! I don’t want another guy in my life who loves drugs more than he loves me! 
Now, Monday morning, there are beer cans stacked up on the table outside and I want the party to be over. These days, these days, they’re getting too much. And I have to go to work and I’m tired and I’m brain dead. I won’t wear a bra today. 
At work I’m still staring, not caring to the girls’ chat, not caring to engage with the rich people. I don’t even have the energy to pretend to care. I give polite answers to children talk. Then I zone out.
When Killing Me Softly comes through work’s music playlist, my mood perks as I’m transported back to that time in Central Australia, when the drunk Aunt Marianne rode with me, putting her music through my speakers, us both giving a wondrous rendition to the song.
Back home. A Monday Broomerang afternoon: Alex, Kalle and Sammy are making Tom Yum in the kitchen and the house is still not clean. I’m too tired to make a scene. Sammy, who’s been drinking beers all day, comes into the kitchen: ‘I have no balance,’ he says. 
When Alex is in the hammock saying, ‘We just need to live off the land, man,’ I’m naturally debative and combative to his declarations through questioning. 
‘Yeah but I think of these things on a world-scale. I don’t want this just for myself, I want to educate others too.’

Sammy and I were outside in chat when N came up. We didn’t greet each other. And he didn’t say much besides adding a comment to our conversation on ADHD. ‘Focus,’ he said. ‘The drugs give you focus.’ I like how focused he can be on others' conversations. I like how his ears perk up to anything of knowledge.

I see Josie in Broomthyme and she tells me how great Friday was. ‘It literally felt like a movie, walking into some hippie community with so many people with eyes half closed,’ she explains, although I didn’t think that much weed was being smoked. 
Besides this, her observations tie in to my own with how I viewed love huddled together, dancing—the Spanish music having people waving their hips and smiling loudly and killing the grass.
Later, I come home to a clean house. N is doing a puzzle on the big table and actually asks how my day was. Jac comes home and comes speak to me. Pippa comes home and comes speak to me. 

Patterns unfold in the days that follow. We’re back to silence and small glances if I’m lucky. 

What is it I see in his eyes? Is it a new universe? Is it pain to which I can relate.

Do you believe in things that can’t be spoken?

Swinging in the hammock, I’m crying. To be able to wholly explain the sort of love that I’ve craved. To tell Emma how the events of our lives shaped me differently. To tell Dad I love you without caring how he’d react. 
Sammy appears on his bike across the lawn. I lean up when he gives me a big hug. He sits with me, and we talk about stuff, that heavier stuff, like our own separate experiences with death. Sammy was young when his Mum died. Still he was happy to watch the pain she held disappear.
Most of the travellers amongst us hold past traumas and hurt, I note. We all have stories as much as we have hope.
Sammy keeps saying things about life, like doing what we believe, and I agree with what he says. Plus I appreciate his admiration for the important role I’ve played in this house. He talks of the harmony and openness that has been created and how pivotal this has been with his band to open up and grow their skills. I’m a colourful, grounding presence, I am told. 
Happy seeps into my sadness as I comprehend that what I do is done with reason, that I really can positively impact others’ lives, and that I have a power that can be used in giving space to people, in creating community, and bringing people together.
I’m so certain Sammy and I have crossed paths before.

Silay and I are perched on that rock at Matso’s. We’re hugging and swaying and singing to Jac’s jam night song: Just looking around, just looking around, to where, I am, right now. 
Silay spends the night sleeping in her van out the front of Broomerang. In the morning I drink a final coffee with her in the kitchen.
Later that night, out at the bush camp, there are big pots with chopped vegetables over the fire. There are maybe thirty of us of different ages and shapes and countries, and about three guitars. Niang Niang is cooking. 
N, Pippa and I had driven out. Pippa had smoked a joint before coming, I’m absurdly tired from little sleep, and N’s being all silent and shy in the group settings. I can’t help but watch him, the pressure in his shoulders, the strain in his slender arms folded across his chest. We spend the night hovering near each other but not much direct engagement. 
With Kamali I discuss the creation of a moving village, laughing loudly, with my eyes tracing back to see the way N smokes a cigarette and the way he responds to people who approach. 
I’m back by N, breathing calm and protection. I stare into the fire and hum to the music of the guitars. 
On the drive back into town N is more relaxed and conversation is easy. 
Back at home, Pippa, N and I sit with Jac and Sienna in the outdoor lounge. We are speaking of mother’s, their phone calls and their expectations. N shares that he talks with his parents only three times a year. In between these phone calls are messages.

Life is giving me butterflies. In my interactions with people, floating through the house, the growing heat, slow days. Stav’s scrunchie ties my hair high on my head as I stare to the pool water in the blank front verandah space. Jac is packing, Pippa is wandering, Sammy is sitting at the kitchen table learning Chinese and eating pasta for breakfast. ‘I don’t know how N does this,’ he says, indicating to half a puzzle sprayed on the table.
It’s true, I had struggled to get one piece of it. 
‘N has immense concentration,’ I reason.
Sammy doesn’t understand or have the concentration for reading, either.
‘But reading makes you so rich,’ I implore.
Later, N is back doing his puzzle and Sammy is holding his guitar, walking out into the backyard sun singing: I’m looking around, just looking around, to where, you are, right now you cunt.

I smoke a joint in the hammock over the pool, daydreaming of future life and happiness with family. I drift in and out, looking to the shadows of the palm trees, to a bedroom light being turned on. I slide from the hammock easily and slip through the shadows, treading lightly on the floorboards, careful not to be heard. 
I go through my curtains to the bathroom, and back again to retrieve my forgotten conditioner: N is in the kitchen with gentle music playing. 
Walking back again from the shower, before disappearing behind my curtains, I look at him at the kitchen bench, hunched over into his phone.

Someone wakes up and puts on loud classical music. 

—

I put the Lion King theme song on. We get into moods like dogs chasing their tails around in a circle.

—

I watch dust floating through the lattices and hear a whisper, ‘Have a good day.’

—

In the kitchen with Roser we talk about boys we’ve had close to us in our lives, and their drug abuse. ‘If people are taking too many drugs, they are trying to ignore a pain. Or numb, maybe,’ wise Roser says.

—

Pippa and I start doing the quiz. When I question ‘tale,’ N ears prick from the big table, and he comes to join.

—

Elsa reappears after being missing for nearly a week, having impromptuly gone on a work trip to the edge of the Great Sandy Desert, unbeknown to everyone besides Sammy.

—

Cody has a theory on ghost and stairs. That they can’t go up the stairs because they can’t go upward; they are caught. 

—

The picture frames keep falling from the walls.

—

My belly is tight and hurts from beer, cheese, bread and pasta.

—

When I’m in the hammock and Sammy is wheeling his bike across the lawn, I shout out ‘GUESS WHAT, the other day I heard myself say “What the actual fuck?” and I knew I’d been spending a lot of time with Sammy.’

—

We are a snapshot in history. Who will I know beyond these days? 

—

We throw it in the conversation cauldron of the Witchen.

—

Like Leore said that trippy day besides the pool: ‘Wow I forgot a whole other world exists outside of this one.’

—

The day at work stretches out long before me. I’m eager to finish, to get home and play music and flirt and dance to Matso’s jam night.

At work, I’m taking photos of new pieces when tacky ladies come in. I greet them, let them browse. Nicole comes out and says something to me. I notice one of the tacky ladies looking at me. ‘Let me know if you’d like to see something closer,’ I say to her bubbling chest.
‘We had such a lovely experience in here last time and bought all these lovely pearls and now this time you don’t even serve us.’
‘I greeted you,’ I say. You know I knew you were there if you needed help. ‘It’s okay to ask when you need something.’ And you’re a grown woman, one who I have not been placed on this Earth to pamper. Sure, I could ooze my sales pitch onto you. But I trust in you, woman, I trust you have the ability to meet your own needs and flag my attention when it’s needed.
In 2021 expectations remain that we serve them. Fuck me, serving all these baby boomers with all this money… most are lovely, sure, but I’m slowly returning to hatred of the wider population. Being here, in such a workplace, isn’t giving me the hope and love and positivity for the world I find at home. Here in this workplace I’m experiencing physical resistance. For while my mind tells me to stay, to not give up, to keep pretending and keep wondering, my body wants to run, to discover, What is success, really?

It is still the boys/men who feed us most negativity. Like Pippa at the bush dinner, being accosted by some man telling her the world is fucked. Still, if we all sat around with that attitude the world really will be fucked.

—

Through breath, we can carry this world. 

—

I don’t want to be told what beauty is. I want to feel it, experience it.

—

I edge back into early mornings, in which I’m reminded of the burnt sunrises of Cygnet Bay, the bay bright and at peace.

—

At Aarli, a man sits alone in the middle of the restaurant. There is nothing on his table. He breathes as he waits for his food.

—

I scatter notes and ideas and drawings. I stare into space. I feel eyes on me. I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m spinning and spinning and spinning.

—

My mind is a little murky. Focusing on the mundane and what other people are doing.

“Let it happen by itself,” said Alan Watts.

—

The gamble I take in giving words to conversations I would say has an 80% success rate.

—

Another perfect day off work. We take a family outing to the supermarket. We are together in the garden with music playing and people cooking, reading, lying in the sun. 

—

Mine and Sammy’s winding conversations: well, you know what they say in Italy? Pasta is very good; Well, you know what they say in France? English is not our first language.

A Tuesday night and I’m like, Holy Hell Mother of God what am I doing with all this daydreaming. I test drive a scooter to Rachel’s and on getting home N has built the pool lounge out of pallets and it’s absolutely incredible. We erect fairy lights, and he speaks of Matso’s.
I tell him I’m in two minds about going. 
N goes to the supermarket for ravioli, our tradition, and I sit down at the big table with a beer and a newspaper word-find. On his return, I want to tell him that he’s the quickest person at going to the supermarket that I’ve ever met but instead I concentrate on my word-find. 
Outside, N lies on the couch on his phone, of course. I sit in the hammock and smoke a cigarette. He stands, puts his cigarette into the ashtray and says, ‘I’m going to go chill instead.’ 
My reaction? Fuck ya.

I wake naturally early and sit at my desk to hear the squeak of a beautiful, nomadic backpacker turning in his bed. Out in the kitchen, the difficult crossword I took from the work bin yesterday is on the bench. There are two words with suggestions written next to them: together, deep. I return to my desk and burn an early morning candle in honour of the morning light. In these moments, I am happiest.

—

“Open your heart and there is the ability to transform.”

From my perch on the couch, as Roser and I smoked and chatted away, I’d seen a moving shadow and had gone to say that I’ve been having a day when I feel I’ve been going crazy in thinking I keep seeing movements. Because I did, that day I kept seeing movement. But I didn’t say it. What I did was attribute this latest movement to the constant stream of people coming through the house. 
On going to bed, I notice my bag missing from its hanging place on the wall. Ivy is cooking a late night dinner in the kitchen. I wander out to tell her I think my bag is missing.  As I’m standing in the kitchen, Roser calls; her bus has been robbed. 
Robbed.
We have been robbed while Roser and I sat in the outdoor lounge and while N was asleep in his room.
Out the front of Broomerang we find N’s bag with his bits and pieces strewn around it. Sammy appears, tells me to wake N, which I do so timidly (on waking he’s confused because he thinks I’m waking him for work).
We take our phone torches and head across the street, recovering bits and pieces from the trail of our belongings. It is me who has lost the most: my bag, bank card, keys, all my pearl jewellery. 
Back in my room, there is the sense that someone has been in here.

It’s a Saturday morning and most of us are off to work. It’s barely 7:30 and I sit in the kitchen with Elsa, N and Beth. Sammy appears at the kitchen door in his morning state of bewilderment. We all look at each other, we all look at Sammy. ‘Sammy, wh-wh-what are you doing here?’ I stutter. 
Sammy lightly shakes his curly hair.
‘Are you okay?’ Elsa wonders.
He keeps staring. 
‘Sammy, stop it please, you’re confusing us. What are you doing here? Are you working on something, do you have somewhere to be, what is going on?’ Why are you awake so early.

It’s the night after the robbery/walk-in. 1:30am. I am woken to someone pleading ‘HELP ME HELP ME.’ There is a rawness to their voice, and I’m instantly snapped from my dreams with my throat bursting to reply, ‘I’M COMING.’ Quickly I put on my lamp and shoot out of bed, standing up to pull the curtain back and stare to a dark and empty hall. There is no one, there is no longer any sound. 
I lie back in bed and wonder what on Earth just happened. Was I imagining things?
It’s now the next night and I walk to Roser, Beth and Elsa in the kitchen. I tell them the story of my possible madness. ‘Oh I heard that too,’ Beth says.
‘And what, you just rolled over and went back to sleep?’
Beth timidly smiles, nods her head.
Elsa is before the stove, stirring her vegetables, keeping her head down. ‘Oh, I should have told you,’ she begins, ‘I have night tremors and sometimes I start screaming. I haven’t had them in a year or something though.’
‘Oh sorry but I’m so glad that it was you and that I wasn’t losing my mind. All day I had thought that maybe I dreamt it.’
Elsa. Elsa who lives in that corner room.

Another weekend rolls in where clouds form and days grow warmer still. It’s a heat that makes it hard to do much without a scooter and with a broken bike. I remain confined to the house, being lazily social. Roser has come by four nights in a row, and we sit around chatting and cooking and smoking and watching the Broomerang world pass us by. 
On the Saturday afternoon and into the night we (Roser and I) make espresso martinis and brainstorm questions for me to ask in my family quiz. N, who enjoys mind tasks, is there helping us brainstorm before heading off to another doof. He isn’t picking up his phone as much as he usually does. Instead he’s jovial and happy. Roser and I tie some string together for N to hang his spoon off—like a true doof king, in his open kimono and outspoken criteria of getting ‘responsibly loose.’ I think of how much of a stranger to me he would be to me at a doof. For at a doof he loves acid, loves ket, loves the internal journey. 
The closer it comes to the doof, the more I start to creep away until Roser and I are back sitting under the fairy lights of the outdoor lounge and N is perched at his spot by the kitchen. Roser and I smoke a joint, and when I pass back by N we talk of a shared love of classical music, and how great classical music can be in remixes. He goes to the doof, I go to bed.

As I stood on the back verandah shaking out the rug from my room—my desk being moved from the front verandah into my room, opening another chapter—N returns from the doof looking like a wild animal. His face is dark and his hair is messy. I don’t know who he is. We share a brief conversation and I look into a blackness in his eyes with red bags that sit underneath. He leaves for the afternoon. For the coming days, as he recovers, his eyes will continue to hold that blackness. 

I close my eyes and think of laughter and support. Of sharing. A ying and yang, lying under the stars.

—

The shade sail is back up, the couch has been built, there’s a hammock over the pool, and the vine is growing at the speed of light along the fairy lights. In the nights it is windy, a wind that blows through the house. ‘I’ve never liked the wind much,’ I explain to Elsa. ‘But this wind, oh this wind, this wind is so glorious and welcome, cooling us down as we drift toward bed.’

The house hums a gentle rhythm: Beth and Liv cooking curry in the kitchen, N whistling as he does his washing after spinning at Gantheaume. We lay on N’s couch creation by the pool. Elsa appears to take a swim after riding home from work. The fairy lights flash and Elsa joins us on the couch, telling me how pivotal I’ve been in this year’s social scene of Broome, offering and creating space for so many great souls to connect. 
‘I had to leave, that’s how I started my year,’ I explain. ‘In Melbourne there was so much talk of botox and so much detachment from the natural world. And so I left, with a notebook full of pictures and descriptions of longing for community tucked away in my car. And I headed west, nearly making it here before I was bumped from the road in the gentlest of ways that changed the direction of my life, leading me here, crossing paths with all of you.’ 
We laugh about the craziness Broomerang has brought. 
‘I’ll see you in the halls,’ I say to her on leaving.
Later, we run into each other as I was coming from the toilet and she was coming in. What an honour this has been to experience a powerwoman such as Elsa—and one who is in such an early stage of her life. For with the likes of Elsa, her youth is marked not in her mind, but through the likes of how long it takes to turn on the stove, stirring pots using spoons, putting eggs in the pan before the pan is hot. She is like me a few years ago.

The awkwardness that descended on the Sunday is overcome on the Monday. I return home from work expecting a quiet night cooking dinner and cleaning the pool area. But N is there listening to music and cleaning. And he’s all talkative, coming all the way up to me to chat. When I lie on the couch outside, he’s still being all chatty and friendly. He offers up information without questions: he’d been to pick up friends from the airport yesterday afternoon, he has lots of energy from a triple shot of coffee after work, he’s finally cleaning his room. I’m brain dead, I tell him. 

Days still growing hot, hotter, hottest. The mangoes are growing bigger and the shade over the pool is appreciated. Fans are now running, we wear less clothes, spend more time flopping about, talking of closing off the ballroom with the air-conditioner. For now, the doors of my room stay open, and I sleep naked atop my sheets up the foot of the bed, head before the window, legs towards the door to the hall. Another new moon is here. A sense of excitement follows me through all the small moments.

In the witchen Elsa tells me of her struggles at the start of the year, before Broome, and how she still feels plagued by sadness or loneliness or depression or whatever it is. But her happiness in landing in this situation seems magical beyond belief. 
For me, I tell her, I’ve made many mistakes, I’ve learned from different personalities and experiences, all of which I needed to find the courage to live my own truth. This took me much longer to achieve than Elsa’s 21 years. And here, now, still we have our bad days, I remind her. Because that’s life.

The bush camp. Niang Niang is excitable and vivacious, hugging everyone who arrives. Overhearing conversations, I hear more discussions that we’re like a moving tribe. A tribe I feel more connection with than I ever did in Melbourne. 
Chicken and fish are cooked by different groups over the long fire. Light is made with a torch hanging off the top of a fishing line, food on the trestle tables underneath. I sit in a camp chair, getting up to hug the different people from countries all over the world. Children run around. Roser laughs that we’re like a movie on some hippy community on Netflix. 
Niang Niang shouts to put food on the trestle tables. When we eat, we take our plates and find our places. Marc, Roser, N and Carmen surround me, sitting mostly in silence. N’s with his phone—a nervous tendency.
23-year old Jaspa—who had appeared at my desk asking about my writing that meandering Broomerang day—practices guitar by the fire. She’s fingerpicking the bottom strings. When she sits at the piano and sings, she is angelic in her interpretations of freedom and the sea. 
On the ride home with N, he starts more conversations than I do. This season, he’s spent only $700 on drugs, which is a vast improvement from the year before. No wonder we’re so close and yet so far. I’m open with drugs and yet I hate him ruining his mind with drugs. I stare ahead to the headlights and reflect on the spirit instilled in children growing up in such settings. 

I could walk out of my room and Sammy could shout ‘SARAH GALLAGHER!’ and we could laugh and make jokes and not even know what the other is talking about. 

—

I feel alone, pining for someone to talk to and cuddle. Someone who has values, desires, and a fascinating brain power, like me. 

He comes from his room, striding down the old hallway with his peach kimono blowing in the September wind. He smiles at me, and his smile is everything I want. When he tells me that he collects feathers, my stomach flips with thought to a random feather I had once collected. It was when I was living in Melbourne and walking to the tram stop to meet friends in the park. That was early days, when I was still moving and unsettled, yet to find my eternal freedom.

“There’s a type of love that doesn’t require you to suffer, hurt or lose yourself in the midst of it all. All it requires is for you to show up as you are and be open to receiving and giving unconditional love.”

It’s hot. I read The Surgeon of Crowthorne and sort photos, fall asleep without a joint.

—

“If you change the way you look at things the things you look at change.”

—

Do people see me as a fraud? If they do, does this matter when you know you’re not an intentional fraud?

—

Beth has another date. Beth has lots of dates.

Beth and I talk about Kohei opening the glass cabinet doors when the house is rowdier. It could also be the movement of the ocean floors. But it could also be Kohei. The night after we spoke about this, we were again standing in the kitchen talking of the doors when I noticed that the doors were open again. There’ve been a few presences around the house of late.

It’s the first time I am meant to catch up with Richard since he fell over the fire. But when the time comes, I try to cancel. Richard finds a way to make it work, offering to pick me up and pump up my flat bike tyre. I roll with it although my reaction to his insistence feels to be a telling sign that our friendship is doomed. Plus there’s the part where he is always wanting to catch up one-on-one while I’m always wanting to catch up when around other people.

—

Frustrations at work with them employing a new guy and straight up offering him the drilling job. The job I want. They can deny it all they want, but the sexism and racism in this is blatant.

—

Sometimes, life is sweet. Like when you buy a backpack three times from a market stall and three times that backpack is faulty, and then you’re robbed of your Fuck Yeah Books bag and a week later a backpack mysteriously arrives in the mail (a bag I had pre-ordered at the start of July, was meant to arrive in August, but I had then cancelled the order and got a refund). I pour my belongings into the new bag and go to Marc’s camp.

By the pool, the music is full on doof stuff and once Roser and I smoke a too-strong-a-joint, we need to leave this funny old scene. In the verandah lounge, Jaspa tells me that I’m a character in a movie scene. She keeps saying the house is like scenes from a movie too. ‘I reckon you drink tea and paint,’ she says to me. 
Is that how people interpret me? The free spirit who drifts through her days like a painting that she herself paints? Who’s the real Sarah here? The one banging on N’s door to wake him up for work? No, I tell Jaspa. I don’t do either of those things.

After a night of little sleep, it’s a weary day at work that starts with internal fuming and an irritable mood. Right then and there, I feel overlooked, and I want to quit. But I have Nicole, who’s feeling low too. We go to the fridge and eat cake. In the afternoon, I pair pearls with Chelsea and Bill tells me I did excellently.
On getting home, I see everyone reverse out to go to the beach. They didn’t invite me. 
Through the red gate, up the front steps, and into the kitchen, I see N sitting in his spot outside. Neither of us acknowledge each other.  
I go to the hammock over the pool with my book. Putting the book down, I close my eyes; I’m so tired and frustrated. Why do I ignore him like that? Then again, in the moment my anxieties were pulsating, and escape was the easiest solution. Sammy appears over the hammock, his round eyes singing, ‘Helllyoooo.’
‘Hi Sammy.’
‘Oh no are you okay?’ Sammy tells me I look vulnerable and wants to make sure I’m okay.
When he leaves, mosquitoes drive me to read in my room. 
In my room, Sammy comes in wearing a matching African top and bottom. He models it for me, and we talk on suppressing feelings, of having sad days, and crying. But this is okay, we agree, this stuff happens. When Sammy raises his arms up into the air, I explode in a fit of giggles on how, from my vantage point down on my bed, he looks like that statue of Jesus in Brazil. 
Jac comes into my room, and I thank him for the book he left on my bed. 
Pippa comes into my room and sits at my desk and admires the ambience. We share a smirk. 
Liv and Beth come into my room. 
Roser arrives. 
Marc waltzes through the house calling ‘coo-ee.’ He has made my new bag. He joins everyone else in my room to give it to me.
Through the open windows to the verandah, N lies alone in his room and it’s like I can feel his grief drifting down the verandah and into me. He’s a Lonely guy, Lou had explained to me when he’d first come. As for me, my sadness has turned to smiling with all these people who love me like I love them.

I hear a bedroom key being inserted from the inside, Tom and Liv’s door being open, and Liv arriving into the kitchen to find Pippa, N and Elsa and I ransacking the place. Really, what is going through that mind? I’m so tired of conservativeness. And enamoured by the innocence, like Liv telling me the story of how she’d incorrectly heard Sammy say he’d stolen something.

—

Bruce asks about me having a boyfriend and I tell him that I can’t find one because I’m still trying to find myself. Maybe I’m not looking, I’m waiting. No, I’m hoping. Hoping, wishing and waiting. 

—

Last night, N spent hours at the big table working on his puzzle. I come to my desk ruminating that to achieve something then I have to put in many and many hours of concentration. 

Walk out to the kitchen and I’m distracted by a buzzing noise above the sink. I walk outside, but there is nothing. I walk back inside, before the sink, and look up thinking of electrical wires. Nothing. I pull down one of my op-shop goblets and find a big moth. Outside the kitchen door leading to the verandah, where the bench looks out to the pizza oven and a dense array of palms, where N always sits for his cigarettes, I lower the goblet and gently lift it back into the sky. It must have been the same moth from last night, the one that passed by me as I came into the kitchen talking to N as he was on his way to another doof, and I was on my way to bed.

David came by last night. He had sat at the kitchen bench, and his eyes looked possessed. He was definitely on something. Ice, probably. Ice and a shit load of alcohol—it’s grandfinal day. He kept reminding me that he was Jubby and that nobody fucks with Jubby. He kept challenging everything that I say, insulting my way of being, telling me that he loves me. He called me hardcore. When I had asked him what he meant by that, he had laughed. ‘Because I think of hardcore like some rock-headbanger, or do you mean I literally have a hard-core?’ I elaborate.
‘I love Sarah,’ he said again.
‘Everyone loves Sarah,’ Pippa said. 
As welcome as David is here, I want him to leave. I was so relieved when N agrees to drive him to his friends, and I was so relieved that N is there through all of this, while Pippa, Elsa and I remain polite.

—

If everyone loves me, why am I so isolated?

My love forecast for this week reads: Take a chance! Make the first move!

—

There are frustrations, so I pick up my guitar. 

—

The year tumbles on, sitting by the pool, alone on a Sunday morning taking my tea and book back to bed, sketching a pendant I want to create. A clear mental vision.

—

Clinging to feelings of melancholy. Roser loves that word: melancholy.

—

Liv returns from the kitchen and unlocks her door. 

—

Roser comes by in the afternoon, after several times being here this week. Roser, my new best friend, talking writing, talking spiritual, smoking weed, laughing, playing with photoshop, laughing. 

It’s another Matso’s Tuesday: a quietening world, a cooler evening for later September. We walk down Stewart Street like we’ve done a million times as a different version of the Broomerang posse. We chat about barefeet, and Elsa is so quirky and articulate in sharing a story that goes between her thoughts and actual conversation with a security guard who had a stumped thumb. This conversation, as conversations often do, lead us to our Broomerang world. As we turn the final corner to Matso’s, engulfed by the salty night air, Elsa explains that she ‘has to remind myself that we’re not normal.’
N and I laugh loudest. 
‘Wait so you’re telling us we’re not normal!?’
There’s a long line to get in and it’s the first time I’ve been in a long line all season. We stick it out, Roser, Elsa, N and I huddled together, Elsa tells us about the stump root fallacy, or something like that, as the Booosh band take to the stage. Looking from our position in the line we see the front-row crowd of familiar faces, and Niang Niang on percussion and vocals, which are shaky and out of tune. Mango trees surround them. Roser and Elsa sway through their songs while N and I give each other wide eyes of what the fuck.
Inside, N and I go for our 6.2% beer, and we talk briefly on eyes—about our mutual fondness of looking into people’s eyes. It can say so much about that person, we agree. Then, my suspicions of annoying N are confirmed when he tells me that weeks before, when I mentioned scabies, he had become paranoid and convinced he had them. He had become so angry at me for not declaring it to the house.
We get drunk on more 6.2% beer and no matter where N goes, my awareness of him follows. We cross paths when we can, talking in short bursts— we’d also spent the previous afternoon together, sourcing tobacco, drinking beer, chatting, cooking dinner, and watching something on the projector.
The night is emptier than it has been in a long time. We sing louder for the people we know. The girl with long hair, make-up covered acne and a split personality takes the stage and I stare at her. ‘Hey she was singing by the pool the other week,’ I say to N, who must have found his way back besides me again. 
I walk home with Roser and N, with N now telling me he’s too drunk for ravioli despite having bought some for post-Matso’s. ‘Tradition,’ he had said, making us both proud. Instead of ravioli, N goes to bed, and I smoke a joint with my soul sister Roser.

Sammy quit, on the spot, and now his Sammy Lemon (Lemon written on in permanent marker) badge is on the couch and for unknown reasons makes my heart ping. When Sammy tells the story of his resignation, him standing before N and I, who are seated at the kitchen table, he attributes it to someone having a bad day. N and I give each other eyes of understanding, and I ask, ‘You don’t think it had anything to do with you being late all the time?’
Sammy turns his mouth into an upside smile, a shrug. ‘No.’
N and I lock eyes again.
N had also come home from work early and in a bad mood, telling us that he’s quit and is finishing the end of the week. 

They’ll leave soon and their absence will open up a million possibilities for what I could do.

—

Frazzled. Need witch kitchen time.

—

I pick up my guitar and I strum, remembering my greater vision and how all that I’m experiencing now could be playing a small part in a greater story of timing. Nonetheless I will miss him when he’s gone.

—

The feeling of veins forming in my legs. The feeling of poor circulation. My hair gets curlier, lightens in the sun, and when people snap videos or photos of me around the house, my head is usually turned, a shadow cast over my eyes.

—

I’m half way through sentences and then change my mind.

Drunk on Moët after a work day on a boat, stoned from a joint by the pool, naked in front of the mirror, moving my hips and forcing a way to beauty.

—

It’s a Thursday. The house is clean, music people are jamming by the pool, I’m resting on my bed when Sammy comes in and asks if the guy out the front can take some bamboo. Today I don’t want to talk to N.

Elsa, Pippa and I sit on Sammy’s van mattress on the pool lounge, built at the perfect angle, looking out to reflections of fairy lights on the water. We discuss our position. How we’re another version of people who have passed through this house before us. Like Vedam is an earlier version of the coconut boys.

—

I’ve been home too damn much. I need to get out, I need to leave.

—

Roser has been the best person to be living in my pocket. We smoke our joints, we discuss our books, and we laugh and laugh and laugh.

—

Talk about hangry. I get home on my lunch break and get angry at Sammy for hugging me, and then I karate chop those who dare cross my path. 

This morning, in my dream, I was the future me. And last night, when the whole house felt it would implode—people leaving, people angry, me doing a bad job—I reminded myself of my own path; that while I want this house for another year, to continue growing and saving, I believe that I will be given what I need. Not a granny flat. But one person, with trees and water holes and spirit and our own adventurous world. So I walk into the kitchen as Sarah who can see beyond these direct moments to the bigger picture, where everything will work out totally okay.

If it weren’t for the others, I wouldn’t have gone camping. But the others were there, and so I did go camping. 
As soon as we arrived at Quandong, I climbed the tree. Then we went for a walk, the glowing orange of the earth spinning away from the sun over the ocean, and returned to camp as the stars appeared in the plenty. 
We lit a fire, ate pre-cooked food from containers, and chatted. It’s an alcohol free night, just a couple of joints.
When I go to pee up on the cliff, I stand there and let the wind wash over me with arms open and breath intentional. I fall asleep next to Roser, on our mattress directly under the stars, and dream peacefully until sunrise.
When we come home, I don’t say hello to N, and I don’t know why. Maybe I’m angry that he can’t read my mind. He leaves with a case of beer and his doof music anyway.
The Landlord comes by, thrilled by the place and telling me that its shining light comes from the captain driving it. The beautiful girls—Pippa, Elsa, Beth and Roser—sit at the kitchen table and wave to him.

For days we don’t talk to each other. A few times I’ve put my head up for a small smile that I’m sure omits my fragility to him, and to him alone. 

—

Roser and I were in the kitchen drinking our morning coffee, as has become the norm, when I confessed my crush to her. Don’t do anything about it, she tells me—he’s leaving soon, it could hurt, we live together, there could be ‘reject’ she says. She also tells me that she’s noticed the way he’d come to me when there’s people around, and the way we always find our way back to the other at Matso’s. 

—

Then it’s Jamie ’s birthday and I get all nervous, hanging back between the pizza oven and the outdoor couch, seeing him in his pocket-shorts and open kimono and hearing his laugh but keeping our distance.

—

The story of Roser and Sarah by the pool, looking out to the fairy lights, making lists and chatting about the phases of life. I sleep, and when I wake, I go out to the kitchen, and I whisper ‘Good morning’ to N. But he doesn’t hear me. Or he ignores me.

I see the tattoo on his ankle and the sound of his laugh and it’s so familiar to me. Like I’ve already seen it many times before.

—

Eye contact returns. A joke is made and he looks to see my response. 

—

He smokes a cigarette in his palm tree spot—the outdoor bench—and I sit at the kitchen table. We turned to each other at the same time to ask what the other has been doing.

—

I wouldn’t want to be a famous writer because then what, do I write about being a famous writer?

—

I don’t get fomo but fodm. Fear of doing more.

—

I love how clean and crisp I feel on a hot night with blankets pushed down and I’m sleeping peacefully.

—

The drum circle had been small, with people at bush camp and people at the doof. My people were at home going through Australian slang.

—

To apologise to him on how I’ve been. Apologise to him and remind him to please pay rent.

We’re in the kitchen waiting on a timer, what was it for? Can’t remember. But we’re staring at the phone and it’s 3:32, waiting for 3:33, and I’m being loud, being watched, waiting and waiting until finally, the clock changes: 3:34

—

Speaking on words with Roser and Sammy. Sammy comes out with some lightbulb idea and instantly snags it as his own. Lucky, for I would have claimed it otherwise.

—

Don’t use spiritual against Pippa. Pippa is science. Science is Pippa’s religion. In terms of stereotypical normalcy, it goes Liv, Beth, Pippa then me.

—

It’s Roser’s birthday and I’m going to make it a beautiful day, which evolves to a beautiful night with talented people by the pool. I’d mostly lain on the couch watching them all, the music set up at the other end of the pool.

—

Talking with Roser and Alba in the kitchen and I’m aloof.

We’re back from the peninsula. I have sunburnt feet, salty hair, missing shoes, very sore legs and an even fonder connection with Roser. 
On the drive up, in Sammy’s colourful van, along the long stretch of cape road, Roser and I had shared intimate talk, from curiosity of being with women to the qualities we want in our partners. This talk on partners made me open up more about N. Since that time before in the kitchen, when Roser told me not to do anything about my crush because I ‘know he’s not the one,’ I’ve been curious. Had I not been honest enough about the intensity that can pass between N and me when we’re in close proximity? Should I act on my feelings?
Roser and I tell the universe our Love wishes are with it now. ‘So Universe please give us a sign,’ I say. Universe, I thought, if I find a red-tailed black cockatoo feather then this will be my sign and I will be honest with him about my feelings. Or maybe I shouldn’t, like my love Roser tells me? A flock of red-tailed black cockatoos pass over us. 
We arrive later than predicted after blowing a tyre. Bruce is on the side of the road waiting for us. He gives me a long and red-ochre pnji pnji. At the start of the dirt track that leads into the land, where we wait for David, Bruce gives me two red-tailed black cockatoo feathers.
Roser and I sleep on the mattress under the stars, the bluff to the left of our feet, Bruce’s camp to the right, and King Sound in front.
I lose my slides somewhere along the way, returning to Broomerang barefoot and full on ice-cream, running through the house to jump in the pool.

 Thursday the October 14. Last night was the first really hot night where my room was stifling and there was sweat when falling to sleep. I had ended up at the other end of my bed again, which is closer to the fan and perfect positioning to absorb the sunrise through the windows out to the verandah. Now it’s early morning and light is growing and I’m waking. There’s a chill and I turn down the fans, pull my sheets up.

Mangoes appear—the bats scaring Pippa and I as we go to bed. 

—

When I wake there’s lots of stuff around the house. Roser and I still haven’t told Sammy, who seemed a little lost last night, about the van.

—

Alba plays guitar, Roser and I do our song for Sammy to explain that we may have blown his tyre and got Gerard bogged a couple of times, N talks of his first DJ set at the weekend’s doof, Pippa lays there chill.

—

My favourite people running into the pool and feeling cold in minutes, my favourite people playing instruments and talking about mangoes, my favourite people passing by me and smiling and everything changes.

—

Jamie drops by and we sit by the pool. There are lots of people in the kitchen. It’s hot, my new scooter is refreshing.

—

Roser, Sammy, N, Alba, Pippa and I have all been to India.

—

I’m not a forgetful person, I usually remember things. Pointless things. This year, though, this year I’ve been forgetting all the time.

In bed, fans turned up high, books pages flickering, I think of the ghost. The chip packet beside my bed starts unravelling. I watch it, the unravelling, and when it stops, I look away. When I turn my head back to the chip packet, the chip packet starts unravelling again, finding its way off the bedside table. There is not the same kind of presence in my room like there is the rest of the house. Here, I think it’s a girl.

Poor circulation in my legs has symptoms like tingling, cramps and throbbing. At night the veins in my legs grow worse.

—

It’s a Friday afternoon, N practices his DJ-ing by the pool. I swim to the end, pop my head out of the water, and we chat. When I swim back down the pool, I lose my diamond earring and for the next few days a few of us will continue searching for it but none of us can find it.

—

The first mango pick of the season with my chums Marc, Roser, James and Pippa.

—

We smash out the crossword.

—

Strumming our guitars, Pippa on her sewing machine, us on the roof with mangoes, someone with the hula hoop in the backyard. At night we sit in the kitchen. 

—

Beth with hobbies increasingly similar to mine (and Pippa’s).

—

‘They’re my bananas,’ I say to Beth, going on to explain that of course she can eat them as long as there are some there when I go to eat them.

—

The sounds of wet season: the song of the whistling kites I became familiar with in Fitzroy Crossing.

—

The strength of morning visions: how much money I could save without alcohol.

—

I turn the soil in the different garden patches, wanting to properly prepare it for vegetables next season.

There’re backpackers by the pool with macrame, a guitar and a halo. Jamie lies in the hammock talking to Beth. Pippa comes. People jump in naked; no one batters an eyelid. I can’t find my swim top or my diamond earring. I talk to Liv about the logistics of her moving to Perth—we are so different in our life-approach. I remember that moment during the season I had chosen the direction of my intentions.

N continues to practice his doof music. People are scattered back around the shaded pool. Later, all the people scattered about the shaded pool area go to the doof.

—

Waking up with a yearning to move my legs again. An overwhelming call for clarity and health.

—

We all have our moments of frustrations. Like coming home from a doof and your fridge shelf is filled with someone else’s food. Like your good, personal knife going missing. Like Sammy’s shit still lying all over the house and Sammy leaving the water in the bath for days (although I think I did this at some point too—the plug can be really hard to take out).

—

Sammy’s shit EVERYWHERE but he’s always giving hugs.

—

Wake with sheets kicked around and my fans creaking. It isn’t hot, it’s warm. Pippa walks past my window to the pool. Beth makes a smoothie in our sacred kitchen. The sound of cicadas has begun, marking the turn into the new season with bats murdering for mangoes in the night.

—

I’ll tell you a secret: if I actually finish things then I might be able to make something of myself.

—

The million words I need to use to find something to say.

—

Jamie on me: Queen B Boss Lady.

At the kitchen bench, I eat an omelette. Sammy is seated at the outside bench working on his Chinese. N comes from the outdoor couch into the kitchen and tells me how nice the doof had been and how police presence can complement it all. Niang Niang arrives and works through her plans of leaving town. In response to a question she poses to N, he says he’s leaving next week (to make it down south in time for the Halloween doof). I don’t react, I don’t respond. I am disappointed and I am relieved.

—

Pippa and I play on equipment at Town Beach, to the side of the Thursday night markets. We love how awkward we both are. It’s the first time I’ve properly seen N spin, and I’m enamoured by his concentration, the light on his face, the positioning of his body toward mine. 
Back at home, lying underneath the fairy lights with Roser, I play her my new favourite song. N, freshly showered after spinning, comes out in his sarong and stays up the other end in his palm tree spot, smoking. When the song finishes and before the next one begins, I already know it’s going to be the song N and I were singing together on the day of acid, when he cooked lunch with an infected knee: One day baby we’ll be old…

I keep generalising the backpacker thing, so ready for them to move on. Roser helps talk me through the real reason of my frustration: while they carry on the heightened mood, I want to rest and recharge.

—

Sammy and I go to the Roey drive-thru for mixers in our mango daiquiris. We wait at the counter for the reliably slow stuff to serve us. Around as there are other people waiting too. Sammy and I discuss the good deal on the slab underneath the counter and decide to get it. We need to work out the payment for our mixers and our slab though. ‘Ah but I owe you for the weed,’ Sammy shouts out. ‘And what, that was like fifty bucks worth, so I don’t know?’ he says shrugging his shoulders with that upside down smile.
I glance around and try to give him the look, but he doesn’t get it. ‘It all balances out in the wash,’ I reply.

Juicy mangoes lie in random spots around the house. The days are waning and N’s leaving soon. I’m feeling full of love although I haven’t worked out how to communicate my infatuation. By the pool, I’m journeying through a gentle acid trip, with Jamie and I in hysterics despite Jamie being sober, of course—Jamie is always sober. But I’m not, and my stomach is sore from laughter. I look to the future and something inside me shifts: there I am, salty and bare and with babes, there I am a woman, a writer, a mother, a lover, a photographer, a jeweller, holding serenity with the universe. Whereas here in the moment, living in the Broomerang sharehouse, I look in the mirror and see skin that has exploded. Oh the profound impact food has on our energy, our emotions, our everything.

Roser was going to leave tomorrow and now she’s leaving Friday. We smoke a joint and lie by the pool. Sammy plays David Gilmour and walks around naked. Roser and I keep saying ‘wow wow wow’ in reaction to things. I tell her that my word for the upcoming months is om(mmmmmmmmmm) but later I change it to time.

—

This thing Liv does when entering into our social settings where her forehead will be creased and her shoulders are hunched like it’s an obligation to be on stressful missions. But soon enough, she always laughs.

—

Roser had cleaned the mangoes off the ground and by the next morning the ground was full of mangoes again. The bats are going even madder in the night. Waking at the other end of my bed, I look through the middle of my curtains to an orange horizon that takes me to outback skies and wandering opportunities. I roll over, get out of bed, and decide not to wake Roser for more photos.

I fall in love with moments over and over again.

—

Last night there came a frog in the kitchen.

—

Sammy in the kitchen talking about a good friend: ‘she wants to live fully as a musician so of course she has no money at all.’

—

Sammy always saying: ‘Do you know what they say in France?’ ‘Do you know what we do in France?’ A joke that started between us.

—

Good moods break when I go searching for my things and can’t find them. It’s MADDENING but a nice morning otherwise: waking to the silhouette of the lattices from a solid sleep. Last night we had dinner at Greg’s and then Roser and I sat back by the pool to smoke a joint and laugh and laugh and laugh.

—

Elsa, Bruce and David come by at lunch time. ‘Elsa,’ Bruce calls out when a bag of mangoes needs to be collected.

—

Marc comes by.

—

With Roser by the pool I feel relaxed but my hands are clenched tight. I roll over and let my arm brush with Roser’s without fear. Why do I fear physical touch, from anyone?

—

I go cross-eyed trying to clap the mosquitoes.

Roser has been here permanently since, what, last weekend? Finally it’s her final day and I pre-empt that I will miss her terribly. Last night we had cut more mangoes, sorted bottles, smoked a small joint, and she worked through my edits of her story while I went off to work on my dream catcher, play guitar and cook a curry for dinner. When Beth came home, she came and chatted with us for a while, telling of the frustration to the bitcoin guy buying out all the art at her work, then Roser and I went to my room to burn the candle she gave me for my birthday and to draw cards. The Autumn Leaves card falls out facing Roser, as does Luna—in the kitchen we had been saying that right now feels a time of transformation. And so Roser will have a spirited time ahead if she allows for all to evolve with divine timing (I really need to work on a new language for this spiritual stuff). I draw cards for myself. The first I turn over is Autumn Leaves, the other is Purity. Purity talks of spirituality and engaging in it.

—

At Matso’s, remnants of our remaining tribe loiter on the empty dance floor. Sammy and friends are on stage and the backdrop to them is the ocean in the same colour as the slated sky. Sammy’s friend Kaya, who wears Earth colours like me—even her troopy is a rich cream—has the voice of an angel (and as cliché as that saying is, I fully support it). When Jaspa starts singing, she keeps her tortoise-shell sunglasses on, and I see her like a younger version of Kaya. Marc takes off his shoes to dance. An elderly, rich-looking couple watched on, with the man, whose belt was firmly in place, looking amused. I think about their perspective, to what they must think. What category are we, the remaining tribe?
At Broomerang, Jamie and Pippa are home. We sit on the pool lounge and count the seconds between the cracks of thunder. Each time Roser counts, it’s 26 seconds.

At the Day of the Dead we dance barefoot and I stand on Jamies’s feet as he hoists me into the air. The music blows us away—such talent—until Jamie, Pippa, Roser and I retreat to the pool. Tonight the fairylights haven’t turned on but still there’s amusing conversation. 
When Roser and I return to the pool for our final joint, I ask her for the dream she wants to put into place for the dream catcher. ‘Um,’ she begins, taking her long index finger to her mouth and tilting her head in an apparent state of consideration. ‘A land and house and people to share it with.’ 
After this year, the importance of community has been heightened for us. And I had been on a good roll until the new Italian boy looked at N’s old room and the new Italian boy was young and excited and wanting to talk, and I had nothing left to give the new Italian boy. From this I realise that in a few weeks’ time, I need those outer rooms empty. I need physical space for mental space.

—

Clouds hang around and mangoes are still on the ground. Pippa and I wave goodbye to Roser and tears spring to my eyes. It has been Roser who I have connected with most this year. It’s been beautiful. Beautiful! I’ve been using this word to describe everything, while Roser’s word has been “nice”. ‘We’re lucky,’ we’ve also been repeating.

Catching up with Richard I’m in a mood where I’m not in a bad mood but I’m in a serious mood and it takes a lot to make me laugh and talk about something other than what my mind is obsessing about at that time. What is playing on my mind at the time is regret about the young Italian boy moving in. The young Italian boy keeps having lots of people over without asking other housemates and the general consensus from the rest of the housemates was that while the young Italian boy’s friends were lovely, the whole scenario was a lot. As for me, I’m done. I’m done getting messages at work about more people in the house again. I’m done with clearing other people’s beer cans and mess. I’m done. The party is over.

There is movement around me while I stay on in Broome and Broomerang, breathing and accepting my place and the position I’ve been placed in. I go for another day at work as Liv prepares to go toward her calling: south for work experience. At night in the kitchen we eat Pippa’s fresh bread and Pippa and Jamie spend their first night together.

—

Today I’m tired and emotional. The house is quiet and tidy but I notice all the dirty parts too. My sweat smells sour. Pippa and I have beautiful chats on the pool lounge. I tell her my truth: that there’s so many different sides of me that I don’t know which one to give and which one I need intimacy to feed. ‘How,’ I question, ‘can we go through such a busy season and there are romances around me but never with me.’
‘There wasn’t much space for romances.’
‘True.’ I did always have people around me.
‘Don’t worry, you’ll get there. People always remember you and you always do so well in dealing with people.’
Jamie comes by. I want to feel sorry for myself, remaining alone, but I remain focused on myself. In my room everything spins. So, who am I?

Pippa and I ride on my silent scooter and relish in the sensation the fresh wind offers. Wet season is here, with the days warming still, and the colours of our world—the wattles and the mangoes and the sky—in yellows and pinks. Pippa has become my closest confinement.

—

I wake smiling to the yellow light coming through the lattices beyond my curtains. In the kitchen, there are dishes in the sink and stuff about. The big table is covered with sand from Sammy giving B a naked massage, on which Pippa walked in halfway through. Sammy, I love you but I don’t think we’ll live together again.

Last year, in my dreams, I dreamt of a landscape like this and the sensation of these landscapes. In my dreams there were people about, backpackers, driving cars and being in Broome with its turquoise water and wide spaces.

—

Another Saturday at Matso’s with our wet season family. There are the remaining backpackers, the bush people, DJ Alex, with Sammy and Kaya onstage. Kaya once again has everyone fixated on the transcendentness or her voice. The 6.2% gets me drunk again and I spin and spin, Kaya’s voice rising up and a small pocket of the world spreading out.

—

We create the revolution because scientists can’t.

Pippa recounts a conversation that was had at her work involving Tom and a mention of naked people around the house: ‘What sort of people?’ Tom was asked by a colleague.
‘Ah, backpackers, I guess,’ he replied.
‘So what’s the problem mate?’
Tom went on to scoff, without consideration to Pippa’s presence, that housemates (us) are having an acid day on Sunday.
As for acid day? It’s Jamie, Pippa, Beth and I around the pool. It’s Beth and I on acid. I’m lying on the peeling wooden boards drifting into sleep, concentrating on the depth of my breath and feelings, and thinking to describe this sensation would be to describe dancing to a song when you are fully present. I take an extra breath, feeling it clean my lungs, and make my mental images dance even slower. There is breathing above my face, and I peel my eyes open: ‘You dirty bloody hippie,’ Pippa laughs over me. 
My hands rest under my breasts, small and imperfect, and I turn my head to face Pippa. ‘Oh but imagine having that feeling of when you’re dancing and it’s drawn out into your life, in moments beyond the dancing.’ I laugh. ‘Do you know what I’m saying or have I lost you in being a dirty bloody hippie?’

There is power in my silences. Power in sitting amongst a sacred place and meditating on the feeling of dancing. 

—

Change is seated in an upright position with legs crossed and incense burning. Change comes through the shadows and sleepless nights. Change is the way I wake at 5am to sit at my desk and work until my book is complete. Change is reading a million books just so I can write one better. Real change doesn’t need to be spoken.

—

Beth and I in pleasant conversation with Beth comfortable enough to offer up information on how sometimes she needs to piece together what I’m saying.

I wake naturally at 5:33 to the sunlight lattice and clear kitchen benches. I water my plants as frogs call, the chimes sing and a wind blows through the kitchen. ‘It’s so moody,’ Beth says.
‘No wonder we’re moody too,’ I reply.
In Broome we are like the tides, from high highs to extreme lows. We are isolation and we are emotion. We are drifters, shedding identities and creating new ones. We are the minority, living our truth, believing with our hearts. I want all my interactions to come from a genuine place because I want to put good into the world and we need each other to do that. Wet season is here. I tap out of the social world and tap into my dreams.