At sunset, a cloud of bats migrate north-west across the city, speckling the evening sky with a taste of the supernatural. A fingernail moon sits on the edge of the horizon. It is so thin it looks like a shard of glass catching the last light as it dips. I sit on my bed, transfixed by the end of the day. My vision seems to fog over as I watch the tall gum down the way dance into the windy night. Perhaps it is the soft edges this hour accentuates. Like the curve of a hip on whom you love. Or the downy head of a newborn. Blurred. Tender. But maybe it's just the chardonnay. My body feels heavy, my eyes fatigued, the backs of my legs still humming with lactic acid.
A few nights prior, I sat on the edge of the bush on Taungurung Country in the Alpine National Park. In what was the first trip away from the city in five months, so did the setting sun bewitch us. Those hues! my friend Hannah yelled. I see the colours now, Jasna replied. She was referring to the photos I take when hiking – natural light being my greatest love affair. How it moves. How it melts and soothes. How the blue of dawn and dusk always feels particularly magical; yet melancholic at times, like a Cormac McCarthy novel, steely and scintillating.
Cooking on a gas burner. Sleeping in a tent as it shimmers in a storm. Catching your breath on the top of an incline. Reaching camp after a day of walking with everything on your shoulders – there isn't a feeling comparable. Not one I'm yet to experience, anyway. When I invited the two along with me, I felt the same sort of trepidation one gets when awaiting a friend's opinion on a book or film you so desperately want them to like. I worried the discomfort of hiking would hinder their ability to appreciate the calm of it all. The sort of release you feel when your body realigns with its roots.
Walking the Razorback Ridge was surreal in how removed it felt from the life we’ve come to know this year. The sky was broad on the first day, the heat high. Our lungs worked overtime. Mountains undulated around us in all directions. I felt as though we were the last people in a world left behind. I thought of the album, Front Row Seat to Earth. At camp that night, Hannah changed into a band shirt from the same musician. On the back, it read, A lot has changed.
As the dark set in, we craned our heads toward the sky. It’s like a blanket, Jasna said. Haven’t seen that in a while, I replied. Then the silence oozed back in, the kind only found in places you have to walk to. Up in the mountains. Free from the whir of society and soothed only by the birds’ warble,
the wind licking the trees, and the stars that never age with you, but continue to spark awe in your witnessing of them. In the morning, citrine-breasted finches flitted about camp as we drank our coffee. My shoulders ached. My hips were tender. The balls of my feet felt raw after too long being sedentary. But my heart was slow, my breath, inaudible. I felt stronger than I had in months.
Before this year of slow tempo and steady rest, self-worth was a thing I’d never truly acknowledged. I’d glimpsed it in passing, convinced myself I knew its purpose, but never did look it straight on. Hold it in my hand and make sense of how to keep it there. Boundaries fall in places we rarely consider. The horizon, a boundary between the bush and the sky, as we sat on a mountain and watched the land change colour. Our flesh meeting the earth, another boundary. Snow Gum to Snow Gum, how they envelop, how they bend into the crooks of one another and look like two bodies, soft and supple. Unspoken emotions, the invisible wound of psyche we don’t prod unless unavoidable. Employment, the thing we try to leave at the door, but usually don’t. How it seeps into our soul until we feel we don’t know who we are without it. And then when we lose it, discovering the boundary that leans against our achilles heel. What we’re willing to do. How much we’re willing to take on. Recognising the shift in before and after. Accepting that maybe now, things will change. Should change. Hope they’ll change. Boundaries turn hope or expectation into something tangible.
On the second day we summitted Feathertop, no one else was there to hear our screams. We laughed at the absurdity of three women, standing atop a mountain and yelling into the universe. Breaking the boundary society has over us to be polite, quiet, submissive women. Women who say Yes. Women who give too much, and don’t ask for anything in return. Women who work hard and still get underpaid. Women who, actually, maybe, don’t have to shave their body hair in order to feel feminine. Women who, dripping in sweat, hike a hill in their underwear and remember what it is to feel good in their body. Powerful. At home.
The storm blew in that evening, I laid awake listening to the earth move. Imagined what it would feel like to be picked up by the wind, thrown into the night. Sleep dragged me under when the rain began to fall.
The mist hung heavy on day three, the land looked as though it had been submerged under the ocean. The leaves on the trees swayed like seaweed in a tide. Slow and languid. The ashen light painted the world with a sense of abandon. If you stood still and turned your head toward the sky, vertigo crept up your spine the way nausea floods your throat. Quick and reflexive. There was no distinguishing North from South, East from West. There was only walking forward, into the fog. The occasional valley winds whipped our cheeks and threw us into fits of laughter. At times we braced, legs a little wider, until they passed. After a handful of wrong turns, and one too many uphill scrambles, we reached the winding tarmac of the Great Alpine Road. Jasna’s hands had stopped working in the cold. Half-naked, I crouched and untied her shoes for her. A car drove past, a man hung his head out the window and smirked a sort of smile that makes the nerves in your jaw constrict.
Maybe not so much has changed. Or change is dependent on the lens through which you view it.
The bats still float across the city. Men still leer. But the end of the day is still golden. The end of the year still brings with it the faint smell of something new. Turn your head to the wind. You’ll catch it as it passes.
Freia Lily is a Melbourne based journalist and photographer. She has a keen infatuation with the natural world, and how it affects the human experience of trauma.