It's like your body takes you in. Takes you somewhere else, somewhere safe, protected; takes you to a place where you feel nothing. Nothing of the hurricane. Not the wind. Not the sand like pieces of ice whipped up, whizzing past. Nothing of the fire. Your body takes you in so you can't hear the thunder. So that you're not aware of the tearing, or the ripping. Your body takes you in so that, for a while, you can breathe.
But all storms pass eventually.
And soon I hear the wheels unfurl from the belly of the plane. My ears pop. And then the plane is touching down, bouncing. Gripping. Braking so that I feel myself inching forward in my chair, my belt pulling tight around my abdomen.
All storms pass. And when they do, you crawl out and see that the world is nothing like it was. Fractured walls, torn limbs, broken roofs. The river is dark and muddy, yellow at the edges. Murky water is strewn with leaves and dirt and cracked branches.
I pull my bag down from the overhead compartment, file off the plane with the other passengers and, in the moment I step out of the airport, I don't see that the world is not like it was so much as feel it. Feel that this wild country of red sand is so big, so overwhelmingly huge, I might cry. It's big where it once felt small, Maggie—like we were the only ones in the room.
I collect my suitcase from the carousel, pass through customs, walk outside.
The earth is big where it once felt small. But the sky: the sky is small where it once felt big. It's low-hanging, pressing down, suffocating me. And in that I feel all the cold, and all the ache.
***
The taxi drive is long. There's traffic and rain, and soon I feel sick from staring at my phone. I look up and gaze out the window. The droplets on the glass make the buildings outside bleed one into the next.
The air in the taxi smells of steamed fabric and a vanilla freshener. 'Can I wind down my window?' I ask, as I'm already winding it, anxious almost, as if the air in here is no longer real.
'But, Miss, it's raining.'
'I don't mind,' I whisper, closing my eyes, letting the rain pelt my face, letting the years peel away, until at last I'm climbing into the back seat of Mac's car, shaking her hand, touching her for the first time. Listening to her say her name in velvet lilac.
Maggie.
***
Before I even let go of my bags, Mac's arms are wrapping around me like purple fabric. I shudder and he holds me tighter, and we're suspended in some strange, wonderful, gentle place. Like the world holds its breath, just for a moment. And space is soft.
But then I see Coco emerge from Maggie's bedroom with a chew toy in her mouth. She drops it at the door, comes to my feet, licks my ankle, and I feel myself roll into the blue absence behind her, sinking, unravelling.
Mac puts both hands on my shoulders. His eyes are a swollen lake, dark and full.
'I can't tell you how much we've missed you,' he says.
And I want to tell him how much I've missed them too, how much I've missed home, but the words are stuck in my throat.
'She wrote you a letter,' he says. 'Give me a sec.' He disappears into his room, reappearing a few moments later with a folded piece of paper. 'I already know what it says,' he admits. 'I had to write it down for her.'
I look down at the paper in my hands like I'm holding a piece of her.
'I don't know if I'm ready,' I say, shaking my head.
'Don't worry,' he says, and he takes the letter back, places it on the coffee table. 'Another time.'
***
I sleep in Maggie's bed.
It is everything and nothing. Like a kiss goodbye. Because no matter how tightly I pull the blankets around myself, no matter how tightly I grip the edge of the mattress, I feel adrift in the blue of her.
It's all push and pull. Push and pull. Like she's the tide. Flooding me, and falling away, in a single night. Maggie is all around me. Nowhere.
I inhale. Lungs filling, lungs full. I exhale, and she escapes.
***
I roll over in bed, eyelids puffy, pick up my phone and see Natasha has forwarded an email from Alison Waite. The subject line jerks me awake. ANTARCTICA.
Has she accepted? Please confirm asap.
I lock the phone and bury it under my pillow. Feeling charged and restless now, I get up and walk out into the kitchen. Unsure what to do with myself, I boil the kettle, put loose-leaf chamomile tea in a glass teapot, pour water over and watch it yellow. I watch flowers soften. I watch petals unfurl. And then with my pot of watery flowers and a mug, I take the letter from the coffee table and go out onto the balcony overhanging the harbour. The water is blue spread out before me, magnificent and bold, like an Yves Klein body.
My dearest Oli,
Perhaps it's comforting to know it's all already here. That everything before and everything that will come after is already here.
Past. Present. Future. Happening all at once.
My dear, everything in the cosmos is connected. In that way, we never really lose each other.
I know it feels like we do. I know you're hurting. Believe me, I know you're hurting. And I know that pain is real. We feel heartache in our bodies, in our bones. Honour that. It's human. It makes us. Makes our stories.
But also believe me when I say that loss is an illusion. Goodbyes are not forever, because everything is already here, becoming, unbecoming, becoming. Just changing form, shape and colour.
A whisper becomes a rib bone, becomes a turn in a river, becomes an embrace, becomes a mountain, un-becomes in a kiss, becomes a spark, becomes a cloud, rains down, becomes a mother, becomes a deep-sea current.
It's all around you, Ol. It's all already here.
We lose people in the form of them that we knew and loved. But the universe hasn't lost me, I've just become something else.
All my love, in every colour,
Maggie
***
I hold her in my hands. On my lap. I hold her.
Mac pulls up to a traffic light. The car slows, stops. I feel the weight of her. The absence of her. This tiny box. I wonder at a life reduced, a body burnt down to a box, a tiny box of ashes. Everything she was. All velvet lilac. Everything. Powder and purple smoke.
We lose people in the form of them that we knew and loved.
I hold the box tight against me.
'You alright, kid?'
I nod and a tear slides free. Mac reaches across, carefully wipes it from my cheek.
'I know,' he says. 'Me too.'
When we get out of the car, I pass her to Mac. He walks with her down the dock one last time.
A flock of seagulls takes flight, their shadows flitting across Mac's shoulders like sky dancers. I look up, watch them circle higher, higher still, until they're small, so small, they're like flecks of ash carried away in the wind.
The Sea Rose is tied up at the end of the dock. Mac passes me the box and boards her starboard deck, climbing up over the lifeline with the ease of a man twenty years younger. That's what coming home looks like. I pass the box up to him and he takes her to the cockpit, unhooks the hatch, and disappears downstairs. I look down at my feet, eyeing the thin water corridor between the dock and the hull of the Sea Rose. I imagine myself falling through, sandwiched between. The pressure. Pinching darkness. As the world around me bleeds into itself. It's all muddy blue. Deep ocean mud.
But then I hear Mac moving about below deck, below the sea. And I remember she is down there, with him. I feel air rush into me in one sweet deep wash. It's like diving beneath a wave in the thick of the night. I reach up, grip the lifeline, exhale, and cross the water corridor. It's like crossing the horizon from desert to sky.
On deck, my legs are shaky. I steady myself against the mast and close my eyes. Feeling the Sea Rose rocking, as if she is my cradle. Soothing me. Sending me to sleep. It is, at once, familiarly strange and strangely familiar. Rocking, back and forth. Back and forth. I breathe. In and out. Back and forth.
That's how it feels coming home.
***
There's barely enough breeze in the harbour to get us to the heads, but I know Mac: there's no way he'll let the motor drown out the sound of Maggie's last sail. So we drift—for hours, maybe—towards the heads, the occasional gust filling the sails, edging us forward.
When we pass North Head, the wind picks up and the Sea Rose lifts. I climb up and sit on the rail, dangling my feet over the side, cutting lines in silk water with my toes. The sea splashes up my calves. A laugh rushes out of me. A crack in the towering cliff face seems to curve into a smile.
I look over my shoulder at Mac. He's at the helm with one hand at the wheel, the other resting on the box beside him.
Beyond him, the Tasman stretches like a bather in the sun. I feel the years falling, back, until I'm standing here in a silk dress, accusing an old man with a white beard of kidnapping me.
'I'm so happy I passed out on your boat,' I tell him.
'You what?' he says.
I laugh, shake my head.
Above, the sail slackens and begins to flap, huge white wings fluttering. Mac reaches down and pulls on the main. And like a seabird, we take flight. His smile stretches the width of the horizon.
We sail through a painting of sounds. No words, just the sun-lanced yellow of waters lapping. The pink of Mac's fingertips pattering the wheel. The smooth blue of the breeze passing between the sails.
We sail through a painting of sounds, all the way to Pittwater, where the Hawkesbury River empties out into the sea. And as the sails drop, I remember a story about streams and deep lakes and meetings at the river mouth. How we all come together in the end.
Mac picks up the box, manages a shaky smile. 'It's time.'
I follow him up to the bow of the boat, where he opens the box. Opens up the clouds. Opens up my chest.
And then I see her. She is sand. Crushed seashells.
I've just become something else.
'Thank you,' Mac says, 'for helping me to see.'
I touch Mac's hands to steady them. Together, we pour her into the sea. And just like that, she becomes part of the ocean, part of my ocean. She becomes a deep-sea current. Seashell bones on the summer tide. Maggie becomes something else.
***
'I read the letter,' I say.
'I thought you had.'
'How'd you know?'
'Because you're on a boat, and you swore you'd never go to sea again.' Mac taps the seat beside him. 'Come here, kid,' he says, offering me the wheel. I move across the cockpit and sit beside him, taking over at the helm. Mac reaches across me, pulls on the main. I look up and see creases in the sail above ironed out. The boat lifts. I close my eyes, breathe in deep, and feel myself fill with a cloud of salt.
Wrapping his arm around my shoulder, Mac squeezes me tight against his side. 'What you gonna do, then, kid?'
I look south, past Mac's arm, into open ocean, into the beyond.
Becomes a cloud. Rains down. Becomes a mother.
And I think of her telling me how all the souls in the world return to the Antarctic. How we all go home. And I imagine her being carried there on the tide.
'I'm going,' I tell him, myself, her. 'I have to.'
He laughs. The sound is warm tangerine. 'She told me you'd say that.'