After I left, but before I became the Sun

There was a girl who would often think about murder. She would wonder 'how would it feel to kill somebody?' She wondered how someone could reach the point where they decided to murder their lovers, their families, or total strangers and she would ask herself 'what would it take to make me kill someone?’ Maybe it wasn't so much of a decision. Maybe it would be like that feeling, like if someone chewed in her ear. If they rolled a half chewed burger around in their mouth, and smacked their lips open to take in large gulps of fresh air around soggy pieces of dead flesh. If her neck hurt, and her hair stuck to her face, if there was something in her eye and this great fat man just kept eating, chewing, smacking his lips open with satisfaction, If this were inescapable, she would do it. She would close her hands around his throat. In jail, at least, no one expects a thing from you. Really, not a thing.

It was the 15th of October when she first noticed the ants, a scuttling, acidic tickle of ants running all over her body. One day as she lay in bed the scurrying of ants on her skin began to happen inside. She could feel the ants squirming around laying eggs in her stomach, making her mouth fill with salty excess saliva, preparing her to vomit. She imagined what it would look like. If she were to vomit straight in the toilet would she be able to wash the ants down? Or would the ants be able to cling on inside her, withstand the pull from inside and live on eating through her insides? She didn't have the answers, not any of them. She knew that she had to run away, away from the ants and the chewing, so she got up and drove away.

By the 15th of November she had forgotten how to get home. Although she had tried her hardest not to learn the name of the small portion of bush land she had ended up in, it was written in the name of every store. Gordon’s Quality Butcher, Gordon Take Away, Gordon Fucking Coles. There in Gordon, in the Coles parking lot, she had been sleeping in her car for two nights, rejecting any thoughts of showering or buying food. Her hair was matted in clumps and she was hungry, but she sat in the comfort of her own sour air, her own little atmosphere. She was hungry, tired and dirty, but the ants had been still, and the awful scuttling had been replaced by the sensation of her heart calmly pumping blood, thump thump, all around her body.

One day, sitting in her car at the Coles parking, watching the people, she caught her own reflection in the rear view mirror. Her eyes settled and she blinked calmly at the dirty, crazed stranger she saw, and realised that she could never go back there, back to where she came from. She couldn't return and say ‘Hey, Here I am, I’ve been here all along!’ She would never remember what to say, or remember what she was supposed to do. She didn't wish to go back, she just wanted to drive. She wanted to drive her car through shops, crash through walls as customers scurried like ants to safety, laugh as dust and rubble fell on the windscreen and dented the roof. She wanted to drive and laugh. She wanted to have sex with somebody and leave without a sound

One month later, days from the new year, she was running out of money. Her car was empty, she was empty, and she was stranded in the hot dusty bush. She was trapped, glued fast, and the ants, the ants trailed in. They trickled in, crept up her ankles, built nests in her hair. They whispered in her ears and crawled in to her brain at night. Their burning formic acid began to pump through her veins. It was all coming back. She had to go, just as she went before.

She drove due east overnight and reached the coast shortly after dawn. There could be no place greater than the coast, she decided, no smell better than salt breeze. She stepped out of the car, out of her sour atmosphere and in to the clean breeze of the beach in her hair as she walked toward the shore. With the feeling of warm sand beneath her feet she was filled with so many impulses at once, to swim, to scream, to tear off her clothes, to run and run and run. But she forced herself to stand with her feet planted on the shore as the heat of the sun touched her face, washed her with warmth all over, burning the ants living in her hair, chasing away the creeping black hoards as they fell through her insides and trickled down, from her throat to the bottom of her legs. And there it was, in the emptiness. Thump thump. Thump thump. She was pure, she was weightless. 

Free from the heavy black weight of the ants, she flew forward in to the salt waves, splashing awkwardly and stumbling until she fell in past her head. The water was so cold, and the shore so close. She started to swim, but she was not running away, no, not this time. She swam until the shore seemed a thin pencil line in the distance, until the water grew darker and cooler. She started to dive straight down, always pushing away from the sun, she closed her eyes and the sun, the sky, the sandy bottom were nothing. The ants were gone, the hunger had washed away, and she was a wave forming under the surface, barrelling over and over toward the shore, gaining momentum, white froth building as she threatened to rise and crash on to the sand. But the fall never came, just the never ending rise. She rose with great speed, and the sun filled her with white heat, she was burning, evaporating, becoming like so many dust particles floating in the atmosphere. She was laughing. Laughing and driving.