Hoping That Cormorants Migrate

Never before had I la’la’la’ed so frequently by the side of the road, the other days always the same and the bedrooms always the same and the beach the same. The cars are parked under the verandah but they are always in the same place and we don’t really have the keys. There’s a flower overhanging, purple jacaranda and I’m scared that soon I’ll be sitting and watching it turn brown and fall. The petals will slide down onto the windscreen and no wiper will push them aside, maybe not forever. Sometimes I sit and hold my phone like a tiny oblong television and watch as the digital minutes jump by and nobody rings to tell me to get in the car. Sometimes I wonder if my phone has a number, maybe it only rings after an octagram chant and a lit sparkler in a skeleton’s hand, a ritual I forgot to note in the email.

There’s a house somewhere that I’ve lived in before, but not in this country. It has hardwood floors and a fridge where nothing’s vegetarian. The freezer’s got coffee grains all through it but I can take the foil packets out if I want. It’s only around during the night and when I wake up. Other times it doesn’t exist, like trying to see from a point five inches above your hair. Nothing there. I can slip out and slip back in holding a plastic bag full of whatever and a ticket to somewhere else in my back pocket.

Here the walls are like a jail only I can see them from the outside too, even when I’m lying in the sand far away the walls are still waiting for me. The gum trees and banksias and other scrubs tangle up around me. Every window has at least a hundred sunlit leaves scraping at it and trying to get in. Sometimes when I’m quiet and I look out of the corner of my eye the wind has stopped and they hardly try at all.

I hope the sparkler ritual will start soon and my little oblong television will tell me to get in my car as I hold it and watch it and smile at it. Then the walls will fold down and the world of leaves will receede a bit and maybe that cormorant I see every day will leave for some magnificently filmed and well-narrated journey. Pasta will no longer be pasta it will be that pasta we had that time. The beach will be just as sparkling but my camera’s batteries will no longer be low and I’m sure I’ll walk that grassy headland to get a new frame of reference.