Downward Fog
by Ruby Gill
I am being plagued by horrendous hallucinations every time I find myself upside down - for example, during a downward dog. as soon as my spine hits the diagonal, I am whisked back off to an entirely different world; to the exact same scene every time, from the exact same perspective, with the exact same salt dripping down my forehead onto the ground below.
the dream itself is spectacular. It only feels horrendous because it’s not real. the wrenching reality is that I’m here, inverted in the bourgeoise of melbourne, instead of there – on the edge of the valley town I was raised in, surrounded by the tusk-thorned acacias and old-green shrubs where the giraffes feed on good days. and no matter how much I attempt to convince my brain that we are not - in fact - there, she goes there nonetheless.
I am never upside down in the hallucination. I am always upright and silent, looking into the same patch of trees, watching the bird. he’s a buzzard, and big. Bigger than the raptors here. he is quiet and observant, feathers only slightly ruffled to keep the morning mist off his butter-block frame underneath. he’s perched towards the top quarter of the foliage.
my body knows the exact geography of the surrounding landscape – how far the two lakes are beyond his tree, where the hippos usually surface, how high above me the eskom wires cross over, the stripe of the springbok in the thicket below, and the 46.5 minutes it takes to get home.
if I remain upside down, hamstrings burning through the melbourne time zone, the hallucination sometimes becomes multi-sensory. I begin to hear the cicada buzz, and the shrike-thrush calling from the thicket near the road. I remember entire languages - of people, of places, of creatures and feelings. I smell dirt-road-ash and the particular rubber of my father’s tyres. I taste the eternal plastic toasted cheese from the ostrich roadhouse and I feel a different kind of sun on my face – wet, angsty, light.
the more the blood pools in my head, the more intently his bird-eyes look back at me, and he speaks with his forest buzzard words:
“come home. come home, you piece of shit.”
they don’t teach you about this particular brand of longing. a magnetic pull to a singular moment in time, entirely engulfing, and only triggered by a harmless attempt to stand on one’s head. fine all day, and then as soon as the bipedal barrier is broken, the truth comes flooding through: I am so many places in one body; my roots were not evolved for this soil; and no bird will ever be good enough again.
that is, until one day, I’m standing up.
this time, on the edge of the gently lapping border that holds this island in place. I am busy memorising the textures of the saltbush marshes, trying to form a palm map of this shore paradise to etch on my skin, when an eagle interrupts the picture. he is white-bellied and grey like a rain cloud, and the biggest I have ever seen. bigger than the raptors at home.
he swoops down through the frame, and lands on a driftwood pole. I am confused as to why he’d want to come near me – a mere human searching for meaning in seas that don’t belong to her. but he stands taller, pulling my spine up with his, and he looks me dead in the eye, feathers smooth as an airplane wing, flight QF64:
“if you are quiet enough, you will hear the spirit of this place too.”
now I am bending over less, and listening more.
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Ruby is one of our Writer's Residency winners, who will be heading out to our cabins over the next 6 months for some creative nature sessions. Read more about the program - and meet all the finalists - here.