HEART AND SOUL

I caught a bus into the city and a train into the hills to visit my childhood home. I’d brought my camera, and curled up on the all too familiar train seats peering out the window- it was all the same, yet so much I never knew. Walking along the train line to my parents house, I peered down a rocky cliff face. It’s a different world in the hills, there are beaten paths, through the backs of peoples gardens, with secluded shelters you can make your way across suburbia by wandering down the train line. It was drizzling and while the sun was out it was shadowed by dark clouds and hills smoke wafted through the air. Although I now live so close to the CBD, I’m still a hills girl at heart and chuckled to myself and I hopped across the rocks to avoid puddles and mud, as my leopard print boots became soaked with moisture. Any hills girl would know never to wear shoes like that. I had my camera out, gazing about in search of a new way to document the path that I had taken so, so many times before, at the end of a long day, defeated from my travels through town, across the other side of the city, at university.

Still, I can’t explain what breath it was in, or what photo I had taken when it happened, but I know that it was along that beaten path that the fairies took me.  I had my camera to my face, with my glasses tucked away, and one moment just fell into another. Peering off the edge, overlooking the trainline, through my viewfinder I just had to move a little left but I could feel the rocks slipping, and then the next I was elsewhere. It’s not all level in the hills, of course, and as many rises as it has, there are just as many drops. I peered down through the leaves at the tree so far below, my feet started to slip and I fell amongst things I couldn’t remember. The boots drenched over. The slim branches that pressed against my face as I peered up through the green feel in between my teeth to hold them out of the way of the lens. Then there was garden, off next to the path I had been so many times- I found a tree with leaves intense that the whole world seemed a deep charcoal in comparison. 

As I stumbled across moss, vines and fallen branches to get there, there were pieces of glass which blinked upwards. The tree was surrounded by a mesh of thorns, grown up past waist height and as I pressed closer, the thorns pressed into me, until they’d caught me too. There were little places, small and rich in colour, with every footstep I explored through the lens rather than  with my eyes and as a repercussion of this I started to bleed from the thorns through my clothing. By the time I found myself in my parents bathroom, stripped to my underwear, there bruises, scrapes, cuts and love marks from the thorns, rocks and nature across my body.  The dirt found its way tucked into my nails, leaves in my hair and moss across my skin.  Without me noticing, the day had seeped into night and my clothes were not only full of burrs but moist from lying amongst the nature which was still wet from the rains.  My body has begun to pay for it, with a chest infection and pulled muscles from the cold- I now spend my days in bed, listening to my breath as it drags its way up my throat. But that moment in by the train line was one which was a long time coming, after walking by every day for several years, finally when I'd let my guard down- magic happened. If there was less sickness, there's be more time to share, but for now- this is what there is xx