And perhaps this is all that loss is:

a hanging on to things long gone

an emptiness,

when all around you is something-

it's just that you can't see it, with your head stuck inside a red suitcase

of dream.

It's like the sound of waiting for your life to begin

when all around you is full of song:

cobalt ring of inked night sky

silver slivered hope of moon

earth that shifts, and shifts again

an ocean, never still.

Mountains of Sydney glass reflect the city back to me in mirror-windowed distortion. The two colours of this city: grey and brown- embroidered by the washed mustard of the Central station sandstone. A man sprints for his bus/train/tram; heavy overcoated and sweaty briefcase-palmed. A woman clip-clops past, seething into her handbag.

I want to ask someone where I am, but no-one will meet my eyes: heads bent to the pavement, iPhone-geared and elsewhere.

On the corner of Sussex and Hay, a gold-coated tree dribbles thin saliva.

The plaque says it's a birthing tree from the Wiradjuri Nation.

Two centuries old.

Ripped up form the glorious riverbanks.

Transplanted.

Rootless and fixed in the arrogance of a city's aesthetic.

And turned into a fountain.

Jesus.

The energy of grief barrels me down the highway, day upon day, and I think: I am empty. Truly empty. 

And I want to drive myself into oblivion.

Away from memory, from my own imagination.

I want to leave myself on the side of the highway and drive on without me.

In Erlunda I pick myself up a sixpack of beer and three hundred and seventy-five mls of whiskey and I drink them one after another until I fall into song and into the hardened bed of a random truckie, and I try to fuck my way into some sense of self....

And I start to fall in love with him; with the incongruity of him. And so I stop myself- because I've been here before, and too many years later I found that he wasn't a rough diamond after all, just... rough.

So I take off down the highway. And I smile at some kind of victory over myself, because sometimes you have to learn the same thing sixteen times before you learn from it- and that must have been the sixteenth time, because in my wing mirror a little soupçon of heart rides along in our wake, trying to catch us up. And I recall that in the wing mirror, things are closer than they seem- so I slow down just enough to let it jump onto the tow-bar,

sidle in through the back hatch

squidge along the floor, past the fridge,

ooze up the back seat,

abseil down my left shoulder

and swoop into my chest.

I'm running out of cash near Glendambo, and we need to eat- so I slip on a little floral dress and prop at the near end of the bar where the truckies sit. 

As I'm driving dow the highway he overtakes me and sounds his air horn, which plays the first eight bars of 'La Cucaracha'.

... and a curled corner of my heart peels open into the morning light...

And once I figure we're not being tailed I let the laughter bubble up inside me like champagne... and I feel alive for the first time in ages...

A cool breeze comes up and for the first time in a long time I can smell something like hope in the wind.

The Great Dividing Range looms up from the earth. Aeons of Rock folded unto itself; the metamorphosing of worlds and time. Once these mountains did not exist; the clashing of continents hewing up weft and warp of peak and trough three-and-a-half thousand kilometres long and three hundred kilometres wide.

But nothing is forever. Not even three hundred million years of rock. 

In Port Augusta I camp near the Lake of Dead Souls; tepid and pulsing. At twilight I take the dog for a run along the sandy banks and stand in the oozing shallows, wondering where the light goes when it clocks off for the day.

Across the lake two figures trawl through these murky waters. Their search is desperate; hands scrabbling, straining souls through their fingers, searching for the one that belongs to them. The older woman leads the quests; the younger one - her daughter?- looks to her constantly for what to do, and how to do it right?

The country's central artery takes me straight to Tennant Creek, where I order the most expensive steak sandwich in the world, and get a thin, tired piece of gristle in return- wedged between white bread sheets; sexed up with burnt onion and mounted by barbeque sauce as thin as blood. 

At the Woomera turnoff my car makes its own decision to divert to the town where fifteen hundred refugees were locked inside facilities designed for four hundred. A hot wind gusts though the now-deserted compounds, their edges still laced with razor wire. Weathered walls of empty houses, windows bound up like blinded eyes. Doorways sealed like lips sewn tight shut. The dog quivers. Nothing but emptiness left here. Ans as we turn to go, a small piece of my heart slivers out through the exhaust pipe and lodges into a weed-strewn crack of concrete. And I leave it there to stay. Lest we forget.