I blush. ‘I like making art. I’m working on something photographic at the moment.’

I show her some pics saved on my phone and Adut asks questions and I explain it as best I can, even though I don’t have ideas as sophisticated or as important as hers. She listens carefully as I explain my doubts and my confusion, nodding and laughing and telling me her own stories.

‘I doubt myself almost every day,’ she says. ‘But I remind myself that being a young woman who wants to take pictures of other young women and queer folk and people of colour is enough. Putting my own representation, my own images forward, that’s powerful in itself.’

‘I never thought of it like that.’

‘It’s hard being at the start of practising something creative, knowing you’ve still got a long way to go. Especially if you have big ideas. Can you email me one of those?’

Adut gives me her email address and I send her a pic. My phone is still making the swooshing send sound when a man in a loud tie-dye t-shirt rockets out of the gallery stairwell. When he spots Adut he raises his hands high—WHY?—and pretends to reel her in on an invisible line.

‘Oh, they finally noticed I’m hiding,’ she says. ‘Good luck, Chloe. Thanks for the chat.’

Adut gives me a quick hug and then she’s gone.

I wait on the ledge for the motivation to go back upstairs and find Natalia, but I’m distracted by thoughts of different places to study and being a beginner artist and how to be myself until my chewing gum has gone tough and gross. I spit it out and realise I need to pee. I can’t remember any toilets in the gallery, so I go to the 7-Eleven at the intersection, and when I come out I turn left, instead of back towards the gallery.

I don’t know what happens, but my feet take me up the street until I reach the tram stop. I’m on a tram, heading for the train station before I even realise that I’ve left the opening and I’m not going back.

NATALIA

DAY 55

The world glows green when I wake up, still surrounded by pillowy softness. I might have been asleep for a thousand years and even though I try to blink away the fuzziness, still my eyelids won’t stay open.

‘You talk in your sleep, did you know that?’ Yin’s voice, close to me.

I smile without opening my eyes.

Her mat is close enough that our sleeping bags brush together with a whisper. The morning sun creeps through the thin tent walls, our secret grotto, our private place, two girls sitting inside a cave made of curled leaves and petals.

‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ says Yin. Her voice is older, sadder. ‘Nat. I’ve been waiting so long.’