I mean, he was only voicing what we’d reasoned to each other many times before and I could tell part of him was relieved the temptation to reproduce was gone. And while I knew he was right, that it was logical to take consolation in the bigger picture, I couldn’t help but think he’d missed the point. But was the point simply that I hated that the power to choose had been taken away from me? From us? I don’t know. It’s all so petty, and yet, not.

Just like the argument with Jem.

We’ve been together nearly seven years. I’d recently graduated from uni in Melbourne and had just moved to Tassie, picking up a job in marketing at the devil park, when we met.

Initially, I’d hated living on the Tasman Peninsula. It was lonely, and I felt like I was living in a creepy backwater, full of rednecks and hillbillies and overshadowed by Port Arthur and all that had happened there. But, when I met Jem—and it was no coincidence it happened when I met him—I began to see this jut of land for what it is.

It sounds stupid to say, but it was like I could suddenly really see it. The clouds churning on the shoulders of hills. The way the shifting and crumpling slabs of ocean are forever being coloured by sunlight, cloud-shadow and rain: blue, purple, green, yellow, grey, black, white. And I heard it, too, you know. I heard the honey- and metal-voiced birds shrieking in cacophony, the bush brimming with their noise.

I guess, in retrospect, Jem’s adoring gaze made me feel beautiful—that when he looked at me, my eyes widened, whitened and sparkled in the way they do when you’re smitten. And those sparkles became the lens through which I saw the world. Sometimes I wonder if all I was doing during that blissful honeymoon period was viewing the peninsula as a new caricature, a series of glittering surfaces that I mistook for some kind of innate character, just as my loneliness had coloured it drab.

But no, the honeymoon period is definitely over and the place is still bursting with beauty—and it was literally sparkling that night I was wandering the beach after our fight: as dark peaks of swell collapsed into walls of white water on the outside bank laid shallow by the low tide, bioluminescence rippled across the waves like the reflections of stars thrown into animated disarray. I remember being surprised at how strong those glimmers of light were, given the fullness of the moon. The ocean’s changing. No one can deny it. And I wondered if this excess was another symptom. It’s the sort of thing Jem would know, or pretend to know. Regardless of its cause, it’s so beautiful; I could have watched it all night.

‘It’s not natural. It’s a by-product of human impact. So even if it’s beautiful, it shouldn’t be celebrated,’ I imagined Jem lecturing. It was the sort of thing he would say with groundless, yet unapologetic, authority.