‘El-Amin.’

Nassim El-Amin. Like water, like music, like poetry.

3

I opened my phone and the screen lit up. No reception. I hadn’t anticipated that. I switched it off straight away, feeling a bit odd about the way the sudden brightness had exposed me in the dark. Feeling a bit creeped out, actually – no point pretending. To be honest, ‘terrified’ would probably be a better word. All my bravado and euphoria, gone with the bus.

Fear is funny like that. There’s the present fear, the kind that gets your heart thumping and your pupils all dilated, like standing alone in the dark on a road in the middle of god-knows-where. That’s the fear of something, something, that might be out there, something that might be coming to get you. And then there’s that other deep and creeping fear, the fear of nothing, of being nothing, the one that slowly eats away at you and drives your actions and comes from inside and sends you out into ridiculous situations where you end up standing around in the dark actually frightened of something, with your heart pumping and your pupils all dilated . . .

Breathe.

I stood in the dark and looked up and down the empty road and then across at the house and back at my reception-less phone. Sometimes my tendency to overthink could be an absolute bugger. There was just nothing else for it. There were no choices here.

Come on, Anna. Big girl pants.

I strode across the road with spirit and gumption, wheeling my sleek case across the bitumen, but the second my case and I were through the gate we were struggling with long wet grass. With my shins and my feet I found a brick, a tangle of chicken wire, and a broken chair. My case found a rotted tree stump. And then a sudden looming rusted thing blocked my path. I stood holding my phone light out and looking at it while the grass heads distributed their water-droplets evenly over my jeans and the tops of my socks and into my shoes. The object was unidentifiable. A handle at the top, a rusted chain hanging down over a rusted plate side. The bottom of it – wheels perhaps, or rotor blades – was knitted securely to the earth, a mat of weeds tying it down in a tangle of organic threads. My suitcase had become hopelessly ensnared, so I left it where it was and wrestled my picture and my backpack and myself around the rusted thing, and when I finally made it to the front door it was only to realise that the front door was obviously out of action. The torch on my phone showed a crack right down the middle of it, a stack of broken crates teetering against it, and a couch full of holes covered in sagging boxes drawn partly across it.

I watched a doco with Dad once, The World After Us, about the way nature will reclaim the built spaces when all the humans are gone: plants using our structures to climb closer to the sun, thrusting their feeling tendrils into all the cracks and pulling the human world apart, brick by brick. We were sitting there in our pristine designer lounge room, on Mum’s pride and joy – her sleek mid-century reproduction yellow cloth couch – and I was struck by just how much maintenance it took to keep human spaces human. How quickly and determinedly and opportunistically life overran our puny human attempts at order. I wasn’t even allowed to drink a cup of coffee while sitting on that couch.