Coming, going, staying

It's too much to write about, too much to talk about, too many days and too many adventures and too many headspaces later. It's perfect, it's everything I want, it's the Grand Carnival, it's perfect and disastrous and wild.

More than a week of increasingly more spectacular water-holes, private and perfect, of swinging and leaping from rope swings, of lounging in waterfalls with the water pounding down over my shoulders, of clambering slippery-wet and completely naked in the most beautiful places I have ever seen. Of a farm full of strutting queers in high finery, of simmering and sinuous sexual tension, of storms that ripped apart the sky, shredded tents and trees, left us gaping and awestruck.

I went to the big party, the New Years party, in a tutu & harness set I made that day. There are photos of me wearing it in the first light of New Wear's day, sprawled across the lap of someone very tall and very handsome. We are sharing a cigar, smiling and smug, so pleased with ourselves, with the party, with the world.

Once the sun was fully up, New Year's Day was lost to this ferocious, intense heat with humidity that felt like we were living inside a sweaty, lubed-up, cum-stained glove. There could be no sleeping off the night before, it was so hot that even shifting position slightly brought on a full-broken sweat. We lay limp, muttering and incoherent, useless in the face of it.

Still awake, with no sleep in me, I spent the recovery party reclined in a full-body hug on a hill watching a massive electrical storm build over the hills. We whooped and cheered as loudly as we had for the fireworks the previous night as the lightning tore the sky apart, and finally the heat broke with a burning explosion of dust and wind and then fierce, pounding rain. We were herded inside off the hill for our own safety, corralled in a dance hall while the storm raged wild outside. It was a storm that completely changed the shape of the night, as tents were destroyed and trees came down across roads and campsites. I was awake at dawn, again (still), watching gentle rain on a battered landscape from the dry comfort of a bandstand. Peeled raw by sleeplessness, held gently, smiling at the world.

And around those big parties there have been the eddies and swirls of life at the farm, a glamorous cabaret, a flirtation here and there, a filthy, bloody and oh-so-satisfying date with two of my dearest friends, there has been hanging out with the high-kicking little calves and the peep-peep-peeping baby chicken, napping in the back of a mustard-yellow truck or passed out in the hammock on the porch or hanging out with a darling friend who is living in the doghouse (literally).

Disasters, of course: I lost my phone AGAIN New Year's night, which has made every movement a logistical nightmare. And although I survived the loss of my beloved phone with chin up and shoulders back, I was reduced to tears by the fact that after wandering through ankle-deep water on the night of the flood my amazing, one-of-a-kind hot-pink-and-white patent cowgirl boots have begun to disintegrate. I am so distraught by their impending loss, I can't even bear to contemplate it.

I'm in Brisbane now, doing it oldschool, early-90's style, making my way around the world without a mobile phone. I make firm plans to be places at times (remember doing that?), and have a little book with a list of numbers and a wallet full of change. This is a new and different phase to the holiday, now that I've left the farm and the gentle embrace of the Northern Rivers, but I am so very much loving not being at home, I am in no rush at all to be back. I can feel that it might become time, soon. But not yet, no, not for a while.