RACHEL O'SULLIVAN

388km / drive 4hr 46mins / cycle 19 hours 34 minutes / walk 3 days 8 hours

388km / drive 4hr 46mins / cycle 19 hours 34 minutes / walk 3 days 8 hours

388km

Can I tell you a secret? I love it when my phone dies and finding my way home becomes a game. I recognise the privilege in this. I am in a well signposted city, I have lived here my whole life, ‘getting lost’ is highly domesticated. Don’t forget I am baiting oceans I could drown in; people like me disappear, get shot, are raped. But consider this: I have never felt more unshackled, time itself crackling, pulsating while I thread hands full of feathers and ferns, listening the screech of the fox calling to her babies. I hardly remember faces, names, conversations, but I easily memorise the places I have visited. Even if I was a child at the time, even now when I am drunk, high, sick, sleep deprived, this image is capable of being accurately rotated 360 degrees, inverted. Jumping between eons, connecting streets roamed at wildly different points in my life, I get home at my own pace, singing aloud, pushing through memories rising from tarmac. It is a test in independence, environmental enrichment, pessimistic preparation. The only thing that can go wrong is if my travel card doesn’t have money loaded onto it, and even this is a solvable problem, possibly just another complication to elongate the puzzle.

drive 4hr 46mins

I am only honest with her in the dreamforest. She has always been there, watching spiders pool from each other, alongside me. How are we supposed to make this work, confined to the opening hours of cafés, the price of cocktails? I’ll know exactly what to do with her navel, her wrists when I get there because I’ve been there before hundreds of times in the temperate rainforests. Here’s another secret: loving once, twice, isn’t enough. Her and her and her. I know, I’m lucky, selfish, if you want to use those old, flimsy words. They aren’t a vessel for any meaning here. But I won’t take anything I can’t give back to her at the end of the night. We will trade each other’s parts back and forth, find new combinations. Walk separate paths until the next time our saliva meets, our smells curdle. Enzymes devouring each other, recognising her as blackberries, crab apples, things we learned in home economics, biology classes. Both of us learning these diagrams for the state exams in the capital city, sequestered in opposing ends of its reaches. In our displacement, there is no moon hanging low with fruit. I have to mention the millions of trees felled, the dead and dying language neither of us speak, dozens of native bushes endangered because of the sika deer some coloniser thought pretty. Me still in the city, always asleep, outlined by a shaky hand, and the rainforest we are bending around each other’s bodies. Finding the synchronicity of some ancient shape.

cycle 19 hours 34 minutes

Think of the days I spent with the horses. I wanted it all to myself, greedy little misunderstood thing. It was a complicated thought process spinning around my head. By myself, in the field, I shed my body. I dropped the half-knowledge, implications of the brands you wear or don’t wear, social pecking order. At home, in school, every wall I banged off grated a bit of me, flaked some small amount of skin, something that doesn’t regenerate. Then, the horses. In ways I didn’t know were possible, the world shook. Nothing, ever, would grip me in the same way this strangled. I wasn’t meant to love them the way I did. Another hobby, a smaller love, please. Something medium sized, for my medium sized life - rugby, camogie, athletics. Knowing that that feeling was possible, that it existed out there, among the young oaks and the unruly ragworth, put all other problems into a neater perspective. How it was a world that kept expanding in all directions, never ceasing to catch my interest, until adulthood dragged me screaming. I will always stare at the horses out the train window. I will always slip a hand out to brush the velvet muzzle. I will always save a few minutes of my day for the sweet-smelling piebalds at the top of Grafton Street.

walk 3 days 8 hours

There is a feeling gathering in you, isn’t there? After the breathing has stabilised into something you can trust (and your trust moves slower than dripping treacle) that the tears finally come, but there is nothing to cry at anymore. So you give your tears to the boys and girls you serve in work, the fledglings first stretching their wings on the roof of your apartment building, the unique call of a blue tit or a goldfinch, since when do you have time to learn these things? You cry because trying to explain this weight makes your new friends cock their beautiful, wonderful heads in confusion. Not knowing how the jagged history you tell them flows in any meaningful way into the person you are now. The jolt of waking up in the morning, how quickly love turned to vulnerability, became your chronic, closed heart. Years of you as snapping and poking, turning it all into scrap-fighting. You cry because still they learn the old you like a preserved archive, carefully turning the pages, pausing because they don’t recognise you as ensnared animal. And still, there are more feelings gathering, they are beginning to make sense as belonging, as love, as home. Maybe this will be the big love of your life. The one defining loss, too. That you have always been far from home. That you might always be. That there are reasons for this. In books that you can carry in your hands. It is not just space that’s the problem, but time too. Distance coming at you from all dimensions. Ones they haven’t named yet.