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March 3rd

I can’t find you. You’re not in the house, or the car, not even in the Separates. I wonder if you have walked away from me, saved yourself. There is panic and sadness inside me, but I do not cry or scream. I keep looking all day, walking further out across the sand until I am closer to the dunes. And there, in the late afternoon, I find you, cross-legged like a buddha, staring up to the sky. As I get closer, I see there are marks in the sand beside you and I wonder if you have been making your art.

You lean away when I sit beside you. I look up too. I wonder if the stars are the same as they were ten years ago, maybe millions have died and millions more have been born.

‘Pleaides,’ you say, raising your arm abruptly. ‘Or, if you prefer, the Napaljarri sisters being chased by the hunter. You remember him?’

‘Yes. Orion in the North.’ I trace the line between the bright hunter’s star and the tight cluster of Pleiades. ‘But he’s never going to catch those sisters.’

You nod. I’m expecting you to say that the hunter will always be following the sisters, never giving up on them, like you used to say, but instead you ask, ‘That because he’s too slow, you reckon?’

I smile in surprise. ‘Maybe because he’s a star!’

Which makes you smile too. You rest back onto the heels of your hands, looking at me now. This isn’t how it was before. You’re right, it can’t be. It must be something new.

‘Thought I’d go mad not seeing the horizon,’ you say eventually. ‘But turns out you can get used to anything.’

‘My world shrank too,’ I say.

Then finally you tell me something: about how you were only allowed to talk to one or two people a day for all those years, and how you ate the same food every day, and how the same sense of unease followed you everywhere.

‘Sounds like me,’ I say. ‘We’ve been living the same life. You made both of us shrink.’

‘I know.’

Returning to the house, you stare at the dirt all the way. I notice that your back is so much better: there will be scars, but your skin is no longer angry and red.

‘You want to go somewhere else? Just us?’ you call back. ‘That what you really want?’

I can’t answer. I don’t know anymore.

I’m letting this place take over, seeing what might happen.

I bring in another can of sweetcorn from the shed. I even bring back one of the precious muesli bars I bought from the petrol station. I’ve been saving it. We eat it together on the veranda, the sky above us bigger than anything.