The cobweb kisses me like a leech as I pass through the gate and the overgrown hedge. I press my belly onto the long grass and let the sun slide over my back. I only have a few minutes to enjoy its embrace before its touch turns poison, and my skin goes cracked and salmon red. There is sunscreen by the first aid box in the kitchen, along with ibuprofen, band-aids, and anti-venom, but there are times when one must be spontaneous. When one must feel a warmth uninhibited.
I used to get a bit of a thrill from feeling my skin flake after an unprotected outdoor rendezvous. I used to stand in the cold shower and use my fingernails to pick it off myself. Like a reptile, I was metamorphosing. This was before I realised that chunks of the sun could burrow into your skin and surprise you later on.
Once, I was taking a walk at night to the top of a dry hill to view the city lights on the horizon. There was a slip of faded red on the road, thin and quaint: snake skin. I beamed and scurried towards it. My fingertips were a breath away when I realised it was more than skin. It was the whole snake, emasculated and flattened into the asphalt like a fresco of itself. My hand retreated slowly and I trudged back down the hill. I did not want to see the city lights anymore.
Perhaps, it was because something in the dead snake’s posture reminded me of a man I knew. When I think about it now it seems I didn’t like him very much. He could be cold, rude, and condescending. He wasn’t popular, but when he spoke his mouth was strong, his brow twitched like a flag on a high pole, and every sentence had the weight of a brick. Compared to him I felt brittle and unsteady. There were times when I’d be so pissed off at him that I felt like smashing in all his windows, but I couldn’t because it would prove my fragility. There were also times when we’d wake up at midday, walk through IGA in our pyjamas, and tell each other things that wouldn’t have made sense to anyone else. In those moments I thought we were irreplaceable; “meant-to-be”.
Then I found out how he was sleeping with other women. He told me, “It’s because I feel inadequate.” After that, everything he said became flat, lifeless, and pathetic. When I saw him my chest tightened and my cheeks burned. So without hesitation, I left. I took cold showers and rubbed aloe vera on my wounds. The red skin flaked away until there was nothing to remind me of that time.
From then on I encountered other reptiles to tempt me into their sun-soaking ways, but nothing could surprise me.
In the roots of the grass, there is a fat, black ant, dawdling along the uneven turf. I think about how much denser and more expansive the world must seem to an ant who struggles through thin weeds. Then again, one who can carry ten times their own body weight must feel equipped to deal with just about anything.
Sometimes I feel like an ant. Like I was born to carry more than I should be able to, like there is some twist in my DNA with the words, “just keep going” inscribed. I probably get it from my grandmother, who’s still alive after five bouts of cancer. “She’s like an old rubber boot,” my uncle says, “You think she’s had it and then she just keeps going.”
I think about when I’m old and weathered, what kinds of cancer they will find hidden in me, chewing away at my organs. What lumps of life will I have been carrying without even knowing it? In a strange way I look forward to it; to them cutting it all out of me and spreading it across the surgeon’s table like a Picasso of melanomas. Perhaps, equipped with scalpels and Latin words, I’ll finally be able to know what it all means. Perhaps, then I’ll be able to tell my story.
The yell of a cockatoo brings me back to the present. A dog cries a few doors down, the wind gossips with the trees, and the hills in the distance stay ominously still. For now, one must be content with a few minutes a day spent in the warmth of the sun, before slithering back through the old gate and the overgrown hedge, to the relentless momentum of life.
