Art by Elsa Li

Content Warning: references to domestic violence

Like a feather in water, Samara’s departure leaves no ripples. Her mother and father have gone grocery shopping and won’t be back for two hours. She has left them a letter on the dining table in which she sounds far firmer and more definitive than she feels. By the time they return, she will have just gotten off the bus at the airport, where she will take the flight to Sydney. Her accommodation is already prepped: a room in a sharehouse with five other people; arranged, a tad dubiously, entirely through social media. As long as she continues walking, one foot in front of the other, there will be a definite, solid path forward. 

Samara doesn’t look back at the house on Clarence Street, partly out of fear that doing so will somehow lead, inevitably, to moving backwards, but mostly out of necessity, to ignore the stabbing guilt that will flare when she turns and sees a curly-haired silhouette in the second-floor window. To turn around is to remember the last look on her younger sister’s face, the pinch of her mouth and slant of her eyes, her silence more affronting than any words she could ever say. 

The bright sun and sky are at odds with Samara’s mind, where murky thoughts are drowned out by the sound of one long, stretched scream; like a siren. But she appreciates the noise. Penetrating the din, words come to her from her sister’s favourite book when she was little: a science fact book for kids named The Force of Water. She remembers that the strongest natural element on Earth is water. Even the largest rocks in the world will not withstand a few centuries in the ocean. She repeats this to herself like a chant. A reminder that just like all those great rocks withered by water, her own erosion is an inevitable certainty. 

***

In the first year after her departure, Samara takes a job as a swim instructor. Five hours a day, five days a week she spends at the pool, teaching kids to blow their bubbles and splash their toes. She finds it ironic; Samara has never been all too fond of water. She can swim, of course, but the true swimmer in her family has always been her sister. Three years Samara’s junior and a state-level swimmer, Hannah Badawi carried herself like the water she loved so much—smooth, graceful and effortless. Samara has always been the runner. She lived for the harsh, rhythmic thudding of feet on ground, and the biting spray of dirt into ankles.

Yet it has been three years, and the pool has embedded itself into the ebb and flow of Samara’s life: the 30-minute train ride, the 15-minute walk, changing into her swimmers, chatting in the staffroom then sliding into the pool at exactly 4pm. The hours blur into a series of smiles, greetings, instructions, hi-fives. In the precious lull at the end of each shift, the teachers finally allow themselves to relax, leaning against lane ropes and platforms. They drift peacefully from lane to lane, or congregate in groups talking about small things like uni assignments, dinner plans, fights with partners or the desire for a big, solid nap. It is during one of these conversations that Samara is asked, ‘What would your dream life look like?’

It is an innocent question, posed to the whole group, but it triggers Samara’s latent sense of fear. This fear escalates as responses are shared around the circle; dreams of teaching, of owning houses, beginning families, dreams that seem simultaneously so simple, and yet so big and out of reach. When it’s her turn to answer she tries to tamp down her fear, makes a flippant joke about becoming the owner of a pool, and allows herself a moment of relief as everyone laughs. But even afterwards, from the relative comfort of home, the question haunts her. And it is not just because she is dreamless or ambitionless—an empty, blank slate upon which nothing will ever be written—but because she is forced to face a part of herself that is dead. The girl who lived in the grand house in eastern Queensland with her parents and sister, who dreamed of getting her law degree in family violence, who wanted to grow brave and intelligent and admired, died on that rippleless day that Samara left. All that remains now is a shrivelled, cowardly shadow.  

But perhaps, Samara ponders glumly, that’s what I’ve always been. She thinks of all the years of cross country racing and training, early morning practices, carefully constructed race plans. Leaving the house as her parents fought, her drumming heart contained by the tight laces of her runners, running and running and running until her mind finally stopped. Standing bent over at the end of her route, hands on her knees, closing her eyes tight and listening to the heaving pant of her lungs, knowing the only way to survive the broken thing she called home was to exhaust herself out of being. 

Samara hasn’t run in three years. She tells herself it’s because she has finally escaped the thing she had been running from. But really she knows that to put on her runners and allow her feet to fall back into that same, comfortable rhythm is to admit her guilt—that dirty part of her that will never stop running away. 

***

Recently, Samara wonders if she has become too much like water. As she fills her days with repetition, wheedling toddlers into kicking their legs and children into placing their chins on chests, she seems to float, empty and transparent, on the edges of conversations, ensuring not to involve herself too deeply. She can feel her erosion, the dangerous chipping away of the rocky cliffs of her past, making history a soft, blurred thing. The house on Clarence Street becomes a place of laughter and gentle sarcasm, with the scent of something freshly baked wafting through the kitchen and jazz music tinkling through the halls. On some tired nights she allows herself to think of it as home, and finds herself wishing to return.

But on other nights, she lies paralysed by memories of tall men in dark hallways with taller, darker shadows. Of her mother screaming of monsters and ravines, of death, death, death. Of less violent, but just as terrifying things, like looking in the mirror and seeing her father in her face, her limbs, the crook of her nose and the silent, raging anger inside of her. Like those electric days after an explosion where her mother would sit and mutter, in trancelike despair, wishing for a perfect future in which they were not free but erased, completely and swiftly, their laughter and tears and breaths turned into a non-existent hypothetical. And in those nights Samara realises that erosion is not erasure. That rocky cliffs become pebbles become sand become steeped into water, now poisoned with her memories. 

Earlier in the year, Hannah turned 17. Samara had typed out a happy birthday message, but it had lain unsent in her drafts. She watched her sister’s celebration from afar, translated through screens, gifs and social media posts, and felt a deep, stinging sorrow. Hannah’s high school graduation is seven months away, and Samara has promised herself that this time she will reach out. She will congratulate Hannah, tell her she loves her and misses her. 

But she is afraid, knowing that she is bound by the past, of the memory of her sister’s face as she abandoned her, graceful even in the face of betrayal. Samara worries that any attempt to reach out will be strangled by her own need to defend herself. She imagines her excuses spilling out of her, stories of her youth, her pain, her loneliness, and worries that Hannah will see through it all and realise how pathetic Samara has always been. That Hannah will say, ‘But I was there too. I was also young, in pain, lonely. I couldn’t leave.’  She will close her eyes and let out one small, brief sigh, before looking Samara straight in the eyes. She will thank her, she will let her go—’Thank you Sammy. I appreciate it, you can go now.’ —and then turn and rise, weightless. Left behind, Samara will drown, swallowed by water, rock, memory.

***

Recently, it has been raining. The heavy sky emits a slow, steady drizzle that has continued for the past month. Samara doesn’t like it. She dislikes the slow itch it ignites within her. Her running shoes seem to taunt her from the corner of her room. Memories play on the back of her eyelids like a movie. The slap of soles in muddy puddles and rain pouring into every little crevice until she cannot see, and yet she is flying, drowning, free. 

She feels like this every once in a while, an itch so strong she wants to tear out of the apartment and sprint down the street until she can no longer walk. But she restrains it each time, occupying herself with other tasks. She cleans every inch of her room, then the kitchen, then the bathroom she shares with two of her roommates. She cooks elaborate multi-course meals that take hours and hours, and divides them amongst everyone in the apartment. She picks up new hobbies. Tries studying random languages from YouTube videos or buys crochet materials or watercolour paints. This time however, none of these tactics seem to be working. The itch grows and grows, insistent and droning under her skin.  

She thinks the dreams where she is back at Clarence Street have been making it worse. In those dreams, outside it is raining, and inside her parents fight. Samara turns, robotic, to the front door, with runners on and her front leg raised, ready to break into a steady jog. But before she can begin, she evaporates, bursting into a thousand raindrops. Right before she wakes she sees everything she touches burst too: the shoe rack, the door, her parents, and finally, Hannah, who watches her with wide, serious eyes. 

Samara is distracted as she teaches that evening, thinking of a page from The Force of Water. Not all raindrops touch the ground. Some are too light, and evaporate as they fall. This rain is called virga. She feels that way now, as if she is something incomplete, removed from the cycle of life. She watches people around her touch the ground and soak meaning into the dirt around them, but finds she can not do the same. Each time she seeks to fall, she is insubstantial, disappearing before she is given the opportunity to be. 

***

Two days before Hannah’s graduation ceremony, which Samara has been keeping track of through Instagram and the school’s website, the itch becomes unbearable. Samara finds her runners laced in tight double knots on her feet, her old shorts on, the lightweight fabric of activewear on skin. She is out of the house before she knows it, into the rain which has not yet stopped. And she runs. 

It has been years and she is no longer the runner she used to be. Her gait is wrong, her strides inconsistent, and her stamina not what it once was. She is struggling after only a kilometre, her breath heaving, sweat, indistinguishable from the rain, forming rivers that flow never-ending down her face. And yet the pain, deep and throbbing in her chest, is one so sweet, so familiar, that she allows it to break her down into limbs, muscle and ligament. She is nothing more and nothing less than this consistent, repetitive act of violence, in which she pushes herself beyond breath. Samara keeps running. 

As she gasps for breath and reprieve from water, she feels herself underneath her skin, 16 years old, hurting and itching for escape. She seems to split, her younger self peeling away from her, long legs slamming on grass in a merciless, incessant rhythm. Suddenly this is a race, one in which Samara is an inevitable but persistent loser. She finds herself adjusting, slipping back into old strategies, determined to maintain a consistent 10 stride distance. As her vision darkens into that old, familiar blur, she begins to see things. Memories. A card given to her by one of her students, on it her head drawn cartoonishly big, her teacher shirt a bright neon yellow. The dinner she hosted at the apartment the other day, where her roommates and work friends met for the first time. The glow she felt as they complimented her cooking and asked her for recipes. Her bedroom, the first place in which each and every element—the second-hand Ikea furniture, the scrappy photo wall, the hanging jewellery shelf—is entirely hers. Arranging her bed to face the window, so that every day she is awoken by the sunrise and the world is tinged purple, orange and yellow. 

Samara notices that ahead, her younger self has stopped running. She catches up, looks into her eyes, but they are empty, hopeless. Abruptly she is 16 once again, living in that pulsing electric silence, trying so badly to dream but finding every possible path forward blocked by shadows in doorways, doomsday whispers, her inevitable growth into an old, despairing woman who wishes for erasure. She is 16 and she knows her death looms. But Samara, 20 years old now, is not 16, and knows that death can come in different forms. One in which a body grows cold, breathless and soulless, and one in which you are reshaped, born into a different skin. This is her skin now, the skin which turns from herself and keeps running, which exalts itself in its limits, its lack, its inability, its ultimate, irreversible survival. And this skin is sprinting now, feet barely striking the ground, seeing tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Seeing Hannah’s graduation, their shattered, hesitant reunion, each beautiful, fragmented hour that will piece together the rest of her life. Airborne, Samara is everything she could possibly be: the past, the present, the future, a screaming lung that breathes.