A Narrow Fellow in the Grass

CW: Mention of animal cruelty / animal death.

The day before my twenty-sixth birthday, I almost stepped on a snake.

We were out in the bush, picking through dense scrub burned orange and brown by the summer sun. We had broken through the tree line and were following the road that led back towards the beach house, our sandals kicking up plumes of yellow dust that clung to our ankles. My thoughts at the time were solely on the champagne that was waiting in a pail of ice on the verandah, to be drunk in celebration of (and commiserations for) my ageing. 

I stopped dead when my partner thrust his arm out in front of me. Mid-step, I clung to him and teetered as we watched an eastern brown snake slither across the path. It was so close that we could have bent down and picked it up, but since neither of us had a death wish we just held our breaths and let it continue on its way. Then, as quickly as it had appeared, it vanished into the undergrowth. 

I glanced up at my partner, who was wide-eyed with the kind of bewildered expression that one only pulls when their life has flashed before their eyes. And then we started to laugh.

In my early twenties, I was in love with someone who didn’t love me back. It was the sort of love that had me picturing a fantasy domesticity I’d never dared to entertain previously, one that involved rituals; morning kisses, frying eggs,  squeezing in my tiny mould-riddled bathroom to brush our teeth side by side. 

I never woke up beside this person. Our liaisons were limited to seedy bars thick with neon haze, and usually ended at two in the morning with their languid refrains of “I should probably call an Uber…” As if waiting for me to implore them to stay. I might have been stupid enough at twenty-one to entertain trysts with someone who clearly didn’t like me, but even then, I knew better than to beg for affection. 

Looking back, I don’t doubt that this infatuation could have been solved with a cold bath, or cloud-watching in a field, somewhere with no telephone wires to cut up the sky, no cheap whiskey or pineapple-flavoured vapes to ‘freshen’ our breath, even as we pretended that the night wouldn’t end in a kiss. It speaks to the depths of my infatuation that I thought fruit-scented smoke could be erotic if it came from the lips of the right person.

Back at the homestead, we popped the cork on the champagne and sat down on the couch, orange foam exploding from the seams of its homemade floral-patterned cushions. Too lazy and stupid with the heat to bother searching for glasses, we took it in turns swigging directly from the bottle, the green glass cold against our lips, crisp and tasting of ripe pears. 

All we wanted to talk about was the snake. I’ve called Australia home since I was five, but in all those years I’d never seen a snake outside of a zoo, despite yearly warnings from my parents to keep out of high grass when summer rolled around. A friend of my brother’s was bitten by a tiger snake chasing his dog through the wetlands and it served as a cautionary tale in our house for years to come, mythologised in dry twig brush and stagnant waters – and a short, sharp scream. 

But we lived in the pinnacle of suburbia; cul-de-sacs, manicured hedges in vivid emerald greens, roses choked into submission with twine behind picket fences, lest their thorns disrupt the homogeneity of the block. It was hard to take their concerns seriously.

Since he was a toddler my partner has made yearly treks into the bush with his family. He told me stories of visits to their isolated cabin in Victoria’s north-west, where every morning he had to knock his boots upside down to dislodge spiders and scorpions before slipping them on. We discussed an acquaintance whose family dog had died wrestling a snake. In a futile effort to save the beloved pet, our acquaintance’s father had allegedly decapitated the snake with a shovel. 

I remember saying that I thought it was unfair. The snake didn’t know that it was doing anything wrong.

There are two terrible ways to wake up: hungover, and alone. I was frequently both, though at the time I would have told you I loved it. To wake up with a dry mouth and a head splintering with pain was a sign that the previous evening had been one of shimmering ecstasy, even if I’d travelled nowhere more exciting than the smokers at The Rose and drank nothing better than flat bitters.

Hangovers, though unpleasant, don’t last. But aloneness, it is stickier and prone to linger, often compounded by an inertia driven by memories of the good parts. The way they’d smiled at my joke. The way their fingers had brushed the curve of my waist and the hem of my skirt. The way the lights on the highway had looked when I rested my hot head against the cool glass of the car window. I thought I could bear the aloneness if I had those small moments. 

But the thing about absence is that it doesn’t always make the heart grow fonder. Sometimes, absence makes the pre-frontal cortex wake itself up after a hundred-year slumber, blinking and squinting, blinded by the light. On a Wednesday morning in your kitchen, drinking instant coffee because you’re trying to save for a house, you might begin to reconcile with the idea that maybe, just maybe, you deserve to be with someone who thinks that you look better in the light of day than you do soaked in neon.

My final decision to cease contact was not, I think, completely conscious. As I age, I discover that true epiphanies are rare, and these visions of Damascus revelations are replaced with smaller moments of clarity that bloom quietly, like harebells in July; always there, always growing, but only noticed when their brilliant blue shines through.

In her poem, “The Snake”, Emily Dickinson muses: 

I more than once at morn,

Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash

Unbraiding in the sun,-- 

When, stooping to secure it,

It wrinkled, and was gone.

In my home country we have only one kind of native snake, the adder; an unspectacular creature that spends most of its time basking on sunny rocks in the Highlands. But snakes are woven through our folklore. We tell stories about the beithir, a mythical monster that is said to resemble an enormous serpent with a poisonous stinger in its tail. If a person is stung, then it’s imperative that they reach the closest loch. If they manage to get to the water before the beithir does then their pain will be cured, but if the beithir reaches it first then they’re doomed to die a terrible death. 

We went back down to the sea later that afternoon, and though I knew it was long gone, I  kept an eye out for the snake. My partner knew a cove, tucked away from the main beach, that became a makeshift swimming pool at low tide. To enter it safely, you had to jump from a shelf of rock that protruded over the water like a cracked grey tooth. Aim wrong and you risked getting tangled in a bed of yellow seaweed – or worse, landing on a submerged rock. 

My partner went first, disappearing into the blue in a spray of white foam. I anxiously watched a stream of bubbles rising, then he broke the surface. ‘Your turn’ He grinned as he swam to the side of the pool. 

Even though he had shown me how to do it, there was still a gnawing terror worming its way through me. The water slowly shimmered and stilled, until I saw myself reflected in its silvery mirror. The sun was hot against my back and I could feel my shoulders starting to burn, yet I just kept staring at the water. It wouldn’t have mattered if a hundred people had gone before me – my fear was mine alone.

I would like to tell you that walking away from this person was easy. But it’s hard to walk away from affection, even if the depth of feeling is unreciprocated.

In my diaries from this time in my life, I can feel the intense frustration of my younger self scrawled in blue ink. Anger was once my solace, from despair, from grief. I found it easier to cope if my teeth were gritted and the veins in my neck throbbed; however misplaced, rage was my protection. Days before the severing, I wrote:

...I will never climb a tower or slay a dragon or rescue a lover chained to a rock in the sea. But I can help myself.

It makes me blush, that sort of earnestness. I’m even less profound now than I was back then. But I remember that girl very well, and I’m not ashamed of her. Like a bartender coming to tell us that they were calling last drinks, I knew that the end was near. And I wanted to be the first to leave

In the wake of his son’s death from measles at the age of six, poet William Wordsworth wrote to a friend “I loved the boy with the utmost love of which my soul is capable.” During the wedding ceremony of her stepmother, Fleabag watches the Priest proclaim that love “isn’t something that weak people do. Being a romantic takes a hell of a lot of hope.” In the sixties, Paul McCartney famously crooned that “all you need is love.” 

Life, I’ve learned, doesn’t begin and end at two o’clock on a Wednesday morning. Nor does love  – though when I finally walked away it did feel like the end of everything. But I knew if I didn’t go, it would go on and on, and fear would make me stay. 

I think it’s alright not to know what you want in life. But it’s a mistake to look for it in someone else. 

There was a selfish part of me that harboured hope of them reaching out. In a perfect world we would have sat together in the laneways behind Hosier and talked through everything. Were our parting a novel I was writing, I would have let us both spill out things unsaid, regrets and burdens. There would be no raised voices, no broken wine glasses or tear-stained cheeks. We would have politely shaken hands and parted ways. 

Would I have told them I loved them? Here my pen hovers above the paper.

But life is not romantic. Life is uncomfortable and exhausting. It’s crowded trams and missing keys and tuna pasta bake for dinner for the fifth night in a row. There was no reconciliation, no final goodbye. We moved in the same circles for a while. We still have some of the same friends. They reappeared in my inbox late last year, and we had a polite but brief exchange of text messages. We made tentative promises to catch up, though I knew it wouldn’t come to pass. 

And then, nothing. 

In the same letter to his friend, though sick with grief, Wordsworth concluded “yet in the agony of my spirit in surrendering such a treasure, I feel a thousand times richer than if I had never possessed it.” And while I don’t look back on that time in my life with much fondness, nor am I averse to it. I remember the lights on the highway, and I remember the girl who helped herself. As it turns out, I would climb a tower or slay a dragon or rescue someone out at sea. The greatest love I have ever known is the kindness I’ve given to myself. 

If life is ever romantic, it’s because we make it so. My friends and I play tennis on Sundays. I walk to work in the mornings listening to Billie Holiday. And when I fell in love again a few years later, the kind cemented in odes, the kind cherubic angels imbue their arrows with, head-over-heels-breath-catching love, it happened on a rainy afternoon in the middle of winter. Perfect, golden glory. I felt it then, and I still feel it now.

My birthday dawned grey, and we loaded the car with blankets and snorkels and empty Tupperware containers, ready for the long drive back to Melbourne. 

We stopped halfway along the highway, pulling into a servo. While my partner was in the bathroom, I bought a can of Coke and struck up a conversation with the teller. 

‘Good holiday, was it?’ 

I said it was and told her about the snake. I mentioned how close it had been to us – and how seemingly unbothered it was. She nodded along and pushed the sweating can back towards me. 

‘That’s the thing, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘If you leave them alone, they'll leave you alone.’