Sweat sticking our thighs to the cracked leather car seats, the bitumen turned to gravel underneath rubber tires, the borrowed pick-up heaving under the weight of all of our belongings. Sitting on the edge of February, the heat sank its teeth into us like ripe fruit: we’d slipped hot and listless into the sweet mud of the year’s beginnings.

In our new home, Gaia felt uprooted, I think; her displacement was corrosive, like agitation under the flesh – an elusive itch.

We were nestled within a sprawling of woodland, and a creek, muddy and roiling. Our first afternoon was spent in the garden, ploughing through the brambles and snarls of green: steeped in viridescent splendour. Gaia dropped to the earth with a muted thud, her feet seized by a snaking vine. Skin slick with sweat, beads of moisture transpired at her temples, blinking down the sides of her face.

There was a shifting within her body that year – something almost too slight to be realised; hanging suspended, her girlhood was sliced open, gutted, and autopsied. Her first blood spilt and stained white bed sheets brown; her skin stretched taut over bones suddenly too big; her voice dropped nearly imperceptibly, a low rasp slipping out the back of her jaw.

March crept in: a fog-damp veil descended, ferns uncoiled with deliberate lethargy, and the earth secreted a perfume all at once sweet, and rich, and ancient. Summer dissolved under our tongues, and the leaves of the silky oak in our front yard began to abandon their branches.

Gaia handed me the clippers the wrong way, blade first. Head tipped back, smooth throat straining, she revelled in the hum, her last baby teeth shaking in her skull. Baptized by razor and ash brown locks free falling from a bare scalp – “Just like the trees,” she said, in a voice as fragile as bird bone.

The autumn nights were lit gently by slices of sickle moonlight, and the clouds hung heavy over our heads, obscuring the stars.

“Sometimes, it kind of feels like I don’t quite fit. Like, I don’t know, this place doesn’t have any space for me.”

I remember telling her this on some April evening, sitting on the veranda steps, pressing sour blueberries up against our gums, licking the deepest indigo stains from pink padded fingertips.

It wasn’t entirely true.

The straps of her singlet sat atop collarbones burnt seething red, shedding skin like something vaguely reptilian: “You know, last week, I sat out in the sun until I actually started blistering?”

She let her hands rest on the base of her ribcage – a rippling of bone under flesh, just visible below the edge of her white cotton top, fraying where she’d cropped it with kitchen scissors. Her body reeking acrid and sour beside mine: “I won’t bathe ‘til the next rainfall,” she’d said.

Sometimes, listening to her confessions, I felt compelled to make things up.

Gaia would often slip away for hours at a time and come home dripping, draped in some sort of water weed, a thin layer of pond grime settling into her skin. Refusing to dry off, she’d tremble into the new dawn, the chill biting at her bare flesh.

Gaia went barefoot in mid-May, pairs of well-worn boots and mud encrusted tennis shoes laying forgotten beside the front doormat. The flesh on her feet tore soft and tender, ribbons of crimson curling out of the lacerations, the blood bubbling slow and lazy like sap.

Sometimes, she’d come home with some small creature cradled in her palms: a lorikeet chick, lame and limping, or a parrot with wings crushed like eggshell, feathers caked in its own shit and blood. She’d trail moss and mud and soil all through the house, constructing little nests in her windowsill, and under her bed. When the smell began to escape, seeping downstairs through the floorboards, we knew that something was dying in there.

Almost as if it were trying to escape the approaching winter, the afternoon light began to recede earlier and earlier, our evenings now imbued with a violet flush.

Unfolding a pocketknife I’d found at the second-hand shop – rust bleeding onto my hands from years of sitting idle at the back of a kitchen draw – I remember etching my initials into the trunk of the ash tree in our backyard.

With a harsh intake of breath, Gaia drew back, her face twisted in grimace, running her left hand over the three ridges, raised and pearl white, where our old next-door neighbour’s dog had torn right through her wrist.

“Just a flesh wound,” I said, digging the blade in keen and deep and steady.

It was June, and early mornings began to ache with cold. The air was laced with something sharp, tearing right through us, and landing deep in our lungs with silent violence. We didn’t realise we’d lost feeling in our lips ‘til we bit down too hard and tasted copper.

When I discovered Gaia crouched in the garden, her back curled almost foetal, clutching fistfuls of earth, I remember thinking she appeared poised, trembling on some precarious periphery.

The blades of her shoulders and round ridges of her spine protruded through the thin material of her t-shirt. She pressed her hands into the soft flesh of her stomach, bone and muscle meeting her fingers; she could’ve opened herself up, divulging what I knew was tangled amongst the pink-grey glisten of her intestines.

Throat convulsing, every exhale a spray of black spittle, there had been some revelation within her, something primordial and divine, pushing frenzied against her sternum, urging to be freed.

“Open your mouth,” she said, and I remember letting my jaw grow slack.

Laying a sapling limp across my tongue, I think she smiled, the soil staining the milk white of her teeth, settling in between canine and molar.

“This place doesn’t grow on you,” she’d said, “it grows inside of you. Like...the roots of an old tree tangled all up in your guts.”

 I swallowed, I think, clusters of earth still hanging loose from the roots.