It was still hot, though the sun had gone down a while ago. Hiding behind my tent in a metal folding chair had become my habit after the show: every night, sitting in the dark with my bare feet in the grass, listening to the strange soft clicking of eucalyptus leaves in the branches above, trying not to hear the murmuring voices of people leaving my show below those branches.
I almost threw up.
What a strange woman.
Bats in the trees.
As our audiences filed out the front, a comedian buddy playing the festival in the tent next to mine joined me, dragging over his own metal chair. He said nothing. We watched the stars.
Christmas in Sydney is a hot thing. Makes you study hot things around you all over again, because it’s freakin’Christmas, so they seem more striking. Hot things like sun on metal and shining glass. My apartment building on Sydney Harbor was distorted by both of these that summer, in that year of two summers. Gold sunlight bent by metal-framed sheets of glass up so very high: a man-made sheen. And it only shone, did not reveal, as glass is supposed to; looked like a black and white photograph. I would stand on the sidewalk outside my building, looking up, counting, trying to find my floor and understand how it is for humans on earth, all crammed together and sweetly lonely, building things. I carry the next song like a new baby everywhere I go, so each of these images relates to my new musical creature —and its future. Will this new song be happy, be healthy? Can it shine without lying? I write it sweetly lonely, building something. But really, it writes itself and it’s not
