A Question of Age by Jacinta Parsons

Author:Jacinta Parsons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC Books
Published: 2022-07-16T00:00:00+00:00

ELEMENT:

Water

Parched

Water

Introduction

IT WAS ONLY ONE month after the Ash Wednesday fires tore through lives and land that the rain fell heavy from the sky. There had been drought here before, when livestock, in desperation and the madness of starvation, ate the dry earth in an attempt to fill their bellies.

When a drought creeps in and makes itself at home, it feels as if it will never leave. You believe that this is the way you are going to die.

When those rains fell in March 1983, they didn’t stop. It is how droughts often work. Long periods of life-changing thirst, and then the rain falls like it had never stopped. ‘Why were you worried, silly girl? There was always going to be rain. You think I would leave you here to die?’

Over the next twelve months there was more rain than usual, 822 millimetres filling dams and quenching the earth. It felt as though water had the power to wash away any memory we might have had of our desperate thirst. Once thirst is quenched, it’s difficult to remember what it feels like to hunger for it. Once your thirst disappears, you can’t quite recall why it felt so terrible.

The land had been brown and hard for so long that many had forgotten it could be any other way. Unlike fire, there is no one moment of trauma during a drought, just a prolonged torture. Soon, though, after the rains came, the landscape returned to green, and the dams filled. And it almost seemed like nothing had ever happened. You could be forgiven for believing it had always been this way, lush and full of love.

***

I have understood that strange, frantic desire for water. I know what it feels like to thirst for it, when your body is screaming for it, dreaming to be drowned in it. I have wanted to drink it up so that I might be overflowing. I know what it feels like to want for it so single-mindedly that you can think of nothing else. And my desire to be so full of it that water spills out of me, staining my shirt, consuming every part of me – that I might feel it run cold through every tributary.

I was in my mid-twenties and had found myself again in hospital. By this stage, it had been weeks. I had come out of surgery that had attached an ileostomy bag a few days before, but now my bowel had twisted and was obstructed. Nothing would go down. I had vomited every last drop of liquid from my body – my earth was parched, and it took every inch of me to attempt to try to deal with the pain of thirst.

It was vicious and I was maddened by its unrelenting cry. I had already come to understand that in this sort of pain, you must find a way to stop fighting. I had learnt through other bouts of relentless pain that I needed to find the strength to lie still, to allow it to cover me.

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