Tree frog green: that was the colour of cycads in January. Unfurling like prehistoric fountains from crumbed-rust dirt, they stayed fresh under the blazing sun. At night, wobbly ceiling fans would half-heartedly whip syrupy air into nearly cool breezes while geckos cack-cackled in corners, and the Bush Stone Curlew wailed… Raised on an imaginative diet of four-seasoned woods, solid-walled houses and cloaked, clear-speaking heroes, I’d managed to overlay such scenes onto our old home of Melbourne… but they made no sense here.

It’s time this piece had a home. I’m finally publishing it, here.

From the rest quarters at the hub at the building, I walk outwards. Then hit a curved wall. The stairs have rotated away. So, I slink untethered through darkness, coiled snake power cords above and cold ground below, until the stairway looms, then climb to where mirrors fold billion-year light into sensors and screens flicker numbers. A little white dome rolling under the big black dome, feebly tracking pinpricks of light. I look down at my equations and wilt. When will it end?

During the last deglaciation fifteen thousand years ago, global sea level rose nearly sixty feet in less than five hundred years. Known as meltwater pulse 1A, this event was discovered in 1989 via shallow-dwelling corals found in the deep sea, bolstering emerging theories that climate change could be rapid. Ice and sediment cores in Greenland had already revealed evidence of recurrent spikes in atmospheric temperature of 10 to 15 degrees Celsius during the last sixty thousand years, and these spikes were closely spaced in time with other sea-level rise events. Ice sheet formation and decay clearly played a role in these climate changes, and the game was on to determine how, and how much.

The pen you dlupped onto the paper last night straddles the page forlornly. The cursor blinks, insolently staring you down—what will you write today?

What do you do well? Are you perhaps good at conversation? Skilled at playing music? Or, perhaps, a master at the specifics of your job? Next question: How much do you enjoy or even need to be told that you do something well? The pleasure of affirmation is a seductive pull.

Your heart folds up and drops to the floor. How could they have misunderstood …