- for a day when gravity is turned down.

A day of walking on the moon, for everyone. Forget lack of fitness, dodgy hips and no co-ordination, today everyone leaps and bounds like the first issue of Superman. Everyone outside and moving, just for the joy of it. A Sunday, to make the most of it. No cars on the roads, no trains and trams on the rails. Elbow pads and knee pads and helmets for the cautious. Skirts for those with nothing to hide.

It’s a day of flyby gropes, of carefully calculating my trajectory to bump into this person just so, whoops, sorry about that, sorry, as I clip something attractive and dark-eyed, and we tumbled into a building. She smells good. I’ve wingclipped enough already to know that boys are generally smelly. There are some exceptions to the rule, but not enough to want to tangle with them too often.

That’s okay, she laughs. Everyone is giddy and giggly.

Something screaming careens out of the sky and slams us into the building again. We ricochet off, the screaming hysterical trying-to-get-too-much-attention-through-noise young thing with bad hair has a hand on the attractive dark-eyed something’s ankle. They cartwheel into a tree. I land on someone by accident.

There are too many people in the city, and not enough open space. A whirlwind of bodies has taken over the stretch of Swanston Street between Flinders and Bourke, the biggest and rowdiest game of british bulldog the world will know, five storeys high.

I bounce as far and as hard as I can, off balconies and gutters, until the rooftops are my platforms, and as I clear the crowds, I pick up momentum, that unstoppable rhythm of kangaroos. The Eastern Freeway is empty, and mine. Each time I rise into the sky, the horizon pulls further and further away, the ground strange and puzzling dream. I can fly, I can fly, I can fall with style. I holler my way out through the suburbs, startling birds and making dogs bark. The houses disappear, and still I bound, giant leaps for a little giant, until gravity begins to wind back up, and my leaps get smaller, shorter, until there is no joy left, until it is just me with my feet stuck to the ground. I’m miles from home, I don’t know where I am, and my phone has no reception.