In the closing dialogue of the Forum (‘Who will be there to sing the rain song?’), June Oscar, an Australian Indigenous cultural leader and adviser to dance company Marrugeku, says: ‘I am the vessel that carries my language.’

I think to myself how I am, too, the vessel that inevitably carries what my language carries with it: solidarity, communication, love and connection, and sometimes, brutality.

Back at the Springback Assembly apartment, everyone is deep in conversation, scattered across the living room, the kitchen, the yard. It’s our last night.

I pause. I move to the edge of the courtyard, trying to take in a wide view of everyone here. I trace our journeys in my mind, trying to find what connects us.

Coming from Cyprus (from the edges of ‘Europe’) I sometimes get an alien feeling in these spaces of privilege. Stories are held everywhere, though. Everyone will go back to their own lives. But for this brief glitch in time and place, we are all here together. And I stop feeling like a glitch myself. Tonight, the glitch becomes the gathering.

The stories become the thread.

Later, at the table, I start a conversation with my newest friend. I show her my house in Cyprus on Street View, and she realises how close Cyprus is to Gaza. She asks me how it feels being so close, and I tell her that during the summer I was looking up at the stars but instead saw glowing streaks of missiles, or how I’ve been tracking spy planes flying from the British bases.

Soon we’re talking about how disorienting it feels that the genocide is also so much at the margins of this festival. How confusing it felt to witness a tiptoeing around the power of language in acknowledging complicity and accountability. The silence around it felt like another kind of glitch, one we didn’t yet know how to name.

Our conversation expands, and others at the table join in. We talk about love, grief and everything in between – the weight of it all. Lately, I’ve been thinking about what hospitality really is. It’s often dressed up through institutions, conferences, organised talks but I found it here, instead. Shared over bread with chocolate spread and cold eggs at 2am. In the cracks of conversation and in the unanswered questions.

And I wonder again, Who will be there to sing the rain song when we are gone?

Maybe it will be us, again. In another courtyard. Another rupture in time. Or maybe the song is already being sung in the closing dialogues

in the quiet act of lingering a little longer.