TWENTY-TWO (Yesterday)

There was a time there all those years ago, in that old house, that old suburb, there was a time there when I saw you in everything. Wherever I went, wherever I looked, there you were. They say, after a person dies, it’s not uncommon to still see them, in places you might have once …

EIGHTEEN (Carry Me Home)

For n. — When I run my fingers over her skin I see traces of the lives she has already lived, lives that I have never known – perhaps never will know. Her skin tells the stories of past loves, lovers that have been too quick, too rough. Stories of children gained and lost. Homes …

FIFTEEN (Remain Nameless)

My sister is dying. It’s an ugly sentence that is less painful to write down than to utter aloud. There are only two places in the world, two moments in every day that I allow myself to be reminded of this fact. When she is sleeping in the next room, and every afternoon as I …

FOURTEEN (Never Let Me Go)

Is it selfish to be this young, with this much life to live and to sit on this dock every evening as the sun disappears, looking out to sea and to be so completely tempted by the endlessness of it? To yearn for the absolution of nothingness. The water, high above my ears, roaring through …

ELEVEN (Heartlines)

To say that Eleanor would become my mentor, my confidante, my everything, would be telling you the premise of a story without ever giving away the ending. I first saw Eleanor on a busy main road, through the sunlit glass of a crowded bar at dusk, she was with another lover then. Or was it …

TEN (Ghosts)

When I met Eleanor I was on the verge of becoming who I would become for the rest of our life together. She caught me on the cusp and held me there. It seems we spend so much of our lives looking back, on who we could have been, what we could have done. But …

NINE (Stay)

Two doors up from me a lady sits in a waiting room chair beside an open door. She is reading a copy of New Idea. Her glasses slowly slip to the end of her nose. It is early morning by this point. I get a glimpse into the room as the nurse walks me down …

EIGHT (On A Sunday)

Mum cries out from the bedroom down the end of the hallway, and I know he is gone. Her cry is one of a grief so complex it still haunts me to this day. My older brother is there with her, he was the one who answered the phone. I sit with my younger brother …

SEVEN (heaven help my heart)

Mum wakes us up early on Saturday. She tells me she’s going to the hospital with my older brother. That she’ll probably be gone all day. She leaves a twenty dollar note on the kitchen bench, kisses each of us goodbye and leaves. It is March 2006. I’m fresh out of school and studying at …

SIX (one of these nights)

Mum always tells me I was born during a cyclone and I never know if she’s being metaphorical or not. When I was born, my family lived in the eight block town of Bogan Gate. Dad was in the army, so we got moved around to strange places a lot. In late January 1988, Bogan …