Fog as a Body I Once Lived In
Some nights the fog reaches me before the memory does. New York swallowed me; Sydney softened me. This is the story of the body I lost, the one I rebuilt, and the ghosts that still follow.
Notes from a city I carried home
Some nights the fog gets there first.
Before memory.
Before I can stop it.
It sits at the doorway.
The way New York used to stay in my clothes.
Long after I was inside.
Long after I washed them.
I got high to blur the edges.
Not to escape.
Just to make the shape less sharp.
I didn’t have words yet.
Only friction.
New York took me in whole.
Sydney is where I wake up inside the fog and forget why.
The air here is warm.
That still surprises me.
There was a night before someone left.
A body next to mine.
Breathing lined up.
The stupid hope that if nothing moved, nothing would end.
Ridgewood felt submerged.
I smoked on Woodward.
Walked until hours fell apart.
Sundays bled into Mondays.
Every morning already wrong.
What stays isn’t him.
It’s the cats.
Warm weight.
Fur on my hands.
I fed them like it mattered.
I left thinking I’d be back.
I didn’t know that was the last morning.
I didn’t know doors close quietly.
I can’t remember the walls of the room.
Just a yellow shirt.
Too bright.
Like a warning I pretended not to read.
The fog isn’t a person.
It’s the city.
It’s wanting somewhere else so badly you wake up there
and still haven’t arrived.
borrowing the city
Other nights there was coke.
Blur.
Borrowed confidence.
Everything sharp.
Nothing real.
We walked to the train like the city was ours.
Like this wasn’t temporary.
Like it wouldn’t ask for itself back.
The Double Doubler (excerpt)
On money, hope, and the small rituals we mistake for luck.
The bodega on Myrtle had a scratched plexiglass counter that caught the fluorescent light in ugly angles. I stopped there every night and handed over a single dollar for a Double Doubler. I told people it was a harmless habit, something to close the day with, but that was never the truth. I needed something tiny to stretch further than it ever should. I needed the illusion that my luck, or our luck, might still decide to split open.
Money was tight and everything else was tighter. Those little tickets were the only part of the day where the math didn’t feel predetermined. I scratched for both of us, though I would have died before admitting it. I kept trying to turn one dollar into a sign that things might ease up, that we might catch a break, that we weren’t always going to be one bad week from disappearing through the floorboards. Hope felt safer when it didn’t look like hope.
Excerpt from a personal essay currently under submission.
Before the Wire Went Dead
My twenties were a hallway with no exits. Wrong doors, wrong hours, wrong men. New York rewired me on blackout nights. This is the story of the version of me who didn’t survive, and the one who did.
My twenties were a hallway with no exits.
Wrong doors. Wrong men. Wrong hours. I kept walking like the floor owed me nothing.
If you slipped out quietly, good.
Some rooms rot.
Some rooms bite whoever stays too long.
New York rewired me on blackout nights and empty platforms.
Something snapped and never came back.
Some nights the glitch arrives before I do.
Some nights it’s the only real thing.
Some nights I miss the girl from before the wire went dead.
Almost
There are versions of my life that almost happened. Versions of me that almost stayed, almost loved, almost survived. This is the quiet reckoning with every future I nearly stepped into, and the one I finally chose.
I looked back at the year tonight and the worst part is how quickly I accepted the damage.
Kimchi Fried Rice
When I lived in New York, I used to dream about free will.
Not in the ways people talk about it.
Not escape. Not reinvention. Not becoming someone louder or braver.
I pictured myself making kimchi fried rice.
I saw it clearly.
A pan heating on the stove. Oil blooming across the surface.
Cold rice pressed flat until it crackled at the edges.
The sharp smell of kimchi cutting through the room.
That was the fantasy.
Not love.
Not permanence.
Just deciding what to eat, and when.
The Late Walk
A late walk can unravel more than a night. The things we remember, the things we carry, the versions of us that follow. This is the story of what still walks beside me long after the streets go quiet.
I passed someone tonight with your exact build. The same white hair you always insisted wasn’t stress, the same slight hunch you carried without noticing. For a second I thought it was you. I used to call you Quasimodo under my breath, but the way my body reacted before my mind caught up wasn’t a joke.
Rotting Clean
There’s a version of me still stranded on a Ridgewood platform at 4am. Pretty on the outside. Rotting clean. A micro-essay about the nights that refuse to stay dead.
There’s a version of me still stranded on a Ridgewood platform at 4am.
She won’t stay dead.
The city noticed when I vanished.
I didn’t.
I was too busy falling apart with perfect nails.
Pretty on the outside.
Rotting clean.
Distance
Distance changes shape depending on where I stand; between cities, between versions of myself, between what I left and what stayed. This is the space I learned to live inside when nothing lined up anymore.
I can name the exact moment it shifted. The mosaic lamp we picked up in Williamsburg buzzing overhead, and the way you said my name in a tone that didn’t belong to you anymore. It was so foreign I almost stopped moving.
A Love Letter Written Between Two and Four (micro excerpt)
A love letter written in the hours when the city goes quiet and the truth gets loud. A fragment about tenderness, distance, and the moment that stayed long after everything else fell apart.
This is the loneliest I have ever been. Not the loneliness of being alone, but the loneliness of standing beside someone who cannot hold what you carry. I moved to a country where I knew no one. I crossed an ocean for a man who does not understand the cost of that decision. The cats breathe evenly. Their steadiness embarrasses me with its simplicity. It also saves me in ways I cannot name.
Quiet Check
A moment of stillness, a pause long enough to hear what’s shifting underneath. A short reflection on the quiet checks we make when the noise drops and the truth comes forward.
I went through the whole timeline again tonight. The only part that was wrong was everything. It should never have unfolded the way it did, but it did, and the part I still can’t deny is this: you showed me what cruelty was, and I executed it myself.
The Unsaid
There’s always a moment where the truth sits between two people, waiting. This is a small piece about the things left unspoken, the weight they carry, and the versions of ourselves that hold them.
There is one detail I keep leaving out. The part where I threw his unread books against those flimsy New York walls that sounded like cardboard when they hit, the neighbour knocking on our door to check the noise, the cats scrambling across the floor like they already knew how the night would end.
Returning to Sydney
Coming back to Sydney felt quieter than I expected. A return to a life I thought I’d left behind, and the softness that met me when the noise of New York finally fell away. A story about coming home changed.
Sydney looked the same but sharper, almost too bright, like it had been waiting with the lights on. The supermarket aisles felt louder than New York ever did, the white tiles shining back at me like they were checking if I had changed. I kept thinking the city would feel familiar, but everything had been rearranged in my absence. Even the air felt cleaner, almost suspiciously so, as if it wasn’t sure I deserved a soft landing.
I walked through the city with the sense that something had been moved an inch to the left.
The colours too bright, the shadows unfamiliar, the air almost indifferent.
Sydney didn’t feel like a place I had returned to.
It felt like a version of itself built in my absence, a duplicate with rounder edges.
I kept waiting for something to click into place.
It never did.
Morning Noise
Mornings are never as quiet as they seem. There’s the noise outside, and then there’s the noise inside. The thoughts, the echoes, the memories that rise before the day even starts. This is a moment caught in that space.
At four this morning I heard a siren that sounded exactly like Myrtle Avenue. For a second I forgot where I lived.
Ridgewood, 3:14AM
Ridgewood at 3:14am was its own kind of truth. Empty platforms, cold air, and a version of me who kept walking through the dark because she didn’t know how to stop. This is the memory that still flickers.
The radiator hissed like it was warning me about something I already knew. Outside, a man dragged a crate across the pavement and it echoed through the whole street, like someone trying to scrape the night wide open. The cats were asleep in their corners, breathing softly like they belonged to a gentler world. I sat on the floor and watched the red light from the deli flicker against my window, the glow pulsing like a heart I was supposed to match.
Everything in New York felt alive at that hour.
Even the loneliness had a shape.
Even the silence had weight.
Sometimes I think the only place I ever felt truly awake was in that apartment, staring at the cracked paint, listening to the radiator talk to me like an old friend.
The Real Version
This is the version of me I told myself I was, and then there’s the real one. Shaped by New York nights, quiet truths, and the moments that forced me to see myself without the story. This is her.
There is a version of events I have never written down. It changes nothing and explains everything.
Wazza
Wazza moves through the house like someone who’s lived a hundred lives and learned to carry them gently. This is a small portrait of the man who became family in the quietest, most ordinary moments.
Wazza moves around the house like a war general who never fully retired. Every time he sits down, he sighs like the government personally betrayed him. Every time he stands up, he groans like he’s being drafted again. I don’t even look up anymore. It’s just part of the ambiance. Like birds. Or traffic.
He loves telling me stories that start with, “In Vietnam…” and then absolutely never finish in Vietnam. He’ll take a left turn into some bullshit about a dodgy mechanic, or a mate named Kev who once tried to barbeque roadkill. I don’t think he’s avoiding talking about the war. I think he’s just committed to the bit.
He calls me “kiddo” like he’s the wise mentor in a coming-of-age movie, even though half the time he’s the one asking me how to update the apps on his phone. He’ll pour me wine with that smug dad-energy like he retired at 46 because he’s a genius and I’m just now catching up.
When he dies, I’m going to fight God.
Not because I’ll miss him, but because he’d think it was funny.
The Early Wine Days (excerpt)
Back then the wine was cheap and the nights were soft. Wazza, Lee, the quiet rituals we fell into without trying. These were the early wine days. Small, ordinary moments that ended up feeling like home.
He looked at me for a long moment.
Then he poured wine into two glasses that did not match.
This was the start of the early wine days.
A season with its own climate.
A small pocket of time where nothing felt entirely real.
The kitchen light sometimes took on a muted blue, as if filtered through deep water. The air would still itself and we both fell silent at the same second, the way animals pause when the world shifts.
He told me the pieces of his early life.
Not the war.
Never directly.
Only small mentions.
A night in the jungle that never ended.
The taste of canned fruit in the heat.
A sound he still hears sometimes when he wakes.
The kind of memories that arrive already stripped down, already pared to the bone.
I learned to listen the way he spoke.
Indirect.
Careful.
Half inside another world.
I told fragments of my own.
Ending after ending.
Loss in the shape of a country.
He never asked for the missing parts.
After each night he went to his room.
I went to mine.
The distance between us held.
The silence felt ritual.
Two people returning to their separate camps after sharing the same fire.
27 Nov
27 November is my birthday, but more than that, it’s a marker of who I became that year. A quiet reflection on aging, memory, and the version of myself I met on the day I turned another year older.
I woke before the light.
The kind of hour where the room feels borrowed.
Thin air.
Unsteady silence.
The ghost of who I used to be still curled somewhere near the bed.
Birthdays used to feel like warnings.
A tally of everything I could not outrun.
A life measured in almosts.
I kept imagining a future where I felt held by something other than fear.
Something other than memory.
Something other than him.
But this morning was different.
Not softer.
Sharper.
Like the world had turned the lights back on and expected me to notice what was left.
And what wasn’t.
I made coffee and the kitchen felt like all the early apartments I ever lived in.
Cheap tiles.
Thin walls.
A quiet that pressed too close.
For a moment I thought I heard the M train in the distance, that low groan that moves through Ridgewood at 3am like a reminder you are alive in a city that does not care either way.
I used to love that sound.
It made me feel anonymous.
It made me feel possible.
There are versions of me still wandering those streets.
The girl clutching hope like a lit match.
The one who tried to make herself small enough to be loved.
The one who thought pain was proof of depth.
I can feel them sometimes.
A flicker under the ribs.
A shadow crossing a window.
A memory that refuses to die cleanly.
Healing is a refusal.
A decision not to return to the rooms that dimmed you.
A slow reassembly of a self no one thought to look for.
A truth you learn to say without whispering.
Another year around the sun and I refuse to wait at any door.
Not for love.
Not for permission.
Not for someone to finally see me.
There is something shifting in me.
Quiet.
Dangerous.
The kind of change that happens once, maybe twice in a lifetime.
I can feel it rising from somewhere I thought was gone.
A pulse.
A clarity.
A hunger I am no longer ashamed of.
I do not know what happens next.
But I know what it feels like.
The way the city feels right before the train arrives.
That split second of tremor in the tracks.
That charged stillness.
That low, electric warning:
watch this space.