Wazza
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)
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
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.
Some Nights
Some nights the past feels louder than the room I’m standing in.
A hum under the skin.
A memory trying to crawl back inside
A small life
Some nights I miss the small life.
The kettle on the stove.
The two bowls by the window.
The feeling that someone was choosing me without saying it.
The Night Before
The night before my life started to make sense, I couldn’t breathe.
Not in a dramatic way.
In a quiet way.
The kind where you realise you’ve been living on borrowed air for years and never noticed.
I stood in the kitchen with the lights off, listening to a city that wasn’t even mine anymore.
Every version of me I ever abandoned was there too.
The girl who waited for people who never came.
The one who mistook longing for love.
The one who thought disappearing made her easier to keep.
They didn’t say anything.
They didn’t have to.
I felt something shift under my ribs.
A crack.
A warning.
A beginning.
Grief has a way of choosing you before you choose yourself.
But that night, I didn’t flinch.
I let the past sit in the room with me without trying to fold myself into its shape.
I don’t know if that’s healing.
But it felt like the truth.
And truth is louder than fear.
If you let it.
Sometimes I think that was the moment everything changed.
Not the morning after.
Not my birthday.
On a random Thursday night.
Just me, in the dark, finally realising I wasn’t broken.
I wasn’t waiting.
I wasn’t asking.
I was waking up.
And once you wake up you don’t go back.
The past can knock, but it doesn’t live here anymore.