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.
Some Nights
Some nights return without warning. The memories, the cities, the versions of me that still rise after dark. A fragment about the hours that blur truth, longing, and the things I still can’t name out loud.
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
A fragment about missing the small life. The quiet kitchen moments, the bowls by the window, and the feeling of being chosen without needing the words.
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.
Re-entry
Reentry is never clean. You come back changed, carrying versions of yourself that don’t fit the rooms anymore. This is the moment I stepped into a life I left behind, and the truth that followed me through the door.
Coming back to Sydney felt like stepping into a life I left mid-sentence.
Nothing fit exactly.
Not even me.
The Night Before
The night before always carries its own kind of tension. The softness, the ache, the knowing. A brief piece about the moment right before everything shifts, when the body already feels the change coming.
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.