Have you ever felt that thundering ache in your chest, like your heart was going to explode? Rupture? Like it was you under the floorboards in an Edgar Allen Poe poem? The imminent booming becoming louder and louder and louder until it eventually drives you insane? And everyone just looks the other way? We all…
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When I was five, I owned a bright yellow bathing suit that was just fine and dandy for mucking about in our backyard paddle pool, which mum would set up against the back fence every summer, making sure it was not in splash range of her clothesline. The yellow bathing suit was a one piece,…
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CW: Abuse, child abuse Freedom. As a kid, it meant zooming down our street, which ran from one edge of our flat dusty country town to the other, on my beloved yellow bike. Letting go of the handlebars, tipping my head back and taking in the cotton-candy coloured sky right on dusk. I was forever racing…
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I can still close my eyes and remember summer holidays as a kid. The car trip we made each year, to the small beach town on the other side of the mountain ranges. The smell of eucalyptus and the soaked earth under the vine tangled rain forest, swallowing up the road as our car made…
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I have never been one to free fall into addiction. The hook always skimmed close to my head, but it never latched. So many times, when I was battered and weak. You would think it would be so easy for me to then reach over an uncrossed line for a bottle or pill. I have…
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None of it matters. The plastic, the gadgets, the high glossed magazines; the heels with the right brand name, faded out on the soles, from all the running you do to keep in front. Things obtained to make life easier, dull a pain, stroke an ego; to make you feel like you mean something while you hurl…
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It was a painful blister, on the arc of my right foot. It was one that had stopped me wearing closed in shoes for a week. It was red raw and puffed up and as big as a 20 cent piece. It had happened as all good blisters do. Having fun. My husband and I…
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Thinking about it all, every last drop of it. She kind of died in a way, without actually ceasing to exist. Without a funeral. Without a kiss goodbye. Not a black dress in sight. Instead, a slow, heart-breaking realisation she wasn’t who she once was and never would be again. Dead, at least to…
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Hills and more hills as far as the eye can see. On the outskirts of town, they ebb and they flow. Looking like a far off distant land you could easily explore and conquer like a Burke and Wills expedition. Why is it you feel like screaming and crying and dying as you walk…
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