Do you remember the first time you felt free? The first time that you realised that while external factors, like your parents, teachers, money, the fact that you’re a 10-year-old child and don’t have a license to do, well, anything, doesn’t mean you have no control? I do. I remember distinctly and I relish the…
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The summer before my grandmother passed away, she visited me and my family in Australia. I sat with her one sunny afternoon as she told me about her life growing up in a Bangladeshi village and having an arranged marriage at the age of 12. I listened as she recounted how her father, my great-grandfather,…
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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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The room spun around me, blurring the faces that stared out at me from all directions. I reached for the wall to steady myself and realised too late I’d missed the mark. My body fell to the floor. Ashley laughed at me and continued her drunken dance to Arrested Development’s Mr Wendal. From my…
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CN: domestic violence, homelessness On a rainy winter’s afternoon, I stuffed as many of the clothes I owned into a tired, oversized blue and red laundry bag. One handle had busted off, and the zipper was long gone. I lugged it down the concrete stairs of the apartment I was living in like a dead…
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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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About fifteen years ago, Ness and I were best friends, and she recently shared some news on social media that had me weeping, even ugly crying, on and off for days. Throughout the course of our close friendship, Ness and I shared a penchant for drinking lots (oh, those Midori shakers!). We danced, twerked and…
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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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Loud music, techno-repetitive, rebounded in my head until it stopped making sense. Voices yelling to be heard: Did you hear about that girl? About that guy? Confessions cloaked in the sound of reverb and electronic seizures. I was an intruder, an outsider among my fashionably dressed peers. I made myself small; hiding behind my more…
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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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