Slapton Sands

The way I saw it, that night, I had a choice – I could wade into the sea or
wade into the lake. The sea was less frightening, somehow. There might be
creatures in the lake, I thought, or old washing machines or skeletons: dark
things, dirty things.

Gut feeling

A little while later, the judge leans her head on her hand and says, Mr Brain, were you touching their breasts as part of your Christianity, or were you just touching their breasts? 

I sit up straighter, as though ready to stand for the first hymn. 

Mirror, mirror

I have lost my face. This is not a metaphor; I no longer recognise myself in mirrors. I know the facts: I’m wearing the face I’ve always worn, the same muscle, the same scaffolding of bone – but recognition is a different order of knowing. My sense of kinship is gone. I stare and a stranger stares back. 

Bad teeth

I have my own serious questions: what’s the truth about teeth? Teeth can be a vessel for so many things we want to believe in – whether those things are lies (imaginative or otherwise) or the truth is irrelevant. Teeth can go from magical to mundane in an instant. From beautiful to ugly, from correct to wrong and back again.

Herbert or Harry?

While living creatures also die, go extinct and at times evolve into something else entirely – just as the built environment eventually disappears – it seems a stretch to suggest that the significance of other creatures depends only on our relationship to them – on what they provide for us, whether as resources or a source of personal awe and emotional resilience.

Mourning in a time of planetary crisis

As species disappear and climate change accelerates, a small but growing group of activists, artists and writers across the world is embracing mourning as transformative ethical and political work. Their approaches are wide-ranging, from public funerals and vigils for departed species to acts of civil disobedience that take the form of mass ‘die-ins’ representing the extinction crisis.

Bucket of water

When clients were brought to Australia, they were held in hotels or detention centres. Detainees were allowed to see external psychologists in visiting rooms in the detention centres. The rooms were stark and grey with bright, white lighting. I filled out an online application form to visit one of my clients. It asked me to list the items I wanted to bring with me, and how I intended to use each of them.

Old feelings, new appetites

Suddenly, my body was allowed to be big, weary, bed-bound and gorged. It was to eat readily, rest gladly, leak chaotically and swell without objection. For close to ten months, it was to be spared anorexia’s vicious rules. As I approached the end of my body’s heavy sabbatical, I felt nervous.

The knitting

The spores that caught and coupled. The filaments that grew, the hyphae that became the sum of our parts. All of it powered by water, powered by oxygen, powered by sugars, nutrients, deaths, resulting in bodies rotting in the ground. We spread out, touching the soft new roots of trees, entering them. Connecting them. A knitting. 

Blaming the pastries

Contemporary life constantly offers us the illusion of control – many of us can access whatever we want whenever we want it at the click of a button. In reality, though, we lack control over so many elements of our lives. Since it can be painful to think about that, we make ourselves forget.

From the new world

The first time I played Dvorak’s New World Symphony, I couldn’t believe the sheer power of inked shapes on paper. Breathing into the first note with eighty other musicians; the swelling fortississimo crescendos of pure angst; traversing stories inspired by communities borne from diaspora and unbelonging. Nothing I’d ever done had felt so real.  

Final five days

We sent Red off to school on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday – but we had to ask him to say farewell, to be ready for her absence, just in case. Every day. To bid your dying sister goodbye, each morning, and then go into the arms of your friends – who didn’t know.