The strangest thing just happened... and I can't tell what's more distressing to me right now: the thing that's actually upsetting me or the fact that I don't have the type of friend I need when I need a friend to talk about the thing that's upsetting me.

Look, I probably don’t know anything because I’m not a parent nor carer of a child and so I don’t know the intricacies of trying to convince a child to do something that isn’t what they’ve already decided they want to do but for some reason my eye twitches so hard every time I see a friend’s kid via facebook post dressed up for Book Week as a character from a TV show/movie/something was not a book before it was on a screen. Like, the whole point of Book Week is to promote Australian children’s literature so your Ben10 costume is a bit... not any of those things. 

Sometimes it will be late at night and I will randomly think about how I'm probably never going to jump an apex again and then I push my face into my pillow really hard in the hopes that my bed will eventually give in and finally just swallow me once and for all.

I can feel myself teetering on the knife edge of relapsing or not relapsing and I don't have the time to deal with this.

"Okay I'm gonna go back to our room, I need the toilet." "You can shit here...?" "Yeah but I'd be shitting and leaving, that'd be rude." "I'd shit in your room."

So strange are the things that can trigger old grief. My family uses laughter and dark humour to combat the feeling of loss, but nothing really does prepare you for that rude awakening you receive when you think you are "over it". A photograph happens to cross your path of your brother at four years old, laughing and playing with someone who only ever gave truthful and unconditional love, for example. Only it's not a photo of the both of them: it's a photo of your brother and someone's hand. But you know it's not just someone's hand, you know that hand, you know that familiar shape and the strength that was never misused. You know that skin, the colour and the freckles, the scratches from the garden, and you can feel it on the tips of your fingers right now if you close your eyes. You can feel it graze your cheek with gentle affection. You breathe in that familiar smell of hand soap and black coffee, and then the timer on the oven goes off and you open your eyes and you're standing in your kitchen in your pyjamas by yourself, struggling not to cry and desperately resenting your dinner for snapping you back to reality. Strange, the things that can trigger old grief.

when you’re like: hell wanna know, hell don’t wanna know

“University hasn’t changed me,” she said, as she calmly added two separate works by her lowkey fave academic into her book depository cart.