2008.

The dress Tia Toni knitted was pink and grey like the galahs outside near the parking lot. I was standing holding the bar above my head, two metres high, looking at the planes and not understanding. The photo shows the dress hugging my strong little body as I look out, uncertain about everything.

I used to think I could hear heartbeats in trees. Jodie and I would climb up to the tallest branches and look across to the hills, and I'd put my ear to the smooth bark and not hear a beat but wish I did. I knew they were alive somehow, and that they were important and felt pain. Years later when I heard about the kooky experiment that found plants screamed real high so people can't hear it when plants next to them were hurt, I smiled and thought to myself, I knew it.

Me and Pauline used to play netball after school. I ran fast to get the ball but we weren't allowed to play in school shoes not runners because the ground was bitumen and the shoes had no grip. I was wearing school shoes and shouldn't have been playing, and when I slipped and skidded on the little tiny rocks, and I was still pulling my stockings out of my leg an hour later, I wanted to know whether you could see bits of me left on the ground but I had nobody to ask. I think I went maybe fifty metres far, it was really far. Pauline had to sit out because her knee was sore. She went to the doctors and found out she had cancer, then she stopped coming to school. I looked inside her desk and there were still books. When she came back she walked funny like her leg was a stick or she was a robot. They took her hair and then they took a bone out, you know the sticking out flat one at the front that makes your knee bend, so she really did have a stick inside her leg to keep it straight. She couldn't run around anymore so we talked instead. Nobody talked as well as Pauline did.

When I threw the rake at him, I didn't think I'd hit him. I was angry because he said something mean and I was far away and I couldn't throw perfectly that well but I hit him perfectly. It scraped the skin on his back and he yelled loud till mum came out. I told her it was the pool water that made it hurt but she hurt my arm when she pulled me out. Mum shouted kind of quiet that I could have killed him and sent me to my room. I cried till it hurt because I thought God would make me die. He wasn't allowed to come to my house again.

2006.

She leaned forward a little and the neckline of her black top moved slightly down and to the right, revealing a soft wart or a dermal bubble of some kind. For a moment I thought it was a quirky misplaced nipple, romanticizing what was only an accidental biological bump.

An instant of unveiling. A secret of the flesh. A personal shame. She'd written about lovers examining each other's skin in the morning haze and I couldn't help thinking of exotic lips kissing the delicate raised mushroom at different times in different places, crooning in strange languages. Such unsurpassed mental clarity, chinadoll face and luminous unveiled eyes, and yet, so ordinarily flawed in body.

She would have liked this accidental show of miscreation, mortalised forever. The vulnerability of skin, the clothed disrepair of corporeal substance. Had it been in a movie, it would have been her favourite scene.

A life in the face of an eventual death.

It's a playground of sorts. Swinging back and forth, push, pull, closer and further away. A see-saw of highs and lows, the heights reached and the inevitable fall to the ground. The monkey bars gripped so tightly, hanging white-knuckled and shallow-breathed, struggling to continue to the next bar to grab. A balancing act atop the rope bridge, carefully moving over something crossable. And through it all, the white crunchy sand that fills each pocket, each sock, each fold of skin, so that always our delicate marshmallow bodies follow us around without our forgetting them.

"How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?

Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interiors by chance, there is no preparation. We who were fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse."

Jeanette Winterson -- The Passion

Summer child lazily lizarding the days away.

no promises of silks,
i do not expect pure joy in each moment,
nor tenderness in every word.
give me only truth.
give me yourself and none other, the
mullings that keep you awake, the
visions of future comforts,
the shirt you wear when your skin doesn't fit.

i have nothing to impart but simplicity and the real.
no throne, no glory, no fame to my name.
my memory deceives me and i stammer often
but i am strong as the moon in all its crescents,
those smiles up and around the sky.
i breathe ocean air deep,
watch the tide further creep,
and will hold you together so you do not disappear.

My earrings are mocking me.