jellybean day dreams

this is where i'll dump all the words i write

[jellybean-daydreams]

One of those days

“Hey Lea, waddup?”

There was a light chatter in the background of the other line. The restaurant Lea was working at was still a bit busy at 9 in the afternoon.

“I just finished my shift”, it had been a while since they talked but Aaron could hear the smile.

“Are you home now?”, she said before a deep inhale and a shaky exhale.

“Yep, I’m not doing anything else either.”

“Can I please come over?”

It was a prickly feeling hearing your best-friend practically beg for something that was always a given. They used to see each other daily back when they were kids, now they were lucky to see other a few times a month.

“Sure thing, chicken wing.”

Lea had parked her car on Aaron’s driveway and was walking towards the door. She didn’t bother knocking pressing through the already open door. She locked it behind her and left the night outside. Slipping her shoes off she let her toes wriggle in the familiar fuzzy green carpet. The tension slithered from her shoulders. Tentatively she walked into the spare bedroom, a ghost of a person.

Aaron walked into the room holding a bag of tortilla chips and a bowl of chopped onions and tomatoes. Lea was curled into a ball, buried under pillows on the spare bed. She had thrown her uniform from the restaurant onto the floor and was already in pyjamas. An oversized T-shirt from the first concert they both went to and black shorts spotted with pineapples.

“Did you bring an avocado?”, he asked.

She shuffled around under the pillows a little before she stuck up an arm to give him a thumbs up.

“Aight, where?”

This time Lea sat up after wriggling under the pillows. She seemed slightly disgruntled and a bit disorientated. There were bags under her eyes that Aaron hadn’t seen before, a few streaks of grey in her hair.

She reached down the side of the bed to rummage in her bag and pulled out an avocado handing it towards him. There was a small knife on the top drawer of the bedside table he used to halve the avocado. He placed it back into the drawers, fished out a spoon and handed it and the avocado back to Lea.

“I’ll come back with the lemon, you try and get the guac together.”

“I like your haircut!”, she called out to him as he left. Aaron cut his brown hair shorter now, people said how they could see flecks of grey in his brown eyes now.

He came back with a lemon wedge. Lea sat waiting with the bowl of almost-guac in her lap. He squeezed a few drops in throwing the rest into the bin into the corner of the room, almost missing. He smiled and looked back at Lea who was grinning at his stupid accomplishment.

“It’s ready”, Lea whispered.

“Are you ready?”, Aaron teased softly.

Lea opened the tortilla chips offering them to him.

“Then we’re ready.”

They turned the T.V. on and ate watching an old rerun of a bygone sitcom. It didn’t really matter what they were watching they just needed something to fill the silence and get their thoughts together. Background noise to filter out the noise in their heads.

“Work was bad. Not the actual work that was okay, just the boss. She was a bitch. I made one mistake and she just unleashed all this unnecessary bullshit on me!”

Lea grabbed one of the pillows close-by and screamed into it for a bit.  

“It’s not fair,” she whined.

Lea chewed her next chip angrily, her eyebrows furrowed staring at the tv.

In the sitcom, the main character had accidentally broken a lucky charm that belonged to the sister. The laugh track played in the background as the two characters met eyes. Instead of the sister getting angry, she picked up the pieces and forgave her brother for an accident.

“Why can’t like people be more like that, you know? I don’t see how getting angry solves anything.”

“I think it’s great that you see life like that, but you are allowed to have feelings too.”

“I’m definitely feeling now.”

“Mmmhmm…”

At the end of the episode, another of the characters had just been offered a promotion for their dream job. They were left with the difficult decision to decide if they were ready to take on the responsibility.

“You ever just feel lost? I don’t know what I’m doing anymore, I used to be so sure what I was going to be, how long it’d take to get there, where I’d be living, all that stupid stuff. Now I’m working this dead-end job because I don’t know what else to do. Like, when did this happen? When did I stop caring?”

“Lea if you’re not happy with right now you could always change. Find something else to do. Change is hard because it's different, people stay unhappy because that’s what they’re used to. But it’ll be okay after a while, you just got to take the first step.”

“Yea I guess so…” she murmured.

The T.V. was playing a documentary on one of the Olympics, there were montages of sprinters, swimmers and fighters. All accomplished people at the peak of their lives a testament to the strength of humanity.

“I feel like I’m failing, like everyone around me is doing so much better. There are like all these people who are successful right now while I haven’t done anything. Just feels bad. I feel bad.”

“You shouldn’t compare yourself to other people Lea. If anything, you should see how much better you’ve grown compared to who you were. As for success, everyone goes at their own rate. I think you’ll get there in time. There’s no need to rush, just breathe.”

They ate the rest the food in a peaceful silence and started to doze off on the bed together with the T.V. playing an old black and white horror.

“Thanks.”

[jellybean-daydreams]

Among the peonies

‘You’re okay with closing up right?’

Claire was already undoing her apron as she asked.

‘Mmm, yeah don’t worry about it,’ Willa murmured as she rearranged notebooks on the shelves.

‘It just suddenly popped up. You know I wouldn’t just ditch you.’

She had already changed and was walking towards the door.

‘Just go already. I’ll be fine, the store will be fine, everything is going to be fine.’

‘Thanks, babe!’

‘Catch ya later.’

Willa placed the last notebook in its place. She tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear and sighed. Closing time wasn’t for another hour and she had doubts she’d see any more customers. It was going to be quiet without Claire around, so she turned up the radio. The station they had played lo-fi music, chilled out remixes of songs from underground artists.

She’d only been working at the stationery store for a few months, but it already felt like a second home. ‘Fringed Pink’, was an unassuming stationery store off the left side of a florist. It was dainty and warm, like an eternal spring sprinkled in between the pens, pencils and books.

Willa hung up her work apron beside Claire’s and grabbed a broom and pan. She gave the store a thorough dusting when there was a beep from her phone. She tapped all her pockets, panicking briefly before she remembered it was in her apron.

A text: Don’t close yet I’m coming to visit, Nate.

Nate was a close friend, they’d known each other way back since primary school days. She was the quiet girl that no one really noticed, and he was the kid who was friends with everyone. It happened that one day he saw her sitting alone on the edge of the playground. He marched over to her with a big goofy smile. ‘Let’s be friends’, he said.

After high school, they started to drift apart. Nate was going to study interstate and Willa decided she’d take a year to figure things out for herself. So, he went away, and she stayed at the store.

She turned the ‘open’ sign on the door to ‘closed’ and sat at the counter. She was anxious.

The store bell chimed: Nate.

Willa could tell how long Nate had been awake by looking at the state of his hair. The tangled mess of brown meant that he’d just woken up. His walk was different, not his usual carefree bounce something slow and laboured.

‘Hey, what’s up?’

‘Hey’, he lifted his head and gave her a weak smile. ‘Things are bad.’ His eyes were heavy, and she wanted so much just to hold him.

‘Yeah?’

She watched him fiddle with the pens on the counter and waited.

‘It’s Quinn.’

Willa tilted her head and raised an eyebrow. It was a familiar song.

‘I just loved her so much. I thought we were going to be forever. Imagined our wedding, how many kids we’d have, holding each other as we grow grey and wrinkly, you know?

He slumped his shoulders.

‘Thought she was my end game’, he whispered.

She watched him and weighed the words on her tongue. Too many times she watched him hurt over other girls. If she wanted things to change now was the time.

‘Nate.’

‘Hmm?’

‘I love you.’

Silence.

‘I don’t expect you to love me back. I’m okay if things don’t change between us either. I just like, I don’t know.’

She chewed on her lower lip and wished he’d say something.

‘Say something please.’

‘How long have you felt like this?’

‘It’s been a while. But that doesn’t matter. When I’m with you, or even if we’re just talking it just feels comfortable. Like it’ll be okay, I can just breathe.’

She could feel her heart beat faster.

‘I know you don’t feel the same way I feel about you.’

‘Willa…’

He looked up and tried to meet her eyes, but she looked away.

‘Just don’t worry about it.’

She glanced down and noticed he’d brought a small black case with him. It was tattered in some parts but still holding together. Much like how she was.

‘What’s that?’

He looked startled as if he too only just noticed it as well. He picked it up and opened it. Inside was a violin. The bow was a little frayed, but it was fine otherwise.

‘I found it as I was cleaning and found laying around. I remembered there’s an op-shop somewhere close to your place. Thought I might as well take it with me since I’m passing through.’

Willa glanced at one of the working clocks on the shelves: half-past five. They’d been talking well past closing time.

‘Walk me home?’

She closed all the lights and locked the door on her way out. They walked alongside each other, their steps in sync, the way it always was.

‘Why’d you come to visit?’

‘Do I need a reason to visit my best friend?’ she could hear him smiling.

‘I wanted to see you, cause sometimes I miss you. It’s lonely without your laugh.’

She ran her hand along the fences as they walked past her neighbours. Thought about how they’d walked this same path so many times before, but it was different today. They came to a brown brick house with peonies growing in the window sill.

She turned to face him.

‘Do you love me?’

‘It’s a lot to take in.’

‘Then it’s a no.’

‘Willa please.’ His eyes were pleading for more time.

They walked up to the door of her house. Nate turned to leave but she caught his sleeve.

‘Can we just sit here? Just…let’s sit.’

Together they sat down on the steps leading up to front door. She leaned her head on his shoulder and he pat her head softly. They watched the twilight settle into dusk.

[jellybean-daydreams]

Fading

He’s telling the same story again. She smiles watching him, remembering to notice different parts of his face so it looks like she’s paying attention. He’s up to the part where a friend of his owes him money, but he eventually gives up on his friend’s debt and nobly lets it slide. Her lips part as she stares at his moving mouth her eyes glazing slightly. She wants him to just stop talking for him to laugh at himself, tell her how much he loves her, how precious she is to him, all the beautiful words to remind her that he cares. The story is about to end and he notices her dazed expression, her parted lips. But he doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t look back lovingly. He doesn’t reach across the table to cup her cheek and kiss her passionately. No. Instead she can see that there’s a slight annoyance about him. Was it the sharp edge in his voice when he finished talking, or maybe it’s how his eyes have a look close to frustration, or how his thin upper lip curled to his right almost in disgust. She must have looked like she wasn’t really listening. He’s upset about it, she can’t blame him since he’s mostly right. She didn’t want to tell him he’d told her the story a few times already, that just seemed rude and not nice. There’s a breath of silence before she says something to prove that she was paying attention, or maybe it was something cute, a joke or a compliment on how great he looks today. He takes so much pride in looking good, she worries about it. Like a few other things about him she ignores it. Isn’t that what you do for love, take the good and bad parts, and accept? A smirk and he chuckles to himself. She probably complimented him. ‘He doesn’t smile, he sneers’, who told her that? He dominates conversation rarely asking about her, but there’s nothing new with her so why should she be upset? She makes more of an attempt to look engaged and maybe this time she’s better since he’s telling her something new. But still there’s a thought that pulls on the edges of her mind, it tugs and its pokes. It asks her, ‘how did it get to this point?’, ‘why did she just settle to admiring him?’, ‘wasn’t he meant to love her too?’. Suddenly she remembers in their few initial dates, she would try to talk and but he disliked being interrupted. He wanted admiration. Tick tick. A glance at his beloved watch and he is standing ready to be out the door and on to his next appointment. Together they hold hands and walk slowly. It is in these stolen moments that she thinks they’ll be okay, that there’s hope for them. If they were physically together they would be fine. But that’s not what happened. “Why do you love me?”, it slipped out. She wasn’t sure she wanted him to answer her. It was a rare moment for her to tell him what was on her mind. A confession that she didn’t trust in his love. “Because you’re pretty.” If they were still facing each other he’d have seen that her face showed a lovely mix of anger, confusion, and disappointment. “Why do you love me?” he asked. He must’ve been joking before. “Because of your hair.” She lies. “Because you were the first boy to who would proud to be with me. Because you aren’t embarrassed to be around me. Because you think I’m amazing. Because you chased me, until I was yours. Because you’re the first boy to tell me you loved me without me making you say it. Because you are the first.” All the words she would’ve told him. He runs a hand through his hair and nods to himself somewhat satisfied with the answer. He wasn’t joking. Just like that the moment is gone. He glances at his watch and hurries to be somewhere else. The boy with a plan, the boy who knows what he wants, the boy that is always doing, the boy who can never be satisfied. Bye for now and see you later says his kiss. I miss you and I want you to stay, is what hers says. He moves away and he lets go of her hand. He turns and leaves her. It wasn’t as bad as she expected. She walks alone and thinks about how lonely she is. They aren’t a good match for each other. They really shouldn’t be together, even being together for that long is an achievement. It’s like they were an accident that wasn’t supposed to happen. A fun game that wasn’t meant to be real. Love hurts. She doesn’t want this cycle of monotony, but she’s not sure if that’s reason enough to change. No one wants to be the bad guy. Their love had faded. It fizzled away and what was left wasn’t enough. She loved a different boy, a boy who loved her and adored her. Loved his immature playfulness, the way he was so calm and collected. The way he made her problems fade, a calm to her angry storms. He loved the idea of her, the innocence in her eyes. Her shy beauty. They were in love. They didn’t love each other.

[jellybean-daydreams]

Womb to world

Explanatory Paragraph My mum is a great mother to my older sister and I. She had three other siblings and wanted her children to also have many siblings. When my sister was born she developed a mental disability that caused her to stay at the mental age of five. My mum blamed herself for not giving birth to my older sister better and causing my sister’s sufferings. She also pities me for not having a ‘real’ older sister or someone that I am able to look up to and be friends with. Ever since having me she has tried many times to fulfil her dream of having many children and so that I wouldn’t be ‘alone’. In order to write this piece I interviewed her a few times and translated what she had said since she’s not a confident English speaker. I’ve also consulted various pregnancy websites in order to properly document the progression of a foetus. The piece is dedicated to my mum and my lost siblings. First trimester: Weeks one to twelve At six weeks the embryo develops a brain and spinal cord. A heart begins to grow. Arm and leg buds are visible. Its eyes and nose are forming. It is about five or six millimetres. It looks like a tadpole. Dusty dirt roads twist and turn, tracing the veins of the Cambodian countryside. The roads are yellow sand sprinkled with small stones, pebbles and trash. Follow a particular road and it will lead you to a small town with rows and rows of dilapidated straw houses. Keep going and you’ll find a well. Take a few steps back and you’ll notice a cosy little home. It’s a hut really, with wooden flooring, bamboo thatched walls and a cheap roof. Inside you’ll find two shy newlyweds. Together they run a small illegal lottery. The year is 1990, she is twenty-three and pregnant. It is her first pregnancy, she is so excited, ecstatic even. She doesn’t mind the morning sickness whenever anything sweet or aromatic wafts her way. And takes care with her every movement. They’ve run away from the city to live happily ever after in the countryside, away from judgemental eyes. It is a classic romance story where the boy is from a middle-class family and girl is country-side poor doing her best to swat off poverty. He falls for her deep brown eyes and cascade of black hair. She likes his boyish grin and his shy attempts at chivalry and romance. His mother disproves of the girl. ‘You can do better than her. Look at her skin, it’s a disgusting tan. She has no money, what can she do? She is nothing, let her go and you will love again’ she says. She is six weeks into her pregnancy. In six brief weeks, she was ready to love her baby, a minuscule dot. A dot that was erased and suddenly gone. Her husband doesn’t show much emotion. He looks like he doesn’t care, but he wasn’t ever an expressive man. During the pregnancy the reality of a future son or daughter hadn’t settled on him. She is horror-stricken. The feeling of loss will envelope her and for months she will be in a deep void of sadness and despair. Release. There is a brief window, an opening where she is able to escape her pain. She has started to busy herself with work, trying to forget about her past sadness. She starts to clean the house rigorously. The taste of food returns to her as she cooks with a new found strength. She does whatever she can to stop thinking about it. Her mind on every and any other task and eventually she is better. But she doesn’t forget. A miscarriage is when a foetus is spontaneously or is unexpectedly expelled from the womb before it has developed enough to survive on its own. They are more common during the first few weeks of pregnancy. Almost one in five women, who are knowingly pregnant will have a miscarriage before their pregnancy reaches twenty weeks, after twenty weeks it is termed a stillbirth. Week twelve At twelve weeks the foetus will start to move by stretching, kicking and twisting. Its bone marrow starts to produce its own white blood cells. Its pituitary gland makes its own hormones. The foetus’s placenta is filtering oxygen and nutrients to assist in its growth. It is around five to six centimetres and can suck its thumb. Across the equator past a sea and a few countries, there is the island country of Australia. Keep heading downwards south easterly and there’s Melbourne. In one of its suburbs in Springvale is a cemetery. Tread lightly to find a gravestone that marks the death of an unborn foetus. This foetus would have been her sister-in-law’s future daughter. Unlike her own loss, this foetus at twelve weeks would have had hands and feet. It would have had shape. It would have been a person. A ritual prayer and small ceremony was made to honour the foetus. It is performed in the hopes that in the next reincarnation it would be reborn again and come to a full term. It is performed in the hopes that it will not leave half-way. So that it will not leave the mother. So it will stay. It is believed that it will take many reincarnations for a mother and her lost child to be reborn as mother and child again. In a lifetime a person will have to perform many good tasks for good karma. How many life-times exactly is unknown but there is a strong belief that mother and child will eventually be together. In Cambodian culture miscarriages are not talked of. They are tragedies that are respectfully left silent, for if they are talked about then neither the mother nor child can move on. Vegetables and etiquette There is an old wives tale in Cambodia, that says that if you crave sweet things when you are pregnant than you will have a girl. An angel would have descended from heaven and taken form as your future daughter, the angels in heaven only eat sweet things. In their small village out in the country, word travels fast. Grandmothers, mothers and aunties all share their words of wisdom to the new couple. They tell the couple, ‘don’t chop your vegetables the wrong way’. If you’re cutting a cucumber you should chop it from the top to the bottom that way when you give birth it will be easier. They say a pregnant woman should always sit in a respectful manner, keeping her legs together at all times. She shouldn’t open or close things half-way, that if she were to open or close a door she should do it all the way. She should not sit in doorways or at the bottoms of stairs, or she would be blocking the exit for her baby and have a difficult birth. The couple listen to the advice and follow it to the dot. She is especially obedient having already miscarried. Along with her husband she goes to the village fortune teller to see whether her child will be a girl or boy. The fortune teller is a revered elder of the village. He is renowned for his ability to communicate with the spirits and see beyond. He says that she will have a son. Third Trimester: Weeks twenty-nine to forty At forty weeks the baby is perfectly folded up and is ready to come out. The baby will weigh around 1.4 kilograms. The baby will move the most during this time. Its lungs will develop further, the bronchioles and alveoli increasing. The uterus is very cramped. In the dirty desolate countryside doctors are an uncommon sight. Even rarer if you are poor. She worries about her baby still, she’s heard stories of how other women have pregnancies where their babies face the wrong way sometime in the fifth or sixth month. She’s heard that sometimes babies are born feet first, where the mother and baby both die. In the absence of a doctor there are midwives, ឆ្មប: ‘yey mawp‘, directly translated as ‘old lady who assists in birth’. She’s heard that there are unskilled midwives, who push up and down on the mother’s belly too much killing the baby. She hopes with all her heart that her midwife is skilled, that she will not lose another. Her midwife’s first instruction is that she should pick a fallen gourd bud and stew it to drink before the birth. The midwife says, ‘the drink will help the baby come just as easily as the bud fell to the ground’. The next instruction is that she should pick flowers from the Bodhi tree. It is said that Buddha’s mother had given birth to Buddha underneath the Bodhi tree. Queen Maya was travelling to Devadaha her childhood home way to give birth to her son. Along the way her procession passed Lumbini Grove, which was filled with blossoming trees. Entranced the Queen asked her courtiers to stop, so that she may leave her palanquin and enter the grove. As she reached up to touch the blossoms, her son was born. That is why women believe that if they eat the Bodhi’s flower they too will have easy births. On the 13th of January of 1993, she endured the long and difficult birth of her first daughter. The long birth caused a swelling on top of her baby’s head, a sack of water that would not deflate and disappear for many weeks. Her baby would sleep for most of the time and was rarely hungry. She would later find out that there was something wrong with her baby. Second Trimester: Weeks Thirteen to Twenty-eight At twenty-eight weeks, the baby’s muscles will develop more. It will spend more time holding to its umbilical cord and sucking its thumb. It will also hiccup or practise its grasping reflex. The baby has fingernails and is about the size of a small doll. Sometime in April three years later she is on a plane with her family of three. Her hair has been cut short to just below her ears and she is secretly pregnant. It feels like a boy. The baby kicks so strongly that sometimes it wakes her up in her sleep. Her morning sickness isn’t as bad either. It is the first time she will be on a plane and she is afraid, but she will be bound for Australia where life will be better. The plane lands and she is safe. The first few years of her Australian life will be lived with her brother and sister-in-law. She has hidden her pregnancy well, disguised herself in loose clothing to hide her form. It is not until she is changing that her sister-in-law notices ‘Sister you aren’t pregnant are you?’ Just a little over five months into her pregnancy and her in-laws are astounded. It is as though the baby had snuck onto the plane in the womb, her brother-in-law jokes. There are fortnightly visits to the doctor, regular tests and check-ups to track the health of mother and baby. In an ultrasound it will be the first time that she will see her baby. The outline of the baby is so beautiful and adorable to her all of her fears that she will lose the baby have vanished. She will have a daughter. Third miscarriage Miscarriages happen when a foetus hasn’t developed properly. They are more common in older women since the chance of a chromosomal abnormality increases with age. She is thirty-seven and a proud mother of two daughters. Her eldest is thirteen but has the mental capacity of a five-year-old, a delayed cognitive mental disability she suspects occurred due to the difficult birth. Her youngest is ten and perfectly healthy. She pities her youngest since she feels she’s failed by not giving her a ‘real’ older sibling. She wants her children to enjoy the company of each other, like herself and her three siblings or her husband and his thirteen. ‘Baby guess what?’ she exclaims to her youngest. ‘What?’ ‘I’m pregnant!’ ‘How do you know?’ ‘I had a dream. I was standing outside and staring up at the sky. And then an angel came down and gave me the moon. The moon became my baby. I woke up and I knew I was pregnant.’ ‘An angel gave you the moon and that’s how you get babies?’ her daughter curiously asks. ‘Yes.’ At the ultrasound, she is excited to see the face of her next baby. But there is something wrong. Her baby doesn’t have a neck or much of anything else. It is just an egg. A few weeks later she will lose her foetus. In Cambodian culture after each birth or miscarriage each woman must undergo a week-long traditional spa treatment to restore her body. She should boil a massive pot of specific herbs and spices, then sit with her torso or most of her body above it cloaked in a towel to soak in the steam. In the pot she should there are a number of ingredients. Boiled leaves, roots, branches of a Kaffir Lime. A green lime or fruit that is bumpy or wrinkled, typically found in south East Asia with a distinctive double leaf. មើមព្រង់ល: ‘merm pro-lie’ a prong tuber similar to ginger but with a yellow inside. Lemon grass, salt and alum salts. Once or twice a day the woman should undergo the steam treatment for the duration of an entire week. After the steam, she will not shower but wear thick clothes and sit in a warm room to rub a mixture of white wine and the crushed tuber from earlier onto her skin. The entire process is to restore the woman’s body to its youth so that her skin becomes tighter and stays youthful for longer. Alongside the process the woman should not have sex for three months or sickness will befall her. Fourth miscarriage: the last and final A recurrent miscarriage is when a woman experiences three or more miscarriages in a row. It occurs in one in every one hundred women trying to conceive. Each miscarriage increases the chance of another miscarriage. It is 2009 and she’s about six or seven weeks pregnant. She’s taken great care with this pregnancy, just like every other pregnancy. This time, she hopes she’ll be fine although she might be slightly complacent. It feels like it might be a boy, but if she were to have another girl she wouldn’t mind either. The elders would say that having three daughters is like having ‘three roses’. That night she dreams, she dreams about her unborn baby. She’s nursing the naked baby and he’s beautiful, with a light pale skin tone and long pale limbs. He’s the most beautiful child she would have. Suddenly he stops nursing, gets up from her lap and walks away. He walks away with his back towards her, not once turning back. She calls for him but he doesn’t seem to hear. “Come back my child! Come back, come back!” He just keeps walking, away. She wakes up and she’s scared. A few days after her dream she is lying on her bed watching TV, her nightly ritual before bed time. There is a pain in her lower abdomen. Something similar to an intense stomach ache. A visit to the toilet and all looks fine. When she returns to bed the pain hasn’t disappeared. It hurts, much worse than before, excruciating even. It is a struggle to reach the toilet again, as she claws at the walls grasping at nothing. There is blood. She isn’t worried though. It is common that mothers who have had children before have a little bit of blood in her later births. It is a small amount of blood or ‘spotting’, similar to the remnants of the last period. She sits on the toilet in pain and agony, tears stream down her face. There is something wrong. The pain intensifies and spreads. Then there is no more. Something has fallen and with it, faith and her hope in the child have fallen as well. It is a long wait at Dandenong hospital before she even gets to see her doctor. She has been there overnight with an IV drip and no food. There are few doctors in the hospital since they have all been reassigned to help with the great bushfire that started just a few days before her accident. She is weak from her ordeal. When her family comes to visit she puts on a brave face although the pain and weakness are still etched in her face. Her movements are slow and lethargic, there is a frailty to her. Her doctor makes a brief appearance and is gone before her family can ask any questions. But he is followed by a nurse who stays for much longer. Her youngest daughter is eager to ask the nurse why there was a miscarriage. The nurse doesn’t have the answers. She isn’t the doctor. So instead she has a generic reply. ‘Sometimes these things happen. Sometimes it looks good and then all of a sudden it goes bad.’ The days that were Her husband listens to the radio in the dining room while her daughters either watch TV or searching the fridge for snacks. She is close to fifty and nearing her final years of fertility. Her period is a few weeks late. ‘My period is late, I wonder if I might be pregnant!’ she exclaims to her husband. He scoffs. ‘I could still have a baby, you never know.’ she says ever hopeful. Her period would come and she would reminisce about her babies. The ones that stayed and the ones that went.

[jellybean-daydreams]

someone I loved

Don’t tell me you never loved me, the words, this noise, all blasphemy. Don’t tell me that you love me, because I know it’s not true.

The look in your eyes, when I said your name. I say it now, it’s not the same. 

You say, “All until now” has been a great mistake. Your words, your face, make this heart break.

Step away from the door, you must let go. I’m sorry but it’s time. And we both know.

Pictures of us, start flickering. Forgotten feelings, the soft whisperings.                      

Snot, tears and wailing, beaten by the world. How ugly I am, opened, unfurled.

Memories of back then, haven’t really faded. Sadly they’ve left us, broken and jaded.

In a box, in a closet, there might be regret. Memories of yesterday, I would rather,

forget.                            

[jellybean-daydreams]

change

She sat on a mountain of broken cars. The junkyard didn’t have many comfortable places to sit. It was the best place to watch the sunset. Shading her eyes from the sun, she squinted looking for me. Her long brown hair glowed in the sunlight. I picked up a broken umbrella and started to climb. Debris fell away, as I noisily made my way up. Eventually, she saw me climbing and smiled. I mean she could have spotted me earlier with the amount of noise I was making. But then again this was Ellie and she was so oblivious. Sometimes. “Finn!” “That’s my name.” “Do you want to sit next me?” There was only space for two on the top. Sigh, “I was going to just climb up and go back down but since you asked, okay, sure,” a cheeky smile to go with the sarcasm. She moved over and smiled that stupid smile of hers. The smile that dared you to try and not smile with her. I opened the umbrella and wedged it behind us. It was battered with holes but it stopped enough light that we didn’t have to squint. “Guess what!” “Who?” “What?” She looked at me confused. “I’m just kidding. What?” “It’s the last day of autumn.” “Yea I noticed, it’s also getting colder.” She frowned. “My hands are cold. But that’s not the point. Today there’ll be a sunset, it’ll be the last sunset of autumn. And we’re going to watch it!” Sigh. She made it sound like she thought of that brilliant idea just then. “I told you to meet me here so we could watch the sunset!” The junkyard; our secret place. Where we’d go to escape the world, more recently the responsibility of becoming and ‘adult’, as our teenage days drifted off into memory. “Haha, really?” Her voice brought me back from my memories. She reached for my hand. “Your hand is cold.” “That’s why I’m holding yours.” I met Ellie in the Junkyard when I was seven, actually it was more like I found her. I was looking for my compass which mum threw away, the last thing dad ever gave me before he left. It wasn’t her fault, she was just cleaning. I’d been there before and the compass was the only thing I had of my dad. As I made my way around the junkyard I noticed a little girl sitting on a mountain of broken cars. She seemed such an odd sight, a small girl in a sundress just sitting there. So I went up to sit with her. She ran away from home and stumbled upon the junkyard. Not long after we spied her parents looking for her. We kept bumping into each other. “Sooooo, what’s the secret?” she asked. She turned to me. “Are you ready?” “Mmmhmmm” She squeezed my hand in excitement. “Ellie.” I reached for her other hand and faced her. If I had both her hands she couldn’t run. She always had a tendency to run away from things that scared her. I looked at her in all seriousness. Her playful smile disappeared as she realised what was happening. The fear was so apparent, but I had her hands and there was no place for her to go but stay and listen. “No.” She sounded almost angry. “Ellie… please.” I was going to say it, I had to. I needed to. “No.” It sounded weaker this time like she was losing her resolve. Silence. Three heartbeats. Do it. They were just words. Say it now. One breath. “I like you. Like-like you.” She looked down, looking for help in her hands. Her hands in mine. “Why…”she murmured. Why was I doing this? I thought about it for so long, thought that maybe it would just pass. Thought that if I waited a little longer she’d say something first. Make the first move. No. That wouldn’t be right. I was done waiting. “I’ve liked you for so long, that just being friends isn’t enough.” Her fear turned to sadness mingled with anger. As if she were angry at me for telling her what she knew for so long. But sad about how we could never be the same. Her face; green eyes framed with such long lashes her button nose so cute, was so easy to read. Sometimes I wondered if it was a good thing. I squeezed her hand. “Say something.” “Something.” “Haha.” A weak laugh. “I mean something else. And don’t say, ‘something else’.” She finally looked back at me. Her mouth open about to say something but closed again as if she didn’t trust herself with words anymore. “Do you…. like me?” My heart beat in my ears. I knew she liked me, but I still had to ask. “Yes.” Relief. “Don’t,” she whispered. “What?” She whispered something even softer. “Ellie. We’ve been through this. You need to stop whispering when someone can’t hear you.” “I don’t…want to change” “Everything changes. Nothing stays the same, we’re constantly changing. I mean it’s not like you’re the same person you were yesterday.” “I don’t….No…. I want to know about us.” “We’ll be better. Because we’ll be real.” “How can you be so sure?” She wanted to say something else. I could feel it. Sometimes it was cute when she wasn’t sure about her words. Scared if they were going to be wrong, hurt people or just not make sense. She needed a gentle probe. “Ellie…” “Will you like me next week?” I bit my lip to stop the sarcasm. Saying, “No, next week I’m going to like Amy from across the road” wasn’t going to be any good. “I can’t tell the future, but I’m not going to stop liking you anytime soon.” She didn’t trust it. Maybe it was because I bit my lip. “Why can’t we just stay friends?” Because I’m selfish. Because I’m greedy. Because I’m impatient. Because I don’t want to wait for you to reach for my hand first. Because watching you laugh at some other boy’s jokes hurts. “Being friends isn’t enough. Not for me.” “If we stayed friends, we could have been forever.” “Grow up Ellie, stop daydreaming!” Too far. I shouldn’t have been angry. Couldn’t she see I was scared too? I don’t know what the answers are. We could be amazing together. We could be so much happier than we ever were. Sometimes being happy and together wasn’t enough. One day everything we were could become nothing, fallen like autumn leaves. Tears welled in her eyes. What good was the umbrella when it couldn’t stop the rain? She willed them not to fall. In all our years of friendship, I had never seen her cry. She despised weakness. While she was fine being seen as ditsy, she loathed to be called weak.  I let go of her hands to wipe the tear away. She turned. I shouldn’t have let go of her hands. She could run now. Run from me. “Why are you doing this?” I ask. She could be so stubborn. She turned to me. The trail of her tear glistening in the sunset. She could’ve been angry with me, sad that we had to change, disappointed that I wasn’t happy enough just being with her. I was ready for any of these emotions. But her face was a mask. It was the first time I couldn’t read it. It was like I betrayed her. Like I betrayed us. “Because I love you.” Her words hung in the air. … I once asked her why she hadn’t been in a relationship yet. I was curious because it seemed odd since I knew that there were a few guys who had tried. It would also be useful for setting her up with Trent. “You know how I daydream so much?” “Yea?” “Well, when I meet another boy I’ve already imagined if we’d look cute together. After a few more days, when I get to know them better I’ve already seen if we’d be good for each other.” “Uhuh” “When I really know them I decide if I actually care about them. Not many boys get to the stage where I actually know them enough to care about them.” “Wow.” “Well you can’t be friends with everyone. Anyway, I was saying something….Oh yea. I don’t usually daydream about the boy and me working out well. In the end of the daydream we’d usually stop talking to each other and become strangers. Everything we were melting away like ice-cream in the sun, leaving a sticky feeling. Mmmm I want some ice-cream.” “Ellie..” “Right, right. Stop making me go on these tangents Finn! But if I cared about them I’d let them become my friends. Not those friends that you know and talk to sometimes, but the friends that know you. I nodded. “I’d rather be happy with them forever than love them for a second and forget them tomorrow.” … I watched her awkwardly climb down the mountain. Watched her leave the junkyard, leaving the gate open because she was too short. I watched the sunset from my lonely throne. I shouldn’t have let her hands go.