this old town, he played four, he played .. wait. Town? I mean man!

When you step outside, you can feel the sun sucking the moisture from your flesh. Even your hair feels hot enough to boil water, stinging your hands as you run them through it. The wind roars past your body, its furnace-temperatures searing your skin and flinging dust into eyes dried up like sandpaper.

Tarred roads melt under the onslaught of a Central West Summer sun where the mere thought of having to step outside to buy groceries results in thousands of simultaneous phone calls to the local take away shops - and an hour long wait for a hamburger.

Sometimes, it’s even too hot for the locusts and crickets who do small, lazy jumps, barely avoiding a quick death beneath your shoes.

Dirt clings to the sweat that coats the webbing between your big toe and the one beside it, drying to form an unsightly, black crumble which only becomes apparent once you kick your thongs off your feet. Underarm sweat mixes with deodorant to form a sticky paste that stains shirts but does little to combat the smell being generated by heat and movement. T-Shirts cling to backs and under-boobs and shorts get stuck in bums, riding up to reveal patterns that seating has left in the backs of exposed thighs.

In my office, small goose bumps cover my arms, the result of the arctic winds emanating from the air-conditioner. It is the reason I keep a cardigan over the back of my chair. It’s a harsh adjustment from 40 degrees outside to the chilly 22 swirling around my desk.

The view out my window is distorted by almost-invisible waves of heat, rising off the iron roof below. A discarded can of spray paint sends a sharp glint of sunlight against the wall of the next building and I worry each day that it will explode in a shower of dried up paint chips and flame. I walked onto the roof and got the last one, falling for the story my co-workers fed me about their own successful roof-treks.
It wasn’t until I was halfway out, the thin iron that was my only support softly bending beneath my feet, that I looked up and saw them laughing hysterically at my gullibility. Apparently nobody else is as stupid as me, to walk onto the two-storey roof of a 100 (and something) year old building with nothing to save them but their reflexes - Reflexes of a cat (that is blind, deaf, and unable to eat solid food anymore)!

On days like this, I spend my work hours dreaming about the blue sparkle of my parents’ pool and that delicious instant where the cool water touches your sun-scorched skin and pulls the breath from your lungs. I dream about the way the seams of the inflatable pool pony scratches against your sunburn, and its smell as you press your nose into the soft, warm plastic to blow it up a little more.

Every outdoor excursion is put off until the sun begins to set behind gum trees standing still as stone when the furnace winds have abated and left us with an oppressive heat-blanket, thick and exhausting. The outdoor jobs that can’t be put off wring childish tears from adult eyes at the unfairness of having to leave air-conditioned comfort and whole families flinch as the tempers of even the most patient parents suddenly get much, much shorter.

Eventually the sun starts saying goodbye, apologising for its rude intensity with spectacular sunsets; splashes of mauve and pink and peach and red setting fire to the stray wisps of cloud dotting the sky. Temperatures begin to drop as salads are tossed and sausages are left to sizzle on barbecues that feel cooler than the steering wheel did at 4pm. As the food hits the outdoor setting, the mozzies begin their attack; a couple of scouts to begin with, followed by the larger army.

With full bellies and sunburn sting, chairs are pushed back from tables and dishwashers stacked; the sharp “ting, ting, ting” of cutlery scraping bread crusts and sauce-piles into garbage bins breaks through the cicada-songs and satisfied sighs are released, along with those full bellies from their trousers.

Cold showers give late-night respite before switching on the fan and pulling up the blankets. One foot stays in, the other sticks out to evenly distribute your body’s temperature. Tomorrow we wake, and do it all again, until Summer’s stinging sun gives way to Autumn’s cardigan call and its promises of flannelette pyjamas and steaming bowls of soup.

Intense weather - that's just how this town rolls.

Never forgotten

Addiction is a strange disease.

It’s something that belongs to other people. To the men and women who have dirty hair and unwashed clothes, asking for money when you walk out of the shopping centre. The ones talking to themselves. The ones you glare at in disgust, or step away from in fear.

“Normal” people don’t have time for addicts. It’s their own fault. They choose to live this way.

Nobody chooses the life of an addict. People make stupid decisions for any number of reasons. Some follow the crowd, others are trying to find themselves. Some are born into it, just following mum and dad’s footsteps, continuing a life as adults that was all they knew as children.

Addiction isn’t solely the disease of the poor, but it certainly spends more time in their homes than in more affluent households.

The responsibility of the addiction begins with the addict, however, the drug of choice, whichever drug that may be, is more powerful than the human willpower and the chemical reaction within the body betrays the user, taking the drug from a want, to a need.

Addiction takes away an addict’s choice. When your body and your mind cannot rest without it, you will do all you can to survive, and unfortunately, for an addict, surviving means using. What is life with the pain of withdrawal? With the drug in their life, they sacrifice everything, but.. by now, everything else is gone, and the only friend left in the world who understands is the drug, so you might as well stay with it.

By the time the addiction takes hold to a point where an addict needs to stop, quite often they don’t have the financial means or a support network to help them climb out of that hole. Their selfish actions have forced loved ones away, they’ve lost them jobs, houses, children. Very few addicts crawl out of their addiction to rebuild their life. I don’t condemn those who don’t make it out alive.

I don’t even condemn those who do make it out, and then go back. Addiction never leaves you, and when you can't regain the precious things you lost due to your addiction, who can blame you for giving into it for good?

My addiction has been ugly. It has been everything you see in movies, or read in books. I have been covered in my own body’s rejection of alcohol, lying on my bathroom floor alone, hoping to never wake up, actually thinking that I’ll never wake up. I’ve been that girl at the bar who you just want to kill. I’ve been the angry, violent girl who smashes glasses on the floor because the bar is closed. I’ve slept with people whose names I didn’t ask for and I’ve put myself in more dangerous situations than I can count, simply to have just one more drink. I became a stranger to myself, all in the name of my next mouthful, cos sometimes, that’s all I could afford. And those are just the nights I remember. For every binge I can recall, there are 5 more that are just a blur of faces and emotions, mostly shame.

I know what it is to chase oblivion to the point where consequences no longer hold any meaning.

I’m luckier than I can express to have somehow retained that final drop of fear that simply wouldn’t allow me to give all of myself to my addiction. My love for, and from, my family and friends kept me tied to reality and that’s what allowed the fear to remain with me, despite the escalation of my addiction.

I knew my toes were brushing rock bottom and if I stood there, even for just a moment, I wouldn’t be able to climb back up. If I even let my heels drop, I’d drag all my loved ones down there with me, scratching their bodies up as I used them to claw my way out.

No matter what I do in my life, I will never lose my family. I suppose, if I was threatening the safety (mental, emotional or physical) of my siblings they’d give me an ultimatum, but it certainly wasn’t any fear of losing them that kept me somewhat on the straight and narrow. It was the fear of disappointing and hurting them that forced me to have my moments of sobriety and it was those moments of sobriety, where I would lay in my bed for 12 straight hours, staring at walls or ceilings, wetting my pillow with constant, silent tears, that kept me in the real world, forcing me to assess just what the fcking fck I was doing with my life.


Do you know how strange it feels to walk to work one Friday morning and avoid eye contact with a disgusting junkie, trying to ask for money, only to BE that disgusting junkie the following day, after a binge? The first time someone grabbed their child’s hand, as I was weaving my way home on a Saturday morning was one of the most horrifying moments of my life.

I wasn’t asking for money, but I was everything else that all those junkies I’ve glared at and treated like sh.it are. To the world, I looked just like them: drunk at midday, unable to speak coherently, shaking from the 17 cans of red bull I’d had with my vodka. Me. The girl who always made my mother laugh with the stupid faces and dances I’d do in the kitchen. The girl who writes all her thoughts and fears and feelings for the world to see because they are too big to understand when they are invisible inside me. The girl who had a good job with a respectable company. The girl who lived in an apartment overlooking Darling Harbour – none of that meant anything because I was, at that point in time, just another junkie on the streets of Sydney.

Each one of us is capable of making mistakes, even many mistakes, repeated over and over. Each one of us wants to be forgiven for our mistakes. Sometimes, these people coming towards us will never be forgiven by the people they love. Their lives are hard enough without strangers constantly reminding them of where they have gone wrong.

I’m honestly not asking for some kind of Save the Junkies revolution and I'm aware that they need to save themselves, there's very little anyone else can do if an addict doesn't want to face life without their drug.

I just want people to understand that addicts don’t choose the life they live. The addiction chooses it for them and none of us have any idea where life is going to lead us. Until humans stop making mistakes altogether, each one of us is a potential addict of some kind, and the next time you spit on someone or mutter horrible things as you walk past, just remember that there is every chance in the world that one day you might find yourself in the agonising position of watching someone you love get stolen from you by their mistakes and you’ll be wishing the people who walk past and call them names would understand that they were not always like this. They just took a wrong turn somewhere and got lost.

News has come to me twice in the last six months of two people who were once bright stars in my life, both of whom got lost in the needle.

Whatever else they were, they were people who loved, laughed, cried and shared themselves with people who are now mourning their loss. Their addiction wasn’t all they were, but it took all they had.

I will love and miss all they were, and all they will never be.

the final two

The one thing I hate about having a job, is working out what to wear to work every day. After spending the last week in my bikini and one pair of short-shorts or another, I am not sure I'm going to be able to handle the return to skirts and pants and collared shirts that the onset of 2011 heralds.

Outside my window, the grass is a moving blanket of grasshoppers, locusts and butterflies. They careen into your legs when you walk past, aggravating the red welts the mosquitos left you with the night before. My skin permanently smells of chlorine, Aerogard and dog cuddles and feels just a little too tight for my body.

I have two more days of freedom left to me and panic attacks are dancing in my chest; two more days to swim, two more days to stare out the window at nothing until my eyes stop focussing and just hang there, chillin', two more days to walk around in thongs and shorts and two more days of using my fingers as a hairbrush.

There are also only two more days of raiding my parents' fridge for Christmas/New Year leftovers. There's nothing quite like opening the door to the coldest place in the house, feeling the frozen air swirl across your bare thighs while you reach in and lift open the ham bag, trying to steal a slice before someone catches you. It's a talent you have to build on each year, trying to get the bag open without upsetting the cling-wrapped leftovers dishes, stacked Tetris-like on top of jars of pickles and cranberry sauce, but it's a talent I perfected many years ago, back when overeating had no affect on my waistline whatsoever.

This year, things have changed and that extra bowl of "sick of Christmas leftovers so lets make curry" has resulted in a rather unsightly bulge over the top of my shorts.

In two more days, I will have to fit back into my size 6 work skirt and I am not entirely sure that is going to happen. I need to do a trial run of my work clothes in case I need to fall back on my unwashed fat clothes, but putting those work clothes on is just the final nail in Summer's coffin, and I'm not sure I'm ready to say goodbye yet.

In true Bri style, my plans to make 2011 the year I get organised will be broken just a couple of days in, thanks to the strongest talent I possess: the ability to pretend things aren't happening, until I have no choice but to acknowledge them. Just you watch, I will make these holidays last until the very minute I have to leave the house for work in an unwashed fat skirt and a shirt with a bulging button hole where my boobs have miraculously grown.

Until then, it's me and my messy hair, out to get the most of these last days of freedom. I wonder if I can convince mum to make another trifle?