What a flurry these last two weeks have been. The Auckland Writers Festival was so wonderful. It was nice being able to attend as a member of the public and not just in a work capacity.

I loved hearing from Torrey Peters, Lemn Sissay, Jessica Townsend, Catherine Chidgey, Kirsty Gunn and Marianna Enriquez. I’ve linked one of each of their books if you’re interested in what they spoke about. Next year I hope I can attend more of the workshops.

I’m currently sitting in a hotel room in Christchurch visiting my best friend while Omer attends the iMedia conference. Next week we jet off to Japan for three weeks!

Kindlingers – read on if you please. Enjoy and have a lovely week.

at the op shop, nothing’s a secret
the books have been read
the clothes have been worn
the games have been played and
the records spun

the nice lady behind the counter
is dealing in second chances
new adventures
invented identities
borrowed time and
renewed hope

at the op shop
hearts are mended
bodies hugged
thoughts unfiltered
eyes assaulted and
lives adorned

nothing’s a secret and
nothing’s new
everything that could be done
has been done
and you’re next in line

you bought a teapot and a book
took your spoils home and looked
longingly at them

they reminded you of someone else
somewhere else

just like they will eventually
remind me of you

She’d seen him around the neighbourhood. As she’d become older and less mobile, he’d progressed through life’s stages with an air of arrogance, of expectation.

He took it all for granted. She watched him parade young women into and out of his flat. Wave or kiss them goodbye with a kind of flippancy she’d only observed from cats. She’d noticed when many became one. How he’d held her hand on evening strolls and once even tied her shoelace when her hands had been full.

It wasn’t a grand surprise when his flatmates had hired a truck and filled it with third-hand belongings and once-flat-packed furniture. The two had made a handsome pair and fit the suburb’s demographic just-so. She wasn’t jealous of him per se or necessarily perturbed by the way the Venn diagram of their respective lives overlapped less and less. No, she’d only wished he hadn’t let those moments pass unnoticed.

While, for a few years, his new normal had become monotonous for her, she’d observed everything he did like they were items on a shopping list. She’d crossed them out as he went.

Nicer furniture, a pet, a painted fence, engagement. Hosting potlucks, hosting neighbours (not her), playing house. They’d both gotten new cars after the wedding, and she’d spied the vomitus pink piffle following what she could only assume was a gender reveal party.

When the girl had arrived, just on time and as expected, she’d noticed the life of him and his wife had folded inwards to encircle this child.

Even then, they’d both taken it for granted. She’d seen the silhouettes of them arguing upstairs while their daughter screamed downstairs. Watched one of them leave the house more often than the other. They’d started taking shifts and stopped holding hands. She’d had indigestion repeatedly wishing they’d behaved like love was all that mattered; hoping they’d known that love was all that mattered. That it was all that would hold them together afterwards.

He’d taken the girl out more than the wife did. The child had learned to skip or ride her bike far ahead of him so he had to jog to keep up. From her perch by the window she’d noticed him begin to slow down. Though her eyes had been bad, she hadn’t missed the telltale signs of wear and tear on a life lived on autopilot. He’d run before. In the days when he’d had flatmates and buckets of testosterone, he had run the length and breadth of the suburb. She’d seen him leave each time and kept watch for his safe return.

These days his physique had left little to the imagination. Fatherhood had made his territory small and walkable. The tight shirts of his younger years had needed replacing months before they were. Jogging in the wake of his daughter, he’d been breathless. He hadn’t known he was risking everything doing exactly what was expected. He hadn’t known that she’d been able to trace the outlines of his life just as well as he could.

He’d seen her once or twice in that spot by the window, knitting he’d assumed. The only thoughts that’d crossed his mind were to liken her to the cat he’d had as a child, how it had followed the sun and basked in it. She’d been irrelevant. She’d meant nothing in the course of his life. The times he’d happened to have looked up and seen her, she’d gone completely still, barely breathing. She’d not wanted to ruin the illusion that his life had been an unscripted TV show and she’d been guessing at the ending. She was close to certain that she’d predicted what eventually happened coming from a mile off. If he’d seen her as she’d seen him, everything would’ve changed.

It had happened in the middle of a nondescript week. Nothing was different and yet she’d awoken early to witness what she’d known was going to happen. One car had left with the wife inside, soon after he’d emerged with his daughter. She’d seen what she’d always seen:  a father doing his due diligence, taking his daughter out to a playground or a play date. But he’d forgotten the responsibilities leading up to the event. That he was in charge. This child that had begun to speak and have complex thoughts, his child, who’d insisted on skipping ahead every time despite his pleas for a slower pace, was frivolous and playful. He was responsible for making sure she made good choices, even when he had to send an important text to a friend about their divorce and how he’d come over one night that week for a beer or something.

The sun had shone between the houses and cast the girl’s long shadow onto the road. He’d been himself, as he’d always been, and she’d watched, as she’d always done. From the distant vanishing point of the road, a van drove slightly above the speed limit towards a house that was being built a block over from theirs. The driver was running late, their job was on the line. A text had come through from their boss asking where they were, and they took their eyes off the road to reply. The girl, empowered to skip as fast as she liked, had looked back at her father, wishing him forward, hoping he’d look up. She’d wanted his attention, he’d been mid-text, responsibilities as a friend for a moment taking precedence over his fatherly ones. He hadn’t looked up, so the girl had crossed the road. She’d seen this before, the girl assuming he would’ve checked, that he would’ve said something if she’d been in danger.

From the window she’d watched the van turn without indicating and thought suddenly afterwards how she could’ve opened the window and called out.

She’d been right after all. The mundanity of his life had been too uniform for it to have been well-lived. Any arrogance she’d perceived him to have about life being a thing that happened to him disappeared with his daughter. He’d been too far away when he noticed the van. She’d been as complicit watching it happen as he’d been living it.

They’d eventually moved out of the house a few doors down from her and people had come and taken away the pink bicycle and the small bed. When the moving truck was full, they’d held hands and gotten into the same car and driven towards where the van had come from that day, into the vanishing point.

Left to watch the world move on, she’d felt something inside her release. The great burden of living had become past tense. Ironic that she’d dwindled her life watching someone else dwindle theirs.