In 2001, my highschool tragically lost two of my classmates on a Duke of Edinburgh hike at Crosslands. The group encountered a violent storm mid-hike and was forced to set up an emergency campsite in a nearby clearing. The wind grew strong and knocked over a tree which fell on top of one of the tents, crushing both girls who were sheltering inside and killing them instantly. I was at an orphanage in Thailand at the time, building dormitories and singing hymns with some Christian missionaries. I checked my email one night when we went into town and saw a note from one of my friends back home:

“Samantha and Tara died on duke of ed. I twisted my ankle. We got to stay home from school and eat tim tams. You’re gonna miss the funerals.”

I dealt with this in my usual way: almost entirely physically. I went to bed for three days and didn’t eat or shower or speak to anybody. After this, I was very sick for a week, and then by the time we got to Chiang Mai, I was somewhat okay.

When I returned to Sydney, most of the formalities were over. However, the faculty wanted to do something special to honour the memory of Samantha and Tara. During class one morning, my English teacher put out the call for ideas.

“What can we do that is special and will carry on here at the school, even after you guys have all graduated?” he asked.

“We could name one of the buildings after the girls,” one student suggested.

“We certainly could,” the teacher agreed, “Any more ideas?”

I raised my hand. “We could plant a tree? Like, in memory. One with strong roots, obviously…”

They went with the building idea.

When I was 19, my friend and I went on a summer roadtrip to Coolangatta to blow off some steam before going back to uni. We did all the usual touristy crap, got sunburnt and bought stuff from a 12 year old street kid in Nimbin, etc, and wound down on our last night by drinking vodka in a seedy bar up the road from our hotel. We got talking to some of the locals, and when we eventually made tracks, one of them followed me outside.

“Hey, do you want to come back to my place?” he asked.

“Oh, no thanks,” I said.

“Well can I come back to your hotel?” he tried.

“No, I don’t think so,” I said, “Not really. No.”

“I’m not going to lie,” he continued, “I don’t want to watch tv or talk or anything. I just want to have sex with you.”

“Yes, I realise that,” I said, “I’m leaving now.”

“Okay…” he said, “But you should know that when I get home, I’m going to think about you while I masturbate.”

The risk of asking someone to eat you out.

One of my favourite things to do is to walk around the house and pick out the pieces of furniture I wish to inherit when my parents die.

“I’ll take the dressers from the lounge room,” I tell my mother, “and all of the art. Except for the Aboriginal paintings, Chris can have those. Obviously I’ll be keeping the piano and all of Dad’s music as well.”

“Do you want the dining set too?” Mum says, “You might as well take it, seeing as you hacked your initials into all the chairs with scissors.”

“I don’t really care for the finish…” I confess, running my hand over the table top, “but I’m sure I can sell it. I imagine all your cash and investments will be split 60:40 between me and Chris respectively, seeing as I’ve proven myself to be the smarter and better looking child?”

“I don’t know about that,” Mum says, “Your brother was a lot easier to handle as a teenager. You were such a whiney bitch.”

“Well maybe if you weren’t such a shitty parent, I wouldn’t have needed so much therapy?” I suggest.

“Therapy?” Mum says, her voice rising, “Don’t talk to ME about therapy. I’ve been having therapy since the day you were born!”

“That’s a coincidence,” I tell her. “Now, what do you want to do about your jewellery? I should probably just take half now, you’ve outgrown most of it.”

And sometimes it’s better to let your co-workers think you are a victim of domestic abuse, because that is less embarrassing than the skanky, horrible truth.

I returned home after a leisurely afternoon at the pub to find my parents midway through a dinner party with some Christian missionaries who were visiting their church. My mother was wrapping up a rather touching story about a woman who went camping alone in the jungle and woke during the night to find her tent surrounded by hungry lions.

“So the woman prayed,” Mum said quietly, “She prayed for hours and hours. And then she felt calm and went back to sleep. When she woke again in the morning, the lions were all gone, and there was an elephant sitting outside her tent, watching over her.”

As my mother’s guests smiled with glistening eyes and shook their heads in wonder at the mysterious ways of the Lord, I leaned over the table and grabbed a baked potato from the serving dish.

“Maybe the elephant was just passing through?” I suggested. “Or maybe this woman is going to murder all her children in five years? Maybe God sent the lions to get rid of her before she smothered her babies, except then the elephant came along and mucked up the plan? I don’t really think you can draw any definitive conclusions here. Correlation does not imply causation. I learned that in statistics. At uni. When I went to uni.”

“You failed uni,” Mum reminded everybody.

“No, sweetheart, uni failed you,” Dad reassured me.

“I’m drunk,” I announced and went back out.

Wanker at party: Hey She-Skelton, you look different tonight.

Me: I’m not wearing make up. I just came from the gym.

WAP: Oh.

Me: Yeah.

WAP: Oh no, it’s not bad. I mean, you don’t look totally ugly.

Me: Just get me a beer.

WAP: Oh, okay.

This morning a girl who I was once very close to died. I’m not going to pretend to know the particulars of the situation, because I haven’t had contact with her for years, but something about Crohn’s disease and the latter stages of liver cancer, etc, etc, she didn’t make it, please pray for her family.

I’m sitting here trying to come up with some memories of this girl. Pick the pieces out of my brain, look at them with renewed perspective, type them out and embody one small part of her life: the impact she had on me. She and I spent a significant amount of time together during highschool, and in theory, I should be able to recount specific anecdotes, quote directly, dig up old notes and emails and photographs.

But sadly, my brain has wiped most of my memories from early adolescence, and I have thrown away all the physical evidence over the years.

And so, digging deep as possible, all I can put together is the vaguest of pastimes, but a stronger sense of her spirit:

The memory is blurred and non-specific, but I do recall the intense camaraderie I felt from the day I met her. And I remember that at every church-related event our fascist parents dragged us to, she and I snuck away, without fail. We stole biscuits and ran down the street. We hid in parks and bitched about every single person in that church. We condemned their hypocrisy and ridiculed their sensitivity. We were ruthless and nasty, delighting in which one of us could shock the other the most.

Believe it or not, she was a lot more cynical than I am. She was more negative. Less ethical. More bitter. And that’s exactly what I liked most about her.

The scene: my family is out for dinner at a cosy Italian restaurant for my brother’s 25th birthday. His new girlfriend is present. I have been forced to cancel my plans to watch Weeds under my doona in order to attend. I am bored. I have had 3 glasses of wine and I want to stir somebody’s pot. I actually like my brother’s new girlfriend, so I refrain from picking on her as I normally would. I know that I should also be nice to my brother, seeing as it is his birthday and I did not get him a present. And I leave my father alone, because he is my favourite person in the world. That leaves my mother.

Mum: So has anybody seen much of the Walkers lately?

Me: Yeah, I see Tim around the city every now and then, when he’s not hiding in his closet.

Mum: Oh, Annik...

Me: What? That kid’s more camp than a row of tents. Last week I saw two guys having sex in Hyde Park, and that was less gay than Tim Walker’s haircut.

Mum: The problem for Tim and other boys like him is that their faith is so important to them. They want to get married and have families like everyone else at church. But that conflicts with their involuntary desires to, you know…

Me: Fuck other men?

Mum: Yes.

Me: So if God intended for Man to be with Woman, and the Bible specifically states that homosexual practice is a sin, and the church frowns upon gays, then why did God create particular humans with these same-sex desires?

Mum: That’s one of the great mysteries of the Christian faith.

Me: No it’s not. It’s proof that the Bible is a load of horse shit, and every time you people can’t explain something properly, you just use some wanky cop-out excuse like “we can’t understand heavenly matters.” How can you add disclaimers to the entire human race’s ability to differentiate between possibility and impossibility like that? It’s a complete crock. You all disgust me.

Dad: Does anybody want dessert?

Friend #1: So, any goss?

Friend #2: Jennifer Chapman from school is engaged.

Me: Who the hell would marry that piece of shit?

Moment of silence.

Friend #1: You’re kind of a bitch when you’re stoned.

Me: So’s your face. Fuck you. I’m going home.