Contemporaneous: Chapter 20
20. I wake in the morning, grab my phone from my bedside drawer to check the time, and instead find a message from Lana: I just want to say that as somebody who cares for you and loves you, it hurts me whenever you make me feel unwanted, like I’m a burden in your life. It feels like I always have to scrap for your time, and when I’m with you, you’re neither verbally or physically affectionate. We’re more like friends to you it seems. I don’t know why or how it became like this but it’s grown progressively worse over the last year. I regularly wonder where I place…
Contemporaneous: Chapters’ 14 – 15
I sit back to read the opening of Melody’s manuscript: 14. Tianna was named after Tiananmen Square, her Chinese mother romanticising the homeland before she fled to Australia – or West Australia, to be precise, where she met Dylan Copley, a mail sorter sorting mail in the city’s central post office, although at different stages of his life he had aspired to play lead guitar in a band, become an actor, to be a stand-up comedian, before life’s little cruelties had sorted his aspirations into the impossibles basket. Of course, Tianna knew none of this as she picked at her lumpy mashed potatoes during family dinner. Mother insisted…