short story

This is a story about every morning when her housemate woke her up. This is a story about when the cat got stuck in the storeroom for hours but didn't poo in it. It's a story about the time when they decided to have fish and chips because it was a warm afternoon, the first one since the last summer, and how they had to pay 40c for individual sauce packets because there was no sauce at home. It's about the way the wind blows on a forty degree day on the edge of a country town, has a bit of dirt in it too, and blows spiky gusts against bare legs. It's about when the first indie band she ever started listening to finally release a new album and everybody is anticipating it but she will never forget how special their first CD was on those lonely nights studying just to get out of that tiny town.

This story is about the quiet freshness in the mountains and how lovely he thought it was that of all the places in the world, deep in the mountains seemed like one of the places that might remain untouched for a long time yet. He remembers how at high school he was the only one to pick up rubbish from their spot on the lawn: now when he leaves food courts he has to put everybody's rubbish away and is uncomfortable with leaving it there even though the cleaning ladies are always loitering around ready to take it. It is about when he moved into a place with his girlfriend for the first time and it turned out one of their housemates were growing shrooms. They would never take drugs together because her father died recently. Their electricity bills were huge that winter.

She never had the courage to ask if she could use the milk or the bread and figured it was better just to use them when her housemate was out - she was annoying anyway - and use as much as she thought she could without being noticeable. This story is about the time when she passed people in the corridor and must have been pulling a face because after she walked by she heard them asking "what was that about" and she resolved to seem more happy when she walked in public places, even though the incident really made her more sad than she really was. This is all about the time when she couldn't decide to kiss him because she had just eaten something satay, even though they were sleeping so close together it he probably smelt it anyway.

This story finishes with the time they both thought how nothing really seemed to ever work out or matter and life was just a combination of small events in a too big world, that time they didn't know how to write about the weight that they felt every day inside so other people would feel it too, or whether that they even felt that weight and were just trying to make themselves feel as terrible as everybody else they knew.