STEPS

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN The museum of my childhood.

There is the hope when my writing was dumped.... Those thousands of pages... the hope someone was there at the landfill. Maybe picked up a page and read. Liked it. Picked up another and decided to take them home. There is the hope some of my writing lives on, in a drawer somewhere or in a box in a garage... Saved. I hold on to this thought. My existing in a random home because someone deemed those musings worthy of salvaging from the rot. My words reflected on, perhaps inspiring, aiding the longevity of the love within that home?

"Would that a single piece survives the rot and picked up by a young girl remains clutched to her heart, because she understands my meaning."

It pains me, lacking the references. Something to look over, dissect again, find within meanings, previously undetected... See, all I did, I wrote. Everything done to me, said. Everything hoarded to relive over and over. Picked up odd moments; the writing transporting me to conversations and impressions, sense in the reading over - I could say sure, this meant that. He cared because if you read here, he admitted that.

Proof I mattered, entering lives, leaving or being left to manage messes. The chaos of my being, the disarray, the fractiousness sorted into files and folders. Footsteps I could traverse, back and forth, over and over. Doing without, relying only on memory leaves me vulnerable. Open to assumptions.

My sons often tell me I have a gift: The ability to read people after only a few utterances. Like I'm in their head? They marvel, time after time watching me unfasten people, exposing their inner thoughts as though reciting from flash-cards. Simple for me to bring forth sensitivities, examine offered assertions and identify true meanings. People assuming I am some magical all-seeing creature, calling me psychic, intuitive. People sometimes frightened by this exposure, other times resentful. No one likes their insecurities brought to the surface and deliberated, dissected.

I tell them it's no gift this. Rather the result of a lifetime of observing. Sucking up expressions, consuming conversations, recording reactions... A bloody lifetime on the outside, looking in - the world and everyone in it under a microscope, too minuscule for me to wander in - my colossal eye, searching, scrutinising, discovering and labelling. No gift this curse, absolving me of the responsibility of mingling, merging, partaking in the living under this microscope.

I've never told my sons about my screwed-up childhood. The one I never had in any traditional sense. They hold no knowledgeof the why I am different. They accept my difference on face value. This is how I am. This is where I'm at now. The only past I introduce is when comparing differences over time, things... snippets of memories about my brother.

I've never described the difficulties. Transplanted from my country to this strange land where they spoke differently, where I stood out, with my migrant clothes and my migrant food and my migrant insecurities.

The day we missed the flight home from seeing William again and the boys opted for the long drive back? Reaching the State border I experienced a sudden impulse to visit the Migrant Camp, show them where we were transported to straight off the ship, when I was nine and a half. A month of living in the converted army barracks.

Walking around what was left of the complex with my sons, I was a child again; describing happy memories, for they were then, at least for me.

"This is where we lined up for food," I said, and "This is the building where we'd play dominoes!"

Reading along the walls, the stories from the endless thousands passing through the camp were at odds with my recollections. I was a child though. I saw only the beauty in the lush green countryside, the colourful parrots, the early morning dew, the odd group of kangaroos observing me from a safe distance.