"Gripping Loose Ends"

I met Cal at a film screening at the old warehouse near Brunswick Street. He sat cross-legged on the concrete floor, smoking clove cigarettes, his hair a mess of curls like someone had stirred it with a fork. He laughed too loudly at the wrong moments, and when the projector jammed, he fixed it without being asked. That was the first thing I noticed about him—his ability to slip into spaces like he belonged there. Like he had always been there.

By the second week he was sleeping on our couch.

We lived in one of those falling-apart terrace houses on Nicholson Street—me, Petra, Joe, and sometimes Petra’s kid when her ex wasn’t being difficult. There was always someone in the kitchen at 2 a.m. boiling rice or crying or tuning a guitar badly. I liked it that way. I liked the noise and the movement and the illusion of freedom. I told myself we weren’t rootless; we were drifting together.

Cal had that same restless hunger. He got a job fixing bikes during the day and spent his nights talking about Italian anarchists and the politics of heroin. It was already clear he wasn’t clean. He didn't try to hide it either. Sometimes he'd vanish for two days and come back gaunt and smiling like he’d just been to the beach.

“You worry too much,” he told me once, when I found him shaking on the floor after shooting up in our bathtub. “It’s not always going to be like this.”

But it always was.

We weren’t really together, but we weren't apart either. He’d climb into my bed some nights and whisper about leaving Melbourne, about going north to Byron or Darwin, starting over. He’d say my name like it was something to be rescued. I let myself believe him for a while. I let myself believe we were in love.

I worked part-time at a bookshop in Carlton. I read a lot, mostly women’s writing—Marge Piercy, Colette, Woolf. I kept a journal. Not because I thought anything I wrote was special, but because I needed to put things somewhere. The days bled together. Mornings were often foggy, in the literal and metaphorical sense. Coffee. Smokes. Endless dishes. Endless people passing through.

One night I came home from a shift and found Cal arguing with Joe in the backyard. Joe had caught him trying to sell one of Petra’s speakers. Cal’s eyes were glassy and hard, and he just kept repeating, “It’s not what you think.”

But it was.

That night I sat on the roof with Petra. She rolled a cigarette with one hand and handed it to me. “You have to stop letting him in,” she said.

“I know,” I told her, and I did. I knew in the way you know that a wound will eventually scar over.

I didn’t stop. Not right away.

I started going to meetings. Not for him, but for myself. I wanted to understand why I kept holding on to something that clearly wasn’t holding me back. There was a woman there, older, named Louise, who spoke about her daughter and how she lost her to heroin. Not to an overdose—but to the years of grief, silence, and small disappearances. I listened, and for the first time, I felt seen.

Cal disappeared for good in late spring. Left a note on a cereal box: “Gone north. Don’t follow.”

I didn’t cry. I went to work, came home, washed the sheets, and threw out the spoon he used to stir his coffee—brown with a blackened edge from the lighter. It felt like closing a book I never really wanted to finish.

The house got quieter after that. Petra moved in with her boyfriend. Joe took a job in Sydney. The walls stopped buzzing.

One night I sat in the backyard with a mug of wine and my journal. I wrote: “Love is not always a warm place. Sometimes it’s the fever. Sometimes it’s the sweat breaking.”

I didn’t know where Cal was, and I didn’t want to. He became part of that summer haze—a memory that swells like heat in the chest but eventually fades into the background.

I still walk past that warehouse sometimes. It's a yoga studio now. People with mats and water bottles file in like they’re entering a church. I smile. Not in mockery, just in recognition. We all try to hold on to something.

Some grips are looser now. And that’s okay.