Ours Everywhere02.06.2025         Thomas Hannah


Ghosts don’t follow us,

We carry them.                           
                                                                                                           
                                                                                      
I lost him over a year ago and feel okay, I think about him on occasion fondly, but it still hurts. 

It was only coming back here, to his city, our city, where our love that would ride alive on trainlines and sleep quiet from long nights, was watered by our beguiling harbour and germinated under the shade of our bridge, I realised he was still there—next to me on the train after travelling out of his way to keep me company, ordering room service at the Rydges, Bloody Marys at the Ship Inn, oysters at The Morrison, battered sausage at The Mercantile, reading my poetry in Hyde park and telling me I’m getting better, taking photos at the MCA and The Art Gallery of New South Wales with a film camera, while I quickly learn words can’t summarise these moments, can’t summarise him.

He and this was my home but now I’m a tourist in this city, a reader of my own story, a pen half empty tracing tattooed memories faded, a viewer of our movie shouting at the screen for my character to wake up before she sleeps through the best parts. Only it’s all in the past now and no matter how many times I replay it she’ll still make the same damn mistakes at the same fucking times—early on at the start and about a quarter from the end. Before she wakes alone again and sees his face in everything. Didn’t Edith Piaf have the same problem in ‘Tu Es Partout’? At least she could sing, even with all her tragic vices, and what am I left with but these split streets and unpublished poems? Edith Piaf had it better than me.  

I guess all good narratives need a complication, and ours was Shakespearian. 

Anyway everything’s wrong, this is not the way it’s supposed to go, I had moved on? Wasn’t this supposed to be my homecoming. So if this was all about me then why must he be here, chasing me like Alice after that rabbit? I wonder how she felt when her home fell away before her eyes, and was left yearning for something unreachable.     
                                                                                                                                  
In the end I only want something for myself, only beauty and memory untarnished by love, only to clear the cobwebs from my head and my chest–but I guess that spider’s still alive and even ghosts only think of themselves.

But I guess we’re only human,

and I still love my city.

Even if I have to share it.