Content Warnings (click to reveal)
Discussed: Divorce
Thinner, Smaller, Faster
It’s a cherry on top, as my mother used to say, if you complete your day in safety and in peace. One could think of Life as being like ice: surprisingly slippery even though everyone really does know what ice is like. You fall on your arse, oh yes, wet as well as cold, scramble to your feet, quickly looking round, yeah I meant to do that, and skate off, never looking back. Like riding a bike, the faster you go the more stable you are. Eventually you can easily believe you’re flying, like nothing can stop you.
I’m thinking of Dad. Oh, Icarus. When I was young he had some high-paying government job that I never understood, and he got kind of swept up. His essential self washed away, I always thought. I never knew for sure—how come, at this late stage with both parents dead now, I still don’t know?— but at an educated guess it was gambling that he got into. He must have felt, at that time, like he was going fast enough, that nothing could go wrong. He lost the marriage as well as the house, hence my learning at an early age about the wealth of landlords being directly linked to the growth of black mold in bedrooms. This was way back, before the internet told us everything.
Eventually Dad rearranged his features, dropped 30 kilos, turned his back on a streak of rapid-fire serial monogamy, and started running marathons. Looking back now, my primary emotion is envy of his ankle and knee joints. Movement is youthful: look at Mick Jagger. Like Jagger, Dad had plenty of hair even into his later years. Did he dye it? Surely. And he did mellow a little with age, eventually relaxing into occasional red-wine evenings, letting me see something honest and sad. He was in his seventies by then. But mostly I think of him running in front of me, bobbing like a slow-motion rabbit, getting smaller, running away, away from failure, away from being somehow found out. Away from the risk of me ever truly getting to know him.
Moira Kirkwood’s life revolves around both writing and painting, and she’s currently undertaking a Creative Writing degree at the University of Wollongong. Her work has been included in Cordite Poetry Review (May 2024); Deep sounding: ocean poems, edited by Friederike Krishnabhakdi-Vasilakis (2023); Burrow (2021 – 2023) and various South Coast Writers Centre Anthologies (2021-24). She was shortlisted for the South Coast Writers Centre Poetry Award 2025 with her poem ‘Thinking makes it so’.
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