Forced to move. Again. Here now in a house I hate. This house is hard. This house is cold. Freezing. To sit on the toilet. To take. A shower. Shower over the bath. Narrow. Deep. Leg over slowly. Don’t fall. The other leg. Stand in that small space. Try not to fall. Keep your thighs tight. Don’t spread out. If you do. The sides of your feet curve. Into. The side of the bath. You feel unstable. Don’t move too much. You can hardly move your arms. They bang up against the tiles. The shower curtain. You can’t do chicken wings. You have to hold them close. To your side. You can’t stand straight under it. Feel the water on your face. It’s the angle of the shower head. To feel it on your face, you have to turn. Right round. If you step back any further, you’ll be on top of the drain. To wash your hair, you have to throw your head back. Far as it can go. You think of The Exorcist. Are you supposed to swivel your head here? I used to love taking a bath. For my bad back. But not now. Surrounded by chill. You move through cold air. As if you’re outside not in. But who cares about the bloody bathroom. The not wanting. Never now wanting. To go to the loo. To take a shower. So what. How long are you in there anyway? How long does it take. To take a shit. Shower. You can survive 3 minutes surely. But that’s under the tap. Then. You’ve got to get out. Dry yourself. Freeze. Seems here I am frozen too. I am stopping. I am not getting to the main thing. The most important. Room. I haven’t got to that. Yet. I could go on about the bathroom. The outside laundry. The two separate taps in the laundry. My handwashing. My cheap clothes. Wanting to rinse. Have to do it now. In cold water. Two separate taps in the kitchen. The dark lounge room. The light I used to work by in other places. This is a hard place to live and work. My bedroom. The place where I work. Where I live. The room that matters more than any other. I am a homebody. I am at my computer. I am attached to my desktop. My chair. But this room. The cold. My feet now. Are always freezing. My face. I don’t recognise this face. This body. In this place. In this room. Take the light. For instance. There’s a blind. I have to constantly. Put up and down. All day. I’ve had to move my desk. It was in front of the window. The light the glare. My eyes grew sore. I couldn’t stand it. Now my desk. Is at the side. 90 degree angle to the window. But still. The light the glare. The blind up and down. I don’t know what. I’ll do in the summer. To get away from the sun. The room utterly black. When the blind is down. Then there’s the debris that fell. From cracks in the wall. This land. Built on a swamp. There’s structural movement. Debris on top of my computer. Into the back of my printer. Had to move the desk the table. Everything in front. Of that window. For the handyman. To seal the cracks. To stop the debris. Falling on top of me. Into spaces. Nooks and crannies. My tools. I spent each day. Escaping. After I moved in. Not wanting to be. In this place. Hard dark cold. Even in summer. No insulation. Double brick. Old. The best I could get. The Notice to Vacate. The 60 – 120 at inspections. Could hardly move or see. Anything. The high rents and shit houses. Worse flats. Tiny. Terrible. It hurts to hear. The word home. I can’t say it. I can’t call this that. When I say I’m going – where? ‘The place where I live.’ What a mouthful. ‘Back. There.’ I don’t know what to call it. I still can’t believe it. I am here. There is nowhere else to go. There is no way out. At every turn. Every room. Like waging a war. My body in battle. I feel strange here/there. I don’t know to live. Here. Or how to launch myself. Into the world. From here/there. It feels like I carry it. Around with me. I rarely get away from it. It waits for me to come back. I see it in my mind all the time. I never knew how the cold. Gets into your bones. My mother’s previous rental. Of forty-three years. Bitterly cold too. She never complained. Said she was used to it. Her old brick house. Sure it had a heater. In the lounge room. Threw out so little heat. All my friends, my boyfriends, my ex-partner saying. That house. Is fucking freezing. That kind of cold. You can’t think straight. Can think of nothing else. Heating doesn’t help. Sure, there’s a split system in the lounge room. But it doesn’t heat. The whole house. Doesn’t help the kitchen. The bathroom. The bedroom. The laundry outside. Such cold. You can’t put it behind you. You carry it. You carry the image. Of the place in your mind. You carry the cold. You know you have to return to it. There are people all over this country. Living like this. I have told myself. Hate doesn’t help. I have read books. Know/n struggling friends. Family. I know I know. Things could be worse. I could lose my sight, a limb; my life too young. I could be living in some other country. Or even here. Floods. Fire. Losing everything. I have lost so many so-called homes. So many times. And now. Had to get out. Just before I turned sixty. Happy Birthday to me. Merry Christmas. Packing again. Looking again. December. January. Applying again. I can’t tell you. How much time. And energy. And exhaustion. That takes. I said to a friend. In the middle of it. My life is a nightmare. She didn’t like it. She was shocked. Perhaps disapproving. She said Your life isn’t a nightmare. Look at all the support you’ve got. Including her. She could see it. I was surrounded. This time I’d put out a call. Asked friends to help. The packing. The moving. Usually it’s only my family. And my old best friend. I was beyond that this time. They’ve all grown older. All have bad backs. They still helped. But I had a whole band of others. Still, when I said my life felt like a nightmare, I meant it. The packing. The looking. The moving. All the help. They can’t keep doing this. Neither can I.