My mother saw this first effort about three days later and said nothing. My father saw it a month later and flipped out. My mother told him to calm down. My room was tucked away in the topmost corner of the house. Nobody went past it. Nobody went into it unless they wanted to see me. ‘It can be painted over if necessary.’ My father didn’t say anything about it to me for a long time.

Throughout high school and while I was an undergraduate still living at home, those walls became the default way for me to react to the world. When I heard a song I loved, I would paint the lyrics in the colours swimming behind my eyes. When a line from a poem got stuck in my mind, I would write it over and over until I couldn’t see the words anymore. When I couldn’t sleep for anger, I would scribble near the head of my bed with the closest writing implement I could find. I made a list of initials of every person I’d kissed. I composed poetry. I ranted. I mused. I was indiscriminate about content; those walls wore my angst, they wore my joy, they wore my lust and hate and longing. They wore everything I couldn’t voice and many things I wished I’d said first. Those walls wore me.

Friends would come and sit in my bedroom and talk about which part of it they liked best. The pictures were their favourites. I painted a porthole on the wall next to my bed, through which you could see Planet Earth. I painted a tree split by lightning, shining golden where it was struck. I painted a night sky, tar-black, that faded to rainbow as it reached the carpet. While I was living in Poland, my great-aunt Patty was given my bedroom during her stay at Christmas. She told me in a letter the following week that she’d had a wonderful time lying in my bed at night examining my art, but that she possibly hadn’t got enough sleep.

When I moved out of home, my third brother, Peter, inherited my room. He was happy to leave it the way it was but the day after I’d left, my father came in with a tin of paint and before Peter or my mother or I could object, had covered all of the soul-scrawl with a pale yellow wash. All of it except for one tiny spot. On the white metal edging around the wardrobe door, about two feet from the ceiling, remains single blue painted raindrop.

I was back in Melbourne for Christmas a few weeks ago. On Christmas night, after all my friends had left, I went upstairs and found Peter lying on his bed with the lights on. We talked for a couple of minutes, but all I could think about was that one raindrop. So I picked up a pen. Underneath the noticeboard in curly drunken sister-scrawl it now says:

Fuck the system. Be a revolutionary. Write on walls.

The bugs have been biting my legs since I got to Brisbane. I douse myself in insect repellent, swat them away, slap them, swear at them, beg them to stop, but still they bite. I wake up in the morning with little red welts peppering my legs.

2.

There is frangipani in the garden, a forest of bamboo and a possum that likes roast potato. Each night, it climbs down from the trees and sits next to the porch railing, playing chicken with Murphy the cat and waiting for scraps.

3.

Being social is an effort, even with people I know very well. Even with people I love. What I want has nothing to do with it; after awhile, of their own accord, my body and my brain begin to rebel.

4.

Out on the Moil River, near Peppimenarti, the mosquitoes are particularly nasty. They carry brain fever and disease, as well as a brutal itch. They breed in the swamp, sharing the mud, reeds and lilies with the barramundi that were hiding from our fishing lines and a huge saltwater crocodile. You can’t stay out there after sunset. At dusk, the mosquitoes swarm. At night, they eat you alive.

5.

There was a time when I couldn’t say no to lovers. No, I don’t want to share your bed tonight. I can’t sleep before 3am and I’d rather spend those blank hours writing. No, I don’t want to spend half my day trying to study while you pretend this is a functional space. I can’t concentrate on raw philosophy when all you really want to do is send your hand creeping up my leg. I require solitude. I require my own space. I require a door that closes and locks from the inside. Five hundred a year and a room of one’s own. And I want and I need and I crave to write.

6.

The difference is what gives.

Scrivener says I am 4,329 words into my new story but it doesn’t feel like that much. I have sketched perhaps a third of the story in fragments only and the more I write, the more of the story I find, and the more I can feel it burning at the back of my head. There’s a point where “I want to write a story” becomes rather a matter of “this story wants to be written”. It’s lame (not to mention an incredible cliché) to say that stories and characters take on a life of their own (and anyone who says so ought to be first punched in the face and then evaluated for schizophrenia) but there is an awesome kind of momentum that happens when you’ve written enough to really feel the shape of the story to come. The unwritten segments start haunting the empty lines, like backwards phantoms – ghosts of things that don’t yet exist, slowly pushing into being. (Perhaps it’s creativity, not immortality, that is the reversal of death.) They follow you around, pulling at your sleeves, distracting you at the most inappropriate moments (in a bar without a pen or paper, ten minutes before the news goes to air, that cloudy place on the cusp of sleep) until you pin them down and give them shape.

The toughest part is getting the skeleton of the story built. I am about halfway through the transition period now, between wanting to write and needing to write. I can keep the lid on it for a little while longer, but another few thousand words and I might suddenly fall off the planet. Six months ago I was wondering how I would fill 10,000 words. This time I think I will be lucky if I turn out less than 50,000. I medicated myself out of writing for three months with alcohol and weed, but the bug comes back within a few days, and stronger than before. Now don’t think I could stop if I wanted to, and that’s not even thinking about the story I’m supposed to be writing for my Masters.

This is not complaining, although it may look like that, taken at face value. I don’t think I could be happy any other way.