Our Daughters and Lemonade.

February 24, 2017 Emma Brooker

Lying with eyes wide open, I know every CRACK and every corner of my bedroom ceiling.

Again I am here in the sticky heat awake, frustrated, yearning for what, I don’t quite know.

I am thirsty, but there is never enough water to quench it.

These past few months I have connected with something almost biblical. Very deep inside, it rolls around and around and whilst overwhelming, manages to also feel like a long slow torturous burn.

Submerged

February 23, 2017 Emma Brooker

I have one delicious memory from my childhood.
One simple, ordinary moment in time that was savoured.
Bath time.
An evening ritual. One that made me innately aware of being planted solidly in a family unit, part of a bustling household and never more secure in that deceivingly inconsequential nightly routine.

The Blister

February 15, 2017 Emma Brooker

It was a painful blister, on the arc of my right foot.

It was one that had stopped me wearing closed in shoes for a week. It was red raw and puffed up and as big as a 20 cent piece.

It had happened as all good blisters do. Having fun.

My husband and I spent a hot summer day, walking the length of an overgrown edge of a channel.

Treasures.

February 15, 2017 Emma Brooker

Before there was all of this and things were hard. Before I moved through life tactically and knew about pressure.

There was a large, clunky dress-up trunk, at the back of the sun-soaked kindergarten room.

It had dents in it.

Dents made from my young teacher I now suppose.

As she pulled and pushed it to do something amazingly romantic perhaps - fleeing a Budapest bedsit in the middle of the night, where a lover slept soundly.

Catching a plane, then a train to a dusty country town for a new start. A chance to disappear into something other than herself. Resting it down gently, filled with old costumes, in the midst of my class-roomed world.

Hidden.

February 15, 2017 Emma Brooker

Through the upstairs bathroom window, the late afternoon light streams.

The kind of light that catches all of the tiny particles in the air, as they gently float around.

Specks of dust drifting; eventually falling.

The room feels like a warm cocoon, despite the cold tiled floors and the flat slabs of Caesar stone, glass and porcelain. My naked skin, in a rare moment feels comfortable, at ease..in no rush to bundle itself up to chase warmth and hide again.

Torn (in a Natalie Imbruglia kinda way).

February 15, 2017 Emma Brooker

The first time I shrugged his irritating hand from my shoulder I was on a crowded dance floor; under flashes of coloured light. Black dress; eyes sparkling; head spinning.

A brief hostile connection, in the middle of a grungy, underground pub. What a dive.

Paint had peeled off the cracked, yellow, smoked stained walls and feet stuck to the once bright red carpet, now melted black from drunken shoes scuffing their way around sweaty, lithe bodies.

Tides.

November 26, 2016 Emma Brooker

I sat on my towel, waiting for the sun to dry up the hundreds of droplets on my wet skin. Watching them intently; muscles burning, from fighting against waves moments before, dumping me against sandbars. Muscles, now burning even more, as I sat there. Fighting the urge to jump up and join them.

Essays