Paradise St 2023 a collaboration with writer Kiara Taylor

This artwork was painted for the Brisbane Street Art Festival

Short story written by Kiara Taylor

Sweltering heat. Walking up the concrete brick overpass on Boundary Street. Standing on the bridge, peering down at your neighbourhood. Hungover and thirsty. Life buzzes underneath. West Enders in colourful clothing glow with sweat as they lug bags of produce from the Saturday markets. Couples holding hands, their voices echoing as they pass underneath the bridge. People dutifully picking up dog shit, juggling coffee cups as their dog pulls on their leash.

This morning you wake up in a stranger's bed. You untangle yourself from white sheets, stumble out the door and make your way home. Over the bridge, and under the giant fig trees that litter the footpath with shades of green. Humidity is high, as always. You think you'd be used to it by now. Always sweating. Your perspiration smells of alcohol. For the length of the commute home, you tell yourself mantras about how you're going to stop drinking and be one of those early- rising market-goers carrying weaved baskets filled with kale and fresh flowers and kombucha. You'll float through the early morning crowds with intention. No aimless back and forth meandering between stalls, staring blankly at a pile of eggplants, tentatively leaving with a random assortment of produce that will eventually rot in the fridge. Oh, to have your shit together.

The back door is locked. Either no one is home or everyone is still asleep. You haul your tired, clammy body around the side of the house and up the front steps. Tiptoeing into your bedroom, you step over piles of clothes you tried on the night before and left strewn all over the floor. You love your bedroom. The gaudy shades of pastel pink and yellow wall paint reminds you of those chalky candy hearts. The French Baroque ceiling design makes you feel like you're sleeping in a palace. The way you can close your curtains and black out the entire room if you feel like sleeping through the day. Sometimes, you come home to find your housemate cocooned in your sheets, evading the offensive light-filled torture of her own room. 

The bathroom is at once the ugliest and prettiest room in the house. Bright, ornate tiles in shades of mustard and navy blue. A clawfoot bathtub is the centrepiece, but no baths happen in here. The inside of the tub is completely rusted, with a scummy reddish-brown stain coating the surface. The Greek landlords, usually the chatty grandfather or the socially awkward, greasy- faced grandson occasionally drop in unannounced to do half-assed maintenance work. Sometimes, they'll spray paint the bath white to cover the rust. It lasts as long as the next person's shower.

Home is a funny concept in your twenties. There's an awareness of temporality. Jumping from one beat up Queenslander to the next. Sometimes you get lucky enough to fall in love with a home. All the right ingredients come together at the perfect time, as if by magic. Strangers become family. Friendship groups intertwine. You begin to set down your roots, knowing that it's going to hurt more once you have to dig yourself back up and move on. There is an intimacy with a housemate that cannot be replicated. You form a microcosm that feels impenetrable. You sit on your balcony for hours drinking cheap wine, lounging on thrifted furniture to get through the monotony of Sunday. Shared dinners. Shared milestones. Arguments heard through the thin of the walls. Crying. Fucking. Sometimes you all fuck at the same time and the house shakes. A symphony of moving bodies. You all laugh about it in the morning.

Those moments never felt like anything special, but now that they exist in the graveyard of your withering memory, they extend a cosmic life of their own. Scenes play out like comforting vignettes from a film you've seen a thousand times. You fill in the gaps using your imagination.

Cerebral clarity begins to deteriorate with time, and each rerun distorts into a tangle of nostalgic fragments. Objects in the house disappear. You can't remember the exact colour of your bedroom walls, or the precise image of the afternoon sun drenching the balcony with golden light. There's a painful tinge of idealism. A longing for something that no longer exists. You remind yourself that one day, this moment, too, will live among a graveyard of many.