The Truth About Girls: Wattys 2018

A pair of earrings. A pretty dress. A single question.

That is how it starts.

I remember the start as clearly as I do the end, with absolute and undying certainty that it's almost cloying to think about. I remember where I begin, and I remember where I fall apart - but everything in-between, the climax and the turning point, the hues that seep in and then bleed out, the essence of my undoing, all of that is hazy.

It comes and goes in piecemeals and startling epiphanies, in hearsays and frozen snapshots of time. It exists as momentary lapses of memory - a flash of white light, the burn of alcohol, a mop of dark hair. It pieces together gradually with every small detail, and then crumbles at the revelation of more information.

The truth about me is something that everyone seems to know, something that everyone seems to have an opinion on - whether it's a junior from school, or a bespectacled, beer-bellied journalist - everyone knows something. Every time I click an article or open Twitter, I see the vast and varying versions of how I came to end; some laughable and dimensionless, some nauseating and horrendous, but all of them heartbreaking. Everyone knows the quintessence of my destruction, except for myself.

But if there is one thing I know, it is this.