I guess fear always starts out like a white page.

We script and write them into our lives, just as easy as I am writing this story now.

They start off as just another white blank space, and then you develop a taste, mature with age and let them scribble over the page. We want to be clean of them. But I unlatched them from a silver lock and all my fears came crawling out of Pandora’s Box. I thought for a while to myself that if I could bury my fears under something as sweet as diaries that maybe, the truth could stay hidden and the truth would stay forbidden. But the sweet smell cannot hide what I could tell.

My father was a man whose journey travelled just under the speed of 50 but he couldn’t change gears, so he was given his last year at 49. It haunts me the way I thought, when I stared at that saffron cancer poster on the wall and said, “Look on the bright side, it isn’t cancer.” Two hours later I would finally learn the true feeling of being so wrong. There were no answers. There wasn’t a cure for him and in a year there wasn’t going to be any him for us. I didn’t even have to be told. I didn’t want to be told. All I can remember is thinking when I was walking to the car how strange it was, my Dad couldn’t drive any more. Only two days ago he drove my sister and me to Melbourne.

During those summer holidays I grew pale under my own grey cloud. The cloud didn’t resemble any stroke of fluffiness or woollies of the ones I wished I could have drawn into my life. No, what lingered over me was more of a human organ, dead and shrivelled up.

When my father was gone, death stayed. It smelt! Not of the dead bird I passed on the street. It didn’t smell of polluted water or of putrefying fish pancaked on the surface. It smelt of flowers and dirt which, piled altogether, would have stood as tall as he had. That was sicker.

But once he was gone there was still fear. That I am instead crashing like an afterthought, because naturally with the strike of lightning needs to follow thunder and rain. So it grew dark and the clouds gained weight. I opened my arm wide for the perfect storm. I opened my mouth and drank, and let it get underneath my clothes. Daylight circled down me, like distant headlights. Then the sun drove straight into the storm. Together we rose to the surface, burning like a phoenix.

So now I rest in happiness and now my favourite colour is yellow.