A handful of seashells

Begin, as always, by noticing the little things. The way your cat’s whiskers twitch when he dreams he’s a tiger. The fluttery arrival of that perky rainbow lorikeet at your kitchen window sill. That satisfying pop of his honey jar’s lid. These are the moments that make up your life, even if you never bother to record them.
His breakfast done, you start to stir yourself porridge, only to realise the milk may be feral. You sniff it, recoil, then sniff once again, humans are nothing if not persistent in their petty masochism. The sourness clings to your nostrils like a memory of a bad date. You make toast from stale bread instead, scraping the burnt bits into the sink. They swirl down the drain, black flakes in a silver whirlpool. You spread some butter but save the honey for the bird. You think, “This is my life now” and you’re not entirely sure if you’re being sarcastic.
It feels like a Tuesday. Or maybe it’s Wednesday. The days blend together like watercolours in the rain. You stub your toe before the bathroom mirror, catch yourself cursing in a language you won’t use again that day. Pain, you think, is the body’s way of exclaiming “Oh you, you’re still here.”
On the bus to work (because you’re trying to save the Earth if anyone asks, not that anyone does, and you can’t afford to run a car right now), a child with sticky fingers presses a half-eaten lolly into your hand. “For you,” she says with a gap-toothed grin. You accept it, on her mother’s smile, because what else can you do? The sugar crystallizes on your palm, a sweet, grainy kindness you didn’t ask for but needed all the same.
At the office, your coworker tells a joke and your laugh surprises you both. It echoes in the sterile break room, bouncing off the microwave that’s seen more reheated leftovers than a divorced dad’s kitchen. For a moment, you forget about the report due at 3, the bills piling up at home, the persistent ache in your lower back that whispers “mortality” with every twinge. You vow to once again remember his second name.
At lunch you stroll down to Circular Quay where the opera house unfurls like a shipwreck of sails, frozen mid-capsize. Some days it splashes like a stricken whale or descends into view like an alien spaceship. The tourists swarm its steps like ants on a sugar cube, snapping photos to prove they’ve made it to the edge of the world. They seldom venture inside, if indeed it has one. You’re not a tourist, or a native, but appreciate its wonder all the same.
The park trees are still green behind that hideous apartment block, as if summer is the only season in this city. The beauty is relentless, exhausting, but demands to be acknowledged, like a peacock strutting through a library.
It’s already dusk as you leave for home. The harbour bridge arches its back, a metal cat stretching over inky waters. Ferries cut through reflections of skyscrapers, each light a tiny life or potential murder story. You spy Luna Park’s big scary face and step on a crack in the pavement. “Break your mother’s back,” your mind pops back, a childhood rhyme bubbling up like a long-lost time capsule. You pause and consider calling your mom. You don’t and the moment passes, but the thought still lingers, a gentle haunting.
You live in Bondi, where the surfers bob on waves like apostrophes, waiting for the perfect sentence to roll in. On summer weekends, the beach is a tangle of slender bronze limbs and regret – last night’s entanglements baking away under an unforgiving sun. But now only the possums scurry through its over-manicured park, nature’s little anarchists defying the slow tsunami of concrete. Half built apartments mushroom where their gardens used to be. You miss the paperbark trees like old friends. In the pubs, big men knock back schooners of beer, their laughter echoing off walls papered with faded rugby heroes. You tell the cat that joke when you get home.
Readying your bed after Netflix and nachos, you discover a stray sock under your pillow. It’s not yours. You don’t remember how it got there. You interrogate the cotton stowaway against the absurdly big moon in your window like it holds the secret to the universe. Maybe it does. Stranger things have happened, though you can’t think of any right now. You decide to keep it just in case.
These moments, strung together like mismatched beads on a child’s necklace, spin the fabric of your day. They’re not the stuff of great novels or epic poems. They won’t be carved on your tombstone or whispered reverently by future generations. But they’re yours. These little snippets of time, these fragments of experience, they’re what make you, you.
So, you resolve not to just notice, but to remember them. Collect them like shells on a beach, pocket them like smooth stones from a riverbed. You’ll let them accumulate in the corners of your mind, gathering dust and meaning in equal measure, rather than blink them away.
One day, when you’re old and grey (or bald, or purple-haired, or whatever the future holds), these moments may be all you remember. Not the grand gestures or the big achievements, not the lovers’ looks or smiles, but the random little glimpses that slipped through the cracks of your everyday life and lodged themselves in your heart. You vow to keep a shelf full of seashells, to add one every day. You go clean your teeth, ready for the lorikeet’s return.

Born in Estonia and educated in the UK, Amelia Anderson currently works in public relations in Sydney.