Vale

I, with no rights in this matter, neither father nor lover.

I see you in the corner of my eye as I walk up Chapel Street, not far from that last, warm goodbye. But as I turn to meet the gaze of a stranger who walks right by me, I’m reminded.

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Written 24/1/2026.

I write with the broken, confused heart of an ex-partner, whose distance was predicated on an assumption that someday, in the company of our new lives and new loves, we would sit in sunny St Kilda parks and laugh again.

Vale.

Even if I’d ever thought of doing so, she wouldn’t have granted me permission to write the whole truth. And even if she had, we wouldn’t have agreed on what that looked like. Now that she is dead, she never will. She will never grant me the permission to write about her in all the colour I now wish I could. She will never know how deeply and inconsolably she was loved.

The whole truth is not controversial. There is no secret or scandal or salacious story I feel barred from recording. But she was a private person. A quiet person. A person whose life was hers, and exclusively hers, to invite others into. She exercised any invitations into her inner world sparingly. Her world is not mine to share.

I want you to know her name, the colour of her hair and her eyes, she shape of her long hands, what made the corners of her lips turn upwards, what excited her into joy, and what held her in stillness. Those are the truths that I’m withholding—because those are the truths that in her death, she has chosen to withhold from the many decades worth of people whose lives she could have continued to touch.

What I can say is less about who she was or who she might have been, and more about what I wish I could have said, or what I could have shown, when I’d had the chance.

You were built like a feather in a cage.

I pretended not to notice you for years before you finally noticed me. When we were together, I was alone in my fear. Fear that I could never be what you needed. Fear that you could never be what I needed. Fear that both of those fears were problems for me to fix, and fear that if and when I failed to fix them, that you would once again become a stranger, and I would once again be not just alone, but living proof of my own inadequacy. I turned you from a person in pain to a fixture of my own. In all this self-centredness, years ago, I prioritised my own fears over your pain.

And when it was over, my attention turned from my own shortcomings to yours.

When it came time to make amends, we sat in Alma Park with my dog. You lay small pieces of yourself out on the grass. I didn’t like some of them. I wanted to drag them up the stairs of my ivory tower and examine them out loud, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to hear you say you were sorry. Your apologies were not enough for me. I didn’t want things to end as much as I just wanted you to be better. But all I said was, I’m sorry too. I wasn’t. I am now.

I mistook selfishness for graciousness. I mistook spinelessness for decorum. I regret not telling you exactly what I was thinking: I love you, what you’re doing is not working, please believe me.

Maybe you wouldn’t have listened. It’s nothing I hadn’t tried to say before. But as I sit here, over two years since I last saw you, I wish I’d said it just right, just once. Not in frustration, but in love. But I didn’t.

We held each other for a moment, our guts hanging out of our skinny bodies in the sun out the front of your apartment. I held it all in. You’ve been a stranger ever since. For months I avoided places I might run into you, and prayed to a g-d I’m not sure I believe is listening to make the sick feeling go away.

Last week I went through old photos. Me, you, cats, monkeys, boats, beaches, and a video of you brushing your teeth. You’re smiling. Smiling through whatever it was that killed you. Smiling through whatever it was that neither of us knew how to exhume and scrub. Smiling through something maybe you knew, full-well, that you’d never beat, or smiling in a moment unsullied by the parts of you that were so determined to drag you down. Smiling through a knot that tightened itself quietly in the recesses of your routine. Smiling through a mouth full of toothpaste and bristles. Smiling at me.

I will say her name now. Her name was Lani Mckaskill. Lani killed herself in her mother’s house on Saturday January 17^th, 2026.

I cannot describe the grief I’m experiencing. It’s confused and unintelligible.

It’s the air getting sucked out of my chest while I sit at traffic lights and remember: Lani Mckaskill is dead.

It’s closer to disbelief than anything else. It feels like a mistake has been made. There is no closure. There is no ‘peace’ with which it feels appropriate to instruct that Lani may ‘rest’. There is just a chaotic tear in the fabric of what was, and what could have been.

Elegy For Jane — Theodore Roethke

(My student, thrown by a horse)

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;

And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;

And how, once started into talk, the light syllables leaped for her.

And she balanced in the delight of her thought,

A wren, happy, tail into the wind,

Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.

The shade sang with her;

The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,

And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,

Even a father could not find her:

Scraping her cheek against straw,

Stirring the clearest water.

My sparrow, you are not here,

Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.

The sides of wet stones cannot console me,

Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,

My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.

Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:

I, with no rights in this matter,

Neither father nor lover.