the rooftop girl

a life remembered in peices.

001
There are so many things I wish I could tell you...

002
There was a girl who grew up believing...

003
There was a time when home felt like the safest place...

001

There are so many things I wish I could tell you.Not to change your path, because I wouldn't. Every joy, every mistake, every goodbye becomes a part of the person you're still growing into. But if I could sit beside you for a little while, beneath that same sky you love so much, there are a few things I'd want you to know.One day you'll discover that hearts don't always break all at once.Sometimes they unravel quietly, in ordinary moments, until you wake one morning and realise you're carrying pieces of yourself you no longer recognise.The hardest part isn't always losing someone.Sometimes it's losing the version of yourself that existed while they were there.You'll spend days wondering if you'll ever laugh the same way again. Whether the lightness you once carried simply disappeared. You'll search for the person you used to be, not yet understanding that she isn't gone.She's becoming.You'll learn that love is both the gentlest and the fiercest thing you'll ever know. It will teach you how deeply you can care for another person, and just as quickly, how deeply you can ache when they leave.You'll discover that the people who shape you aren't always the ones who stay.Some will arrive only to teach you something. Some will leave without explaining why. Some will love you imperfectly. And some will remind you that you are worthy of being loved exactly as you are.There will be days when the world feels unbearably heavy, and others when it feels impossibly beautiful. Somehow, they'll both exist at the same time.I know that sounds confusing now.One day, it won't.So keep looking at the stars.Keep asking impossible questions.Keep believing there's more.

002

There was a girl who grew up believing that the books she read, the movies she watched and the stories she was told weren’t just that.They existed somewhere. Maybe not exactly as they were written, but somewhere.She looked up at the sky and dreamed not of impossible things, but of places she hoped she might one day reach.She watched birds. She watched planes disappear into the clouds. She watched ants crawl between blades of grass that must have seemed enormous beside them. She watched leaves surrender to the wind—a wind so soft it barely announced itself as it crossed her skin, cool enough to wake her, warm enough to make her stay.She listened.The birds would sing. Or laugh. She never truly knew which.She wondered what they were saying to one another. Whether they had thoughts like hers. Whether they carried invisible sadness. Whether they had their own version of music that helped them escape for just a little while. Songs that spoke the words they couldn’t.Maybe not with language. Maybe with the tapping of a foot, the sway of a shoulder, the quiet movement of a body remembering what freedom felt like.On warm summer nights, she’d gather every pillow and blanket she could carry, drag them through the house, climb to the second floor and push them, one by one, through the window that had no flyscreen.They’d tumble onto the flat timber roof below with a soft thud. She’d climb out after them with a bag of lollies tucked beneath her arm.Then she’d lie on her back beneath a sky so crowded with stars it felt impossible that people could look at it and not ask questions.Because she believed stories weren’t invented.She believed they were remembered.Every fairy tale. Every impossible adventure. Every whispered legend.Someone, somewhere, had simply forgotten where it really happened.She would stare into a sky so impossibly endless that it almost felt alive. Billions of stars. Some radiant. Some barely there. The kind of sky that made questions feel louder than answers.She never searched for constellations.She searched for meaning.And every time her thoughts grew too big for the girl lying on that rooftop, she’d find herself returning to the very same place.There has to be more.

003

There was a time when home felt like the safest place in the world.
Not safe in the way Vaea would come to understand the word years later. She didn't think about locked doors or money in the bank or whether there was food in the fridge. She was a child.
Safety was simply the feeling of never having to wonder.
She never wondered whether there would be dinner that night. She never wondered who would pick her up from school. She never wondered whether there would be clean clothes waiting somewhere in the house, or whether someone would notice if she was sick, sad, hungry or hurt.
Those things simply happened.
To Vaea, home felt almost magical because of it. At the centre of it were Teresa and Jace.
Her parents.
When Vaea was young, she believed her father could fix anything.
Not most things. Anything.
Something could break. Something could go wrong. A problem could appear that Vaea couldn't begin to understand, and somehow Jace would know what to do.
At least, that was how she saw him.
There was a certainty about her father that made the world feel a little less frightening. Jace worked hard. He was at the family butcher shop by six and wouldn't finish until six that evening. Twelve hours beneath fluorescent lights, only to wake the next morning and do it all over again.
Vaea didn't yet see the responsibility he carried. She simply saw her dad, the man who left for work every morning, came home every night and always seemed to know what came next.
Teresa was a different kind of certainty.
Her mum worked too, but somehow her days seemed to stretch themselves around everyone else's. She was there in the mornings, taking the kids to school before heading to work herself, and when the school day ended, Teresa was there again.
Then came everything else. Sport, appointments, washing, the things that needed remembering, the things children forgot, and the hundred tiny jobs Vaea never noticed because she had never needed to.
And at the end of the day, somehow, there was still dinner on the table.
As a child, Vaea didn't stop to wonder how her parents managed all of it. They simply did.
That was the magic of them. There was something incredibly safe about believing that the people raising her simply knew how to keep the world turning.
Vaea wouldn't understand until much later that childhoods like hers didn't simply happen.
They were built.
Quietly, day after day, by people who woke up tired and went to work anyway. By people who remembered what needed remembering, showed up where they needed to be and somehow found enough of themselves left at the end of the day to do it all again tomorrow.
As a child, Vaea saw none of that.
She only saw home.
And perhaps that was the greatest thing Teresa and Jace had given her: a childhood in which safety felt like something that simply existed.

the rooftop girl is a life remembered in pieces.

A literary collection of memories, personal reflections, people and places that shaped a girl long before she understood they were shaping her.Some memories are ordinary. Some are beautiful. Some are painful. Others only reveal their meaning years after they've passed.They are not told perfectly, and they are not always told in order.Because memory rarely is.At the centre of them is Vaea, a girl who spent much of her life looking at the world a little differently, searching for meaning in things other people seemed able to accept without question.This is her story.Not told all at once. But piece by piece.

if something here stayed with you...you can leave a thought, share a story, or simply say hello.

write to the rooftop girl

there are still stories to tell.