Rozie Kelly

“When I reached her room, I didn't go in. I sat on the floor outside her door, and I cried the tears I knew I wouldn't be able to bring forth once she was gone. I cried tears for the poet and through her I cried tears for my mother and for my father. I must have fallen asleep right there in the corridor, for I was woken when the sun took over from the moon, by a nurse arriving to check on Kingfisher. She took me wordlessly to the staff room and made me a cup of coffee with both milk and sugar, and gave me tissues to wipe my face. How many kind strangers there are, for all of us, and how often they know the value of silence and soft hands.”
― Rozie Kelly, Kingfisher

“You don't often see the in-between, do you? You don't often see the part where you walk in silence and don't touch one another, the part where the shards from an explosion float to the ground, and you have to get up again the next day. The part where you put the washing on and go to work and pretend everything is fine and all the while your chest is heaving from your invisible wounds. You see the chasms of heartbreak, the wet cheeks and dramatic sobs and hard goodbyes, but you don't see the agonised conversations with friends: the fabrications of a narrative that doesn't show us in our horrible, fractured, human light.”
― Rozie Kelly, Kingfisher