The Storm That Spoke My Name

There are moments in life that divide us quietly into a before and an after. This painting was born in one of those moments.

I was in my car when the phone rang.

It was my brother.

His voice was calm in the way people become when they are trying not to frighten you. He said Mum wasn’t well. That she was sick. That things weren’t great. And I did what I always did back then—I tried to reason my way out of fear.

Don’t worry, I said. Nothing can happen. Even Mum’s aunty is still alive. I needed those words to be true. I needed logic to hold me upright. Then I asked the question we all ask when we’re trying to feel in control.

“What’s the worst-case scenario?”

He paused.

“You’re saying the worst case is cancer, right?”

“Yes,” I said. “And she doesn’t have cancer.”

Another pause.

“She has it.”

I remember saying, She has what? As if language itself had failed me. As if naming it might undo it.

She has cancer.

In that moment, something inside me collapsed—not just the shock of the diagnosis, but the realisation that my family had known for years. Years that I didn’t get to hold her differently. Years that were already gone. Years I could never return to.

The pain wasn’t loud. It was physical. It arrived as heat, sweat, nausea, a pressure in my chest that had nowhere to go.

I was parked by the ocean in Cairns—Trinity Beach. I was living there then. By chance, or fate, or mercy, I was already beside the sea.

I got out of the car.

That night, it began to rain.

I walked along the beach, and I didn’t try to escape it. The rain soaked me completely. My clothes, my hair, my skin. I stood there and looked up at the sky. There were no stars—but I imagined them anyway. I needed to believe they were still there, hidden behind the storm.

I began to move.

Not a dance of joy. A dance of grief.

I moved my body the way animals do when they are wounded—instinctively, urgently—trying to shake something unbearable out of my cells. I twisted, stepped, swayed, lifted my arms, let them fall. Rain ran down my face and mixed with tears until I couldn’t tell which was which.

That night is where this painting comes from.

This painting is me.

The closed eyes are the moment I stopped trying to be brave. The night behind her is the weight of not knowing how to hold what comes next. The drips are the rain, the tears, the way grief doesn’t arrive neatly—it pours, it stains, it runs where it wants.

The stars are imagined, because sometimes hope is imagined before it is felt.

The gold tears are not decoration. They are sacred. They represent the moments where pain becomes something else—where grief doesn’t destroy, but transforms. Gold, like in kintsugi, doesn’t erase the break. It honours it.

The gold beads within the body are what remained alive in me that night. Tiny, glowing fragments of resilience, memory, love—things that didn’t disappear even when everything felt like it was falling apart.

She is standing, not because she is strong, but because she has no other choice.

She is drenched, because grief is not dry or polite. She is silent, because words hadn’t come back yet.

This painting is the storm that spoke my name. The night my body understood something my mind couldn’t yet carry. The moment when loss began—not with death, but with knowing.

I painted this not to remember the pain, but to honour the moment I survived it.

And somehow, gold grew there.