https://www.bluemariposapress.com/stories daily 0.75 2026-01-22 https://www.bluemariposapress.com/stories/witness monthly 0.5 2026-01-22 https://www.bluemariposapress.com/stories/the-descent monthly 0.5 2026-01-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/69152a1b61c28a114e922efc/91e03b9b-3c97-401b-b448-a0d11663dc73/KIA.jpg Stories - The Descent Ninety kilos lighter, sober for the first time in years, I no longer recognised the man in the mirror. The armour was gone, but so was the shape beneath it. I hadn’t written since Crystal Street was published in 2017. Could I still write? Could I do it sober? The question repeated with the rhythm of tyres on bitumen. Somewhere north of Townsville, Emerald, I think, the light began to change. The tropics started rumbling and the rain started to fall. As I drive, the ghosts of my past come back to me. In 2005, at thirty-five, I was a writer who loved drugs and alcohol. Impulsive, restless, always chasing. I had the habits of a great genius. Every thought, every action aimed at keeping the crash away, regulating emotions, and silencing the voices. By July 2016, I was 170 kilos. Bloated on painkillers, benzos and booze. My knees ached. My back throbbed. Walking was hard. I sweated constantly. I couldn’t shit properly, couldn’t wipe my own arse. My trip to Japan was the reckoning. In a mirror, I saw what I’d become: grotesque, lumbering, trapped in my own skin. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/69152a1b61c28a114e922efc/08347ca4-40dd-4fec-ab66-6961f4e47f08/Injury.jpg Stories - The Descent Then the car crash, my wife beside me, sternum cracking like timber. Opiates. Benzos. Adult diapers. Humiliations piling up. Years blurred: addiction tightening, psychosis circling, marriage dissolving, job gone. I thought about who I was then, and who I had become. I wore prosthetics: food as armour, alcohol as camouflage, drugs as masks. I mirrored and performed, fat clown, drunk and loud, stoned and lit. And when the fat melted away, when the drugs and alcohol stopped, I didn’t know how to act. People didn’t know how to treat me. Thin privilege admitted me into a club I hadn’t asked to join. Who was I? Autistic rhythms, years of mirroring, years of impulsivity. Without prosthetics, without the shield, I was naked. Sober, I didn’t belong anywhere. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/69152a1b61c28a114e922efc/f2898586-75d0-4fba-8020-83e3af4dbb8c/Cabin.jpg Stories - The Descent Inside, the wooden floors bowed underfoot; the fridge rattled when I walked. At night, the wind lifted from the Barron and the temperature dropped ten degrees, colder than the city below, so I wrote in a hoodie and socks whilst mist crawled under the doors. The toilet sat outside under the balcony; the shower was tacked to the back wall beneath a sheet of corrugated plastic the colour of old teeth. Water dribbled more than flowed. A burnt-orange lounge faced the forest, and when I sat there, the vines seemed to inch closer. From the veranda, I could hear the Barron River. Even when invisible, it announced itself, a deep, patient roar at night, breathing through the gorge. The sound became a metronome for thought. I told myself I’d live like Kerouac in Desolation Angels, ascetic, honest, stripped back to the page. Same mud, different altar. I had his quote, ‘You came here to write,’ pinned to the fridge. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/69152a1b61c28a114e922efc/c828c122-d44a-41c1-9e08-40626751343a/Kuranda.jpg Stories - The Descent ‘Hey, man,’ he said, shaking my hand. ‘I heard about your accident.’ He glanced at the moon boot. ‘From the reports, I was expecting you to be far more dissipated. You look well.’ ‘You sound disappointed,’ I said. ‘I assure you, I’m not.’ We laughed. He bought two long blacks. ‘Yeah,’ I nodded. ‘It’s intense. Raw. Primal. I think I needed it. To get clean. To start again. I haven’t heard my own voice in years, and it’s …’ He waited. ‘I brought everything up with me,’ I said. ‘Thousands of pages. Early drafts. Old manuscripts. Sections from Melted. It’s overwhelming. I keep moving piles around, like furniture in my head. I thought I’d be halfway through the novel by now, but I’m stuck. It’s all there, in pieces, but no arc.’ ‘Is that what you’re writing now?’ ‘I’ve told everyone I’m writing it,’ I said. ‘Told work I was taking a sabbatical to finish. But I’m terrified. I haven’t written a full draft in five years. And I was high the whole time. What if I can’t do it sober?’ ‘You think the drugs helped you write?’ ‘They helped me start,’ I said. ‘But they never helped me finish.’ https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/69152a1b61c28a114e922efc/7060aec9-f8af-4c30-b978-95444617a4d7/Beach.jpg Stories - The Descent He leaned forward. ‘Two ways,’ he said. ‘Gradually, then suddenly.’ ‘In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning,’ I answered, quoting Fitzgerald. He nodded approval. ‘You want the hut and the page, good,’ he said, echoing Kerouac. ‘Now suffer for it.’ When I stood to leave, Martin nodded once. ‘Write it all down,’ he said. ‘That’s how we pay our passage.’ Driving back up the range, the clouds folded in around the car. The dragons slept again in the mist. His words followed me like a benediction. Back at the cottage, I wrote my first paragraph. It wasn’t good, but it was honest. The rainforest pulsed against the tin walls. Every sound was magnified, the drip of water, the call of curlews, the steady breathing of the river. Writing felt less like creation and more like transcription, as if I were taking dictation from the place itself. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/69152a1b61c28a114e922efc/a557d710-fb4b-449d-8934-37b8b99abc5c/Renewal.jpg Stories - The Descent At night, I sat beneath the single bulb, listening to rain on the roof, feeling the pulse of the forest press against the walls. The words came faster, then slower, then stopped. That was fine. The story was teaching me patience. The Barron still flooded; the curlews still cried. The rainforest still hummed with its patient, untranslatable language. And I was still there, writing. ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live.’ Joan Didion This essay is excerpted from the forthcoming memoir, Melted, by Vogel-shortlisted author, Jeremy Aitken. Jeremy Aitken is a Vogel-shortlisted author of The Bike and a lecturer in Human Services and Sustainability at the Australian College of Applied Professions (ACAP). His teaching centres on reflective practice, cultural safety, and ethical decision-making in professional contexts. Based in Kuranda, Far North Queensland, Jeremy’s debut novel Crystal Street(2017) explores addiction and transformation. His forthcoming memoir, Melted, traces collapse and renewal across body, mind, and rainforest, blending confessional narrative with close ecological attention. 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