The Witness
By Jeremy Aitken
I didn’t come north to write The Bike.
I came to the rainforest to disappear into another book, Melted. I left Sydney to start a new life. Far North Queensland was meant to be a forward motion, not a return. I thought I was moving on, not looking back. But The Bike was always there. Like most people I was dragging my ghosts, an exile but I thought it was a new beginning, but I couldn’t stop running from myself. Those ghosts, shame, fear, doubt, regret, were still there, and I couldn’t integrate them or have individuation until I confronted the past. I didn’t understand that I was still running.
All of this I didn’t yet know. Then there was the accident.
I had moved into a small cottage in the rainforest in Far North Queensland, telling myself I was there to write Melted. In truth, I hadn’t written anything at all. Days passed without me putting pen to paper. I was still moving internally, still outrunning silence, even in the middle of the rainforest. It took the accident to stop me.
Confined to the cottage during the long rainy stretch, movement taken from me, noise stripped away, I found myself sitting inside a quiet I’d spent years outrunning. The city had taught me how to stay in motion: harsh fluorescent lights, all-night rooms, men trying to outpace the silence with speed, substances, posturing, performative. I had learned how to keep going, not how to stop. The Bike was born there, in addiction, in urgency, in the need to keep going or disappear. Here, nothing let me run.
Metacognition, reflection, calmness were what was given to me in the rainforest. Alone at night, I could confront my past, and slowly the voices started to speak and come back, and I could finally listen and understand. The rainforest does not fill silence, it deepens it. The rain doesn’t distract. In that enforced stillness, surrounded by nature that feels older than consequence, I began opening old manuscripts.
In my mind, I had written the story completely, but I hadn’t yet opened the manuscripts or started to type. I had told everyone that I was coming to the rainforest for a year to write Melted, weirdly no one said that was a bad idea. I believed intention would be enough. Initially I felt trapped: my foot mangled and throbbing, the constant rain, the fan whirling, hot humid air circulating, geckos running over the roof, the whirring of my thoughts that wouldn’t stop. I was completely alone and had moments of solipsism. I was surrounded by the immensity of the rainforest, the quiet, the sounds of the frogs at night in the wet, the crickets calling during the day. Surrounded by the wreckage of the life I had lived, I realised I had to confront this work. I couldn’t begin the new life unless I confronted it. Manuscripts all around. I then picked them up and started reading.
Then pages I had avoided. Lives I had half-written and then abandoned. Men who had never been granted reflection because reflection would have slowed the chase. I was able to give them inner lives I hadn’t made them fully fleshed out because I never bothered to listen, no, I didn’t have the skills, the time, or the understanding to listen and to write them as they deserved to be. To give them flesh and bone, a beating heart, an inner life, a poetry, a humanity, as I had been given. I had been given the gift of sobriety, a new understanding, and I felt that I had to give them the same, even if they couldn’t do so. I had the ability. I had the duty.
That was the first gift of FNQ: the slowing. Then the silence. Then time, which is what the rainforest is. It moves to its pace, ordered by the universe, beautiful, everything as it should be. I learned acceptance. To listen. That was key. And faith, and that everything would reveal itself when it was necessary. I had to sink into this rhythm and not impose my own. The quiet gave me permission to look back without flinching.
I slowly began to understand that The Bike wasn’t unfinished because it lacked craft or courage. It was unfinished because I hadn’t yet earned the stillness required to complete it. I needed distance from the city that made it, distance from the hunger that shaped those sentences, to see what the book was actually asking of me. I had to stop before I could see.
Not redemption.
Witness.
I couldn’t write Melted while a part of me was still trapped in the unfinished narrative of addiction. The Bike was a residue, an unresolved story, a version of myself still frozen in time. To move forward, I had to walk back through that world, understand it, and forgive myself. Finishing the book closed one life so another could begin.
I wanted to give witness to lives that are usually overlooked or flattened into caricature: men moving too fast to be seen, chasing relief, chasing meaning, chasing something they can’t name. Writing the book here allowed me to meet those lives with less judgment and more clarity. I could come to terms with what I’d written, and what I hadn’t then been able to say. And in that rebirth, I didn’t try to fix the past, only to face it, complete it, and let it stand as it is.
I left Sydney on 20th December 2025, and I completed The Bike exactly one year to the day I left. Here in Kuranda, I finally stopped running, and only then did I understand that I had been running at all. Here, I understood what home was.
