The Belt I Tightened When I Was Trying to Hold On

The first hole I punched was the smallest one. I was sixteen, in a Brisbane flat, sitting on the carpet of my bedroom the morning my parents separated, pressing the leather in until the buckle bit the soft dip of my waist. In the way teenagers think during catastrophe, I decided something had to stay cinched. If the world was going to loosen every other thing, at least my own middle could stay drawn.

It took years to admit the strap had nothing to do with my waist and everything to do with me. I wore belts the way other girls wore friendship pins: tightly, as if a fastening could substitute for being fastened to someone. I owned a small archive of brown and oxblood, and changed them depending on the kind of day I was pretending to have.

Belts are made to hold things up. Trousers, mostly. Skirts, sometimes. Never the things I dragged behind me out of a childhood that had rearranged itself without warning.

The Buckle Was a Kind of Promise

There is a particular sound a leather strap makes when you pull it one hole past comfort: a small groan, like a sigh you forgot you were holding. I learned to listen for it. It meant I had tried hard enough. It meant I had been brave about what I was tucking in.

I was tucking in everything. The phone call from my father at the servo on Logan Road. The letter I read three times at the kitchen bench. The argument with my mother about the laundry basket, which was really an argument about who was allowed to be tired in this house. The buckle took it all. I would stand sideways in the long mirror behind the wardrobe door and study the line of myself. If it looked tidy enough, I assumed the inside must be tidy too. This is a lie belts tell well, and I believed it through three moves, two high schools, and the first year of university.

What the belt gave me, I now know, was the feeling of an edge. A border. The thin hard circle that said: here is where I end, and what is inside this line I can control. I needed that line the way I needed to lock the front door twice and call my sister back before she could leave a voicemail. The buckle was a rhythm I could keep when every other rhythm had gone slack.

The Creak at the Coffee Window

A flat white I ordered one Tuesday in Melbourne, in a laneway so quiet you could hear the tram cables hum a block away, changed the way I carried my own weight. The barista was maybe nineteen, tattooed to the elbow, with a buckle half the size of my palm. When she handed me the cup, she paused and said, with the gentleness of someone who has noticed something once before, "You hold your shoulders like you're late for something." I laughed because it was easier than answering, and walked into the winter light without finishing the drink.

I thought about her all week. I thought about how easy it was for a stranger to see me — a woman in a coat two sizes too big, with a belt pulled mean — and how I had walked past myself every morning for years. I think of her now, whenever I notice how my body arranges itself around the things I have not said. She did not offer advice. She just noticed, and that is its own kind of medicine, the kind a tired woman at a Chippendale cafe cannot afford to buy.

That week I started writing honestly. Not the polished posts, not the tidy essays with their clean endings, but the real ones. The ones with a buckle in them.

A Hole in the Strap

I added a notch in March, of all months. I had flown to Sydney for a reading and stayed in a hotel on William Street where the curtains were too heavy and the radiator hummed like a kettle. I pulled the belt one hole tighter before bed because that is what I did, and a tooth on the buckle bent into the leather and left a small bruised mark.

I unpacked it the next morning and stared at the strap for longer than a piece of leather deserved. It had grown soft in the wrong places and stiff in the wrong ones, the way objects do when they have been used for one job too long. I put it in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe, under a swimsuit I had not worn since I took my sister to Bondi on a Saturday arvo.

The week after, I bought a new belt at Paddy's Markets, choosing one with five holes instead of three. I wanted room. I wanted the option of looseness.

Letting the Strap Lie Where It Falls

I do not wear my belts so tight now. Some days I wear one only at the suggestion of the trousers, half a finger between the leather and my ribs, and let the buckle rest where it lands. On other days I go without. I know this sounds small, but smallness is its own kind of honesty. The whole essay about why I wear one lives somewhere in that drawer next to the old buckle, and I keep it because the curve in the leather is the shape of the year I survived.

If you have a strap you keep pulling somewhere — a habit, a smile, a sentence you finish for other people — leave a finger of space. Not because the world is gentler than it was. Only because you deserve a hole you do not have to earn.

If this piece walked past you somewhere familiar, send it back through the contact page. I read everything that arrives, between brekkie and the second pot of coffee, and I will write you back, slowly, in sentences, the way letters used to be answered. Bring me your own buckled afternoons. I will keep them next to mine.