Things That Don’t Stay Folded

"People talk about finding yourself like it’s some big adventure. They never mention that sometimes, finding yourself means losing everything you thought was true first."

I was rubbing the sleep from my eyes when I shuffled past Mum's room. The floorboards creaked in the same spots they always did—the ones I'd memorised from a lifetime of midnight trips to the toilet. The third board from her door groaned with familiar protest. The one near the bathroom that complained if you stepped on the left side let out its usual sigh. Everything felt heavier than usual. My legs. My eyelids. The air itself, thick and still, as though the whole house was holding its breath alongside me.

Sleep had been shit lately. Proper shit. Ever since I'd sent off that application, my brain wouldn't shut up. I'd lie there staring at the ceiling, at the glow-in-the-dark stars I'd stuck up there when I was twelve—arranged in actual constellations because I couldn't bear to do it randomly—watching them fade from bright green to barely-there grey as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. Orion's belt. The Southern Cross. Cassiopeia. All of them dimming whilst my thoughts refused to quiet. And I'd just think. About the envelope that was coming. About what it might say. About whether I actually wanted to know the answers I'd been chasing.

Origami usually helped when my head got like this. There was something about the folds—the precision of it, the way you could take a flat piece of nothing and turn it into something with shape and purpose. The satisfying crispness of a perfect crease against my thumbnail, the way the paper seemed to want to become what you were making if you just listened to it properly, paid attention to its grain and weight. It was meditation without having to sit still, creation without needing expensive materials. But even that hadn't been working lately. I'd tried to make a crane two nights ago and fucked it up three times before giving up and chucking the paper across my room, watching it arc through the air and land softly amongst the others scattered near my desk. Failed attempts and finished pieces all mixed together, like some metaphor I didn't want to examine too closely.

The lounge was all shadows and grey shapes when I passed through. Moonlight coming through the window made everything look unreal, like a photograph of our house instead of the actual house. Cold light, winter light—the kind that makes you feel more alone somehow, that turns familiar furniture into the silhouettes of strangers. I could see the shapes of my paper creations scattered around: cranes on the windowsill, their wings touched with silver from the moon; a few of the geometric ones I'd managed when I was still concentrating properly, perched on the bookshelf between Mum's battered romance novels and my astronomy guides. They looked strange in the dark. Fragile. Like they might just unfold themselves and return to being nothing, as though whatever I'd made them into was only temporary, only borrowed time before the paper remembered what it had been before I touched it.

The kitchen tiles were freezing through my socks. Tasmanian winters don't mess about. Made me properly wake up, that cold biting up through my feet and into my ankles, sharp as a slap.

"Shit!" The word just burst out of me before I could stop it. There was someone in the kitchen. Just sitting there in the dark, completely still—a silhouette against the faint pre-dawn light filtering through the window above the sink. My heart went mental, properly hammering against my ribs like it was trying to escape. Then the shape sniffed—this wet, human sound that somehow made it worse before it made it better—and I knew it was Mum, but knowing didn't stop my hand from slapping the light switch on pure reflex.

The fluoros flickered on with a click and that familiar buzz, the harsh white light that makes you squint and see spots dancing. The kitchen flooded with that unforgiving brightness—the cracked benchtop near the sink visible beneath its cutting board, the secondhand fridge humming its tired mechanical song, the calendar on the wall with its forgotten appointments. I blinked hard, my eyes adjusting, and there she was.

"Mum? What are you doing up? It's five-thirty in the morning."

She looked... small. That's the only word for it. Mum's not tall—five-two on a good day, though she always stood like she was taller, carried herself with this quiet dignity that made people forget her size—but sitting there on the tall stool at the bench, hunched in her faded flannel pyjamas, the ones with the little tears near the hem that she keeps meaning to fix, she looked tiny. Shrunken. Her hair was down, all those auburn curls just hanging there instead of tied back like usual, and I could see grey streaks I'd never noticed before catching the fluorescent glare. Her face was blotchy, red around her eyes and the tip of her nose. Those freckles across her cheeks—the ones she said I hadn't inherited, thank god, though I'd always liked them—stood out stark against skin gone pale with exhaustion and tears. She'd been crying. Not just crying—properly crying, the kind that leaves you looking wounded, that strips away every defence you've ever built.

And she was holding that envelope. The yellow one. The one I'd been watching the mail for every single day, racing home from deliveries to check the letterbox before she got back from her shift, timing it around when the postie usually came through.

"Why do you have this?" Her voice came out thick and broken, choked with tears, and she was properly sobbing now, clutching that envelope like it might escape if she loosened her grip even a fraction. Her knuckles had gone white with the force of her hold.

My stomach dropped. Just completely dropped, like the floor had opened up underneath me and I was falling with nothing to catch me. I'd been so careful. I'd checked the mail every day before she got home from work. Every. Single. Day. Racing back from the depot, sometimes cutting my lunch break short, always with one eye on the time. How had she—? The envelope was right there in her trembling hands, the official yellow of it almost glowing under the fluorescent lights, accusatory and undeniable. The post doesn't even come this early. How did she find it?

"What is it?" I tried to sound confused. Innocent. Like I had no idea what could possibly be in a yellow envelope that would make her cry in the dark at half-five in the morning, alone in our kitchen with just the hum of the old fridge for company. But my voice came out wrong, too tight, strangled by the lie I was trying to tell, and I could feel my heart still hammering away beneath my ribs.

"You know damn well what it is," she snapped, and her fist hit the bench hard enough to make the tissue box jump, hard enough that I heard the dull thud of skin and bone against laminate, hard enough that I worried she'd hurt herself.

I actually stepped back. Mum never snapped. Not at me. Not like that. In nineteen years, through all the shit—the empty fridge weeks, the disconnection notices she thought I didn't know about but which I'd seen crumpled in the bin, the times I knew she went without meals so I could have something decent, pretending she'd already eaten when the hollows beneath her cheekbones told a different story—she'd never once raised her voice at me. Not properly. She'd get tired. She'd get quiet. She'd retreat into herself when things got really bad, moving through the house like a ghost of the woman she usually was. But never angry. Never like this.

But now she was looking at me with something in her eyes I'd never seen before. It wasn't just anger. It was... pain. Raw, bleeding pain, the kind that comes from a wound reopened after years of careful scarring. The kind that makes you look away because witnessing it feels like an invasion, like you're seeing something too private, too devastating for ordinary morning light. And I'd caused it. Me and my need to know, my selfish fucking need to have answers to questions I'd spent my whole life not asking.

My mouth opened but nothing came out. My brain was racing, trying to figure out what to say, what to do, how to fix this thing I'd broken just by wanting to understand who I was. But it was like my thoughts were moving too fast to actually form proper words, like trying to catch water with your fingers. That envelope was supposed to give me answers. It was supposed to tell me something about who I was, where I came from, what half of my blood actually meant. But I hadn't thought about what it would do to her. I'd thought about intercepting it. I'd thought about reading it alone in my room with the door locked. I'd thought about everything except this moment, standing in our kitchen at dawn whilst my mother fell apart because of something I'd set in motion.

I did what I always do when she's upset. I walked over and put my hand on her shoulder, feeling the warmth of her through the thin flannel, feeling the way she was trembling beneath my palm—these tiny, helpless shudders running through her frame. Even sitting on the tall stool at the bench, she wasn't much shorter than me standing. I'm not exactly towering over anyone. Five-eight if I'm lucky, five-seven if I'm honest, which is what Mum always encouraged—honesty, even when it made you smaller than you wanted to be. I rubbed her shoulder in small circles, like she used to do for me when I was little and couldn't sleep, when I'd had nightmares about nothing in particular and everything all at once and she'd come to my room and sit on the edge of my bed, her hand warm and steady against my back until the fear receded.

I reached for the envelope. My fingers brushed the paper under her grip, felt the slight texture of the official stationery, the weight of what was inside. Heavy. Heavier than a single sheet of paper had any right to be. "I'm sorry," I said quietly. "I needed to get it for my passport application."

She just stared at me. Blank. Like she was looking straight through me at something else entirely, something I couldn't see but she could, clear as day. Some memory, some moment from years ago that had never quite stopped hurting.

"Bali trip this summer, remember? With Morgan and Dale?" I said it gently, trying to pull her back from wherever she'd gone, back to the present, back to me. Back to something that made sense.

"Oh yes," she sobbed, wiping at her face with the back of her hand. Snot and tears and everything, just smeared across her cheeks, her breath hitching with each word she tried to form. I grabbed a tissue from the box on the side bench—the cheap ones from Woolies that fall apart when they get wet, the kind we buy because they're on special—and started dabbing at her face like she was the kid and I was the parent. Role reversal. Everything backwards. The whole morning feeling like I'd stepped through a mirror into some alternate version of our life where nothing worked the way it was supposed to.

"Thank you," she whispered, taking the damp tissue and clutching it in her fist like it was something precious, something worth holding onto.

I sighed. Couldn't help it. The sound came out heavier than I meant it to, weighted with exhaustion and worry and something that felt uncomfortably like guilt. We'd been through a lot together, the two of us, more than most families of four. When I was seventeen, I'd left school. Just... left. Didn't even discuss it properly with her, didn't give her the chance to talk me out of it, just came home one day with concrete dust on my jeans and told her I'd taken a job at the CityDirect depot out near the Brooker. Sorting parcels in a tin shed that baked in summer until sweat dripped into your eyes and froze in winter until your fingers went numb. She'd cried then too, but different. Quieter. That night I heard her through the wall—our walls were thin, too thin for proper privacy—trying to muffle it with her pillow so I wouldn't know. But I'd known. I always knew more than she thought I did.

I knew she was doing everything she could. Working whatever hours they'd give her at the nursing home—night shifts when nobody else wanted them, double shifts when they were short-staffed, weekend penalty rates that still didn't add up to enough. Stretching food until it screamed for mercy. Making pasta three different ways so it didn't feel like we were eating the same thing every night—with tomato sauce, with cheese, with whatever vegetables were on markdown at Coles. Keeping the house going, keeping the power on just barely, keeping us together through sheer force of will. I wasn't stupid. I'd heard enough stories at work from the other blokes—kids whose parents were on the gear, families living in cars or bouncing between shelters, proper nightmare stuff that made you sick to think about, that made you grateful for what you had even when what you had wasn't much. We weren't like that. We had a roof. We had each other.

But we also had an empty fridge more often than not.

I walked to the fridge and opened it, the seal breaking with a soft sucking sound. The light inside flickered on, casting its cold white glow across the nearly bare shelves, illuminating our poverty in stark fluorescent truth. Already knowing what I'd find. Barely anything. Half a bottle of milk, the plastic compressed where I'd squeezed it yesterday to see how much was left—enough for tea, not enough for cereal. Some wilted lettuce in the crisper, brown and slimy at the edges, destined for the bin. A jar of jam that was mostly air and probably some mould if you looked close enough at the lid. A sad-looking tomato with a soft spot developing on one side. The three eggs Mum had mentioned buying on Tuesday, meant to last the week.

"You're not eating?" Mum's voice came from behind me, smaller now, fragile in a way that made my chest hurt.

I shrugged, closing the fridge and feeling the cold air escape around me before the seal caught again. "I'm not really hungry."

We both knew I was lying. We both knew that she knew. But sometimes you lie because the truth is just too depressing to say out loud at five-thirty in the morning when your mother's already crying in the dark over things you can't fix with honesty or good intentions.

"Can I see it first?" she asked, and she was biting her lip now, this nervous thing she does when she's really anxious, worrying at the bottom one with her teeth until the flesh goes white and you're afraid she'll draw blood.

I looked at her properly then. Really looked, studying her face the way I might study a fold in origami paper, trying to understand its structure, its weaknesses, what it was trying to become. "You haven't opened it yet?"

I took the envelope from her hands—gently, carefully, like it might shatter if I was anything less than reverent—and turned it over. The seal was intact. Perfectly intact, the glue undisturbed, the paper smooth and unbroken. She'd been sitting here in the dark, holding an unopened envelope, too scared to break the seal and see what waited inside. Just sitting here whilst the house was silent around her, whilst I was asleep down the hall with my glow-in-the-dark stars fading on the ceiling above me, completely unaware that the world was ending in the kitchen. How long had she been sitting here? An hour? Two? Since the small hours of the morning when sleep abandoned her and fear took its place?

"No," she said, barely a whisper, barely anything at all.

"Then how did you know what it was?"

"The return address on the back."

I flipped it over in my hands, feeling the weight of it, the texture of the official paper against my fingertips. Department of Justice, Office of Birth, Death & Marriage Registrations. Right there in neat printing, official and undeniable, stamped in plain black text that might as well have been a declaration of war. "Oh," I said. Such a small sound for such a big thing, such an inadequate syllable for a moment that felt like the hinge on which my whole life was about to swing. I handed it back to her slowly, like it might explode. Like we both knew it would explode, the only question being when and how badly and how much damage it would leave in its wake.

This was it. This was the moment I'd been moving towards ever since I'd filled out that application form, ever since I'd written my own name in the applicant box and felt the first tremor of something shifting beneath the surface of my life. On one side of opening that envelope was everything I'd always believed—that my father died before I was born, that Mum had loved him and lost him, that there was nothing to know because there was nothing left to find. A story of tragedy rather than abandonment, of loss rather than rejection. On the other side was... what? Something that made my mother cry in the dark. Something that made her sit alone at five in the morning rather than wake me for company or comfort. Something that had lived in her all these years like a stone in her chest, weighing her down, pressing against her heart with every beat.

Mum was crying again, these little sniffles that made her shoulders shake, dabbing at her nose with the tissue I'd given her. It was already falling apart in her hands, little white bits clinging to her fingers like snow that wouldn't melt. Then she did it. Just slid her finger under the corner and ripped the top open, decisive despite the trembling, committed despite the fear. The sound was too loud in the quiet kitchen, too final. Like something breaking. Like something tearing that couldn't be mended, no matter how carefully you tried to fold it back together.

Her hand shook as she reached inside—properly shook, trembling so much I thought she might drop whatever was in there onto the laminate floor. She pulled out a big sheet of paper. Official-looking. Heavy. Cream-coloured with some kind of watermark I could see even from where I stood, the sort of paper that governments use when they want you to know something matters.

It's real. It's actually here.

Mum gasped. Actually gasped, sharp and painful, like she'd been punched in the stomach, like the air had been forced out of her by something invisible and brutal. I watched her eyes scan the page, moving across the typed lines, the official formatting, the careful bureaucratic language that reduced lives to data points. And I saw the exact moment she found whatever she'd been dreading. Her whole face just... collapsed. Crumpled like one of my failed origami attempts, like paper that had been creased wrong and couldn't hold its shape anymore, couldn't pretend to be something it wasn't.

"You still love him, don't you?" The words came out before I knew I was going to say them. Just appeared in the air between us, materialising from some part of me that had been waiting nineteen years to ask.

"Yes," she said, and her voice was so soft I almost didn't hear it, barely louder than the hum of the old fridge marking time in the corner. "I loved him from the day I first met him." She was somewhere else now, somewhere in the past, seeing something I couldn't see. A different kitchen, maybe. A different life. A version of herself that still believed in possibilities I'd never known. Her eyes had gone distant, focused on a point beyond me, beyond the walls of our little house, beyond the grey Tasmanian dawn bleeding through the windows. "And I never stopped loving him, even when—" Her voice broke, shattered on whatever word came next, on whatever truth she couldn't force past her lips.

"Even when he died," I finished for her, my voice barely more than a whisper, trying to complete the story I'd always known, the narrative she'd given me to make sense of his absence.

"Yes," she whispered, staring at the paper like it held answers to questions I didn't even know to ask, like it contained the whole history of a life I'd never been allowed to understand.

"Is that the reason you never found anyone else?" I'd always wondered about that. My whole life, it had just been us. No boyfriends. No dates. No man ever sitting at our kitchen table or leaving shoes by the door or watching television in the lounge whilst Mum made dinner. Nothing. No one. Just Mum and me against the world, a team of two that never seemed interested in adding a third.

"Yes."

One word. One syllable. A whole life explained. Twenty-two years of loneliness, of sleeping alone, of facing everything by herself—all of it contained in three letters that said everything and nothing at the same time.

"Can I see it?" I held out my hand, trying to keep it steady, trying to look calmer than I felt.

She hesitated. For a long moment, she just held that piece of paper, her knuckles white where her fingers gripped the edges, creasing the official stationery with the force of her reluctance. I thought she might say no. That she might refuse, might keep this secret for another nineteen years, might take it to her grave rather than let me see what was written there. But then she handed it over, her movements slow and reluctant, like she was handing over a piece of herself, a fragment of some truth she'd spent two decades protecting me from.

My hand was shaking. Properly shaking, almost as bad as hers had been, betraying me despite my best efforts to stay calm. I looked down at the birth certificate—my birth certificate, the official record of my existence—and started reading. The official seal at the top, embossed and formal. The date of registration, some bureaucratic timestamp that meant nothing to me. My birth date: 3 October 1999. The hospital: Royal Hobart. My name: Joel Elijah Gibbons. All the facts of my existence laid out in neat typewritten lines, clinical and impersonal, as though a life could be reduced to data fields and proper nouns.

Mother: Kate Elizabeth Gibbons

Yeah. Obviously. I traced the letters with my eyes, the typed text crisp against the cream paper, my mother's name official and undeniable.

Father: Jamie Nigel Greyson

I just stared at it. At those three words. Jamie Nigel Greyson. Seventeen letters that rewrote everything I'd ever believed about myself, about my family, about the story of how I came to exist in this world.

A name. My father has a name.

Not "unknown." Not "deceased." Not blank, not redacted, not absent. A name. A full name. First name, middle name, surname. Which meant he was real. Which meant he'd been real when I was born. Which meant he'd been real enough to be listed on official government documents, real enough to sign his name or at least have it recorded, real enough that someone somewhere knew who he was. Which meant...

My brain was trying to process it, trying to make the pieces fit together like origami folds that should create a recognisable shape, but they wouldn't. They just wouldn't fit with what I'd always been told, with the story I'd built my whole identity around.

I looked up at Mum. She was watching me with this look on her face—scared and sad and something else. Something that looked almost like shame, like guilt, like the expression of someone caught in a lie they'd never expected to be exposed. Her eyes were red-rimmed and wet, still leaking tears she wasn't bothering to wipe away, and she was biting her lip again, hard enough that I could see a white line where her teeth pressed into the flesh.

"Mum," I said slowly, the word feeling strange in my mouth, weighted with something new, something that had never been there before. "If his name is on here... then he didn't die, did he?"

She didn't answer. Didn't move. Just sat there on the stool in her old flannel pyjamas, looking small and broken and like she'd been carrying something too heavy for too long, like she'd been holding up a weight that had finally grown too massive for her shoulders.

She didn't have to answer.

The silence said everything.