“Trying to talk myself out of wanting kids. My husband keeps pushing back our baby timeline because of stress and instability at his workplace. My mom’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and I’m finishing up a full-time professional degree. The end of all my free time is approaching like a freight train -- within 9 months I’ll be job-hunting, job-doing, and caregiving -- so why would the *absence* of screaming babies distress me?”

-Rita

I first see the house on my second time circling the mountain.

Or, part of the house.

It’s a gabled peak of corrugated steel jutting out of sub-tropical rainforest like a little, upturned tin boat. I’ve been driving for over an hour, along winding bosky roads with very little to see of anyone else except the occasional passing car. Just me and the baby asleep in the back.

The mountain feels, somehow, lonesome. It’s nice, in that it’s quiet, and I’ve finally gotten the baby to sleep. But I can’t help but feel a kind of emptiness all around us. As if the whole world had ended and its just us left forever driving around a lonesome mountain.

And then, the road pours out onto a curve that becomes a cliff-side and suddenly there’s a valley below.

Or, the shape of a valley, anyway. It’s so packed to the brim with forest that it’s hard to make out anything except one singular plane of undulating, interweaving green beneath the sky. All but for the roof of the house that’s poking out of the trees. It’s almost hiding, but I have just enough time to spot before the road swoops away, leaving me to wonder:

Why on earth would anyone build a house out here?

Parenthood is a kind of personal apocalypse.

In the years leading up to becoming a parent I was told - by family and friends who had already sailed away into the far off lands of parenthood - that having children completely changes your life. I’d seen siblings and their partners turn grey overnight, I’d heard the stories of sleepless nights, exhaustion, and stomach bugs. I’d heard the venting frustration and I’d listened to the guilty flickers of regret buried under a thousand arguments that it’s worth it.

But, I still didn’t quite understand it.

Then we had a kid. And, lo, as foretold, everything prophesied came to pass. Your life ends, all the things you took for granted, like sleep, are suddenly vanished.

You die a little.

This sounds dramatic because it is. You walk into hospital one day and walk out again with every single thing in your life forever altered. Because it must. And you try to bargain with it, make plans to escape the fate of every other parental ragnarok, but inevitably, you too, will perish.

You’ll give up trying to get full nights of sleep or to keep your bed to just yourselves. You’ll put on the TV when you promised no screens till they turned three. You’ll give them ice cream and buy them babychinos and have a dwindling list of non-negotiable parental red lines to not cross.

This makes perfect sense when you think about it because the person who made those plans and that list is gone. They sank in the flood waters when they broke on the hospital floor, and now you’re someone new.

In the years leading up to becoming a parent, I lost a lot of people.

Between 2018 and 2024 I lost everyone from my professional mentor to my grandfather. A Bumble date turned close friend. The man who raised my wife. My mother. For a while, I would flinch whenever someone would call out of the blue.

After my dad developed a tendency to leave vague, somewhat sad sounding voicemails, I had to give strict coaching instructions on tone.

A bit more pizzazz, please, dad.

I once asked him, many decades my senior, when life would get easier. When loss would start to feel less like something hiding, in waiting, around the bend.

‘It doesn’t.’ He told me, ‘And it won’t.’

My dad trends towards this kind of doldrumish life advice. One of his favourite and most quoted pieces of wisdom is the reassuring affirmation that ‘There is never a good time for anything.’

This sounds on the surface to be a pretty depressing take on everything that life has to offer. But he always says it with a smirk and a twinkle in his eye and then goes on to add, ‘So you might as well do it now.’

I can see why he thinks this way.

By the time I rolled around into his life he was already four kids deep into parenthood. His business in computer software was struggling in the economic crisis of the eighties and staring down the barrel of bankruptcy. He even applied to the government small business stimulus program at the time, only to receive a letter in reply that read something along the lines of: ‘We see no viable future in the business of computing.’

That letter would be framed in his office.

It’s unfair to be so hard on whoever rejected his application - foretelling the future has always been a foolish game. They couldn’t know how tech would dominate the world’s economy in a short few decades. Or that my dads company would pull through, that he would make a go of things despite how hard it might seem, and thrive. Nor could he have known that my younger sister would join us little more than a year later.

I wonder now how much the idea of my sister, my siblings, and I helped sustain him through those times. It can’t have been easy, but when times are tough - it’s nice to have something to look forward to even if that thing is a world ending child.

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In the months after becoming a parent, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be one.

It’s a discombobulating thing to have a child that you know, on a biological level, you love - but on a much more real, emotional level, you resent. And then you resent yourself for the resentment. Such is the life of a parent whose child has colic, and screams like a ghoul every evening for hours upon inconsolable hours.

We tried everything.

Swaddling, tonics, a fancy automated and Wi-Fi enabled bassinet. Rice formula. Four visits to nurses and lactation consultants, two GP visits, and calls to a support hotline. For months on end we slept in blocks that averaged less than forty minutes at a time. My wife and I would, in turns, become our own ghoulish, spaced out zombies for days at a time while the other parent picked up the slack. Until, it was their turn to temporarily fall to pieces.

And then, gradually, things got a little easier. And a little better. And he began to smile, and grasp for us with little chubby fingers. He learnt to sit and crawl and giggle. Glimmers of ‘Oh this is what its supposed to be like.’ and ‘Maybe we can actually do this, after all.’

‘Maybe this is good.’

At the time, we were living in a narrow three level townhouse.

Its a lot of stairs, as the midwife in the hospital pointed out to us. Deathtraps with right angles, those. So we set up babygates around the home and told him off whenever he would crawl over and shake them in their brackets.

Until, one day, when he was about ten months old. I had just gotten home, and was complaining about something at work that had been stressing me out for weeks. The gate began to shake. We called him to come back, to get away from that. But he didn’t. And the gate didn’t hold.

I have had a knife brandished at on me on the street and I’ve been chased by a bullshark in a midnight river. Nothing in my life was as terrifying as watching my baby son fall down ten individual steps.

In seconds we had rushed over, picked him up, and cradled him as he screamed in our arms. We checked him out from top to toe and found nothing except a bruise and a chip on one of his front teeth. My wife grabbed a frozen strawberry from the freezer and within a minute the little guy was happily chewing away as if nothing had ever happened.

But then I was crying. Something was swimming up out of my stomach and chest until all I could do was sob. I had no idea what was happening - except that I felt such a strange mixture of relief, and grief, and suffocating stress and it was all coming out at once.

Up until that point my son had never hugged me or said more than ‘mama’ and ‘more’ and maybe ‘bye-bye’. But right then he stopped gnawing on his frozen strawberry, looked at me puzzled, and mumbled,

‘Dada.’

And climbed into my lap to hug me.

This only made me sob more.

So he hugged me again until I hugged him back and everything seemed okay again and hey, we can all go back to eating our strawberries, right?

I lose sight of the house in a moment or two, and then we drive on back into the shaded side of the mountain.

This second time around, the sleep is a little better, but not much.

Our second son arrived sooner than we planned, and we’re back into the thick of juggling our lives like hot plates. He likes the car though. More than a handful of very early mornings or late afternoons I find myself driving around like this, until he’s had enough sleep and I can turn back home.

It’s been long enough, I figure, that by the time I get home now he should have had a full nap’s worth of sleep. So I take the next turn to descend the mountain from a route I’ve not yet taken and after one sharp curl, I’m surprised to find I’ve arrived at a school.

Of all the things to find on this empty mountain, I didn’t think to find a school. Or enough people to fill one. And yet, it’s a school. It’s mostly hidden behind a row of trees, but you can just glimpse a few classrooms and the front office.

There’s a pedestrian crossing that, on first glance, seems kind of preposterous for the lack of traffic. But then I imagine a local - probably an elder retireein a high-vis vest - running that little strip of road each morning and afternoon. An usher for dozens of little world ending cataclysms of good news, chipped teeth, tears, cancelled plans, and sleepless nights.

Along the school fence, beside the crossing, there is a great big, green, cheery banner that reads:

‘Friday Night! Community BBQ! Everyone Welcome!’

All I have is the two WhatsApp check marks indicating it was delivered, but besides that a silence that I fill in the dark hours with different scenarios--maybe something terrible has happened or maybe she just wanted me out of her life and is happier this way.

- Kate

At the time of writing, the Arecibo signal has travelled more than four-hundred-trillion kilometres from Earth. An invisible spray of headlights over a distant dark road, radio waves plowing on alone through a dusty interstellar highway of perpetual night.

When the signal first launched from Earth, it sped past the planets of our solar system in a matter of hours. Then spent its next years submerged in the Oort Cloud, a belt of ice and rock that surrounds our parcel of space like a picket fence eggshell. Now the Arecibo signal will spend the next twenty-five-thousand years travelling towards its destination: the M13 star cluster in the Hercules constellation.

The signal was sent from the Arecibo Telescope - a great white dish the area of a dozen or so football fields, built atop a natural sinkhole in Puerto Rico, like a giant’s bath plug. In November 1974, with the energy equivalent of a few litres of gasoline, the dish transmitted its cosmic message toward a destination we could never hope to reach.

In a three minute burst of radio waves, the signal contained numbers, our DNA structure, our solar home address, and a depiction of a human being -

“Here we are.” We were saying, to anyone who might hear it.

Yet, by the time the Arecibo signal reaches the Hercules constellation, it will miss its target.

After twenty-five-thousand years, the heavens will have shifted. To reply via a similar signal would take another twenty-five-thousand years. It begs the question then - if the signal found someone out there, would there be any point in replying? And why would you send such a message in the first place?

In celestial terms, the constellations Hercules and Ophiuchus are neighbours. Which means that, despite sitting so close together in our night sky as to almost touch, they are still an unfathomable distance apart. As the Arecibo signal races across an endless night sky towards Hercules and M13, stretching and rippling out as radio waves tend to do at the speed of light, it is followed very slowly by an Earthly probe.

The probe, Voyager 1, and its twin in the opposite direction, Voyager 2, are intended to send back data and discoveries on their journey out of the solar system. Jettisoned from our planet in 1977, the Voyager 1 probe is travelling seventeen kilometres a second. At the time of writing, it has travelled only twenty-five-billion kilometres from Earth on its infinite journey into space. Still, having passed by our local planets and heliosphere, it is currently mankind’s furthest flung object. Voyager 1, heading in the general direction of the Ophiuchus constellation, drifts along through space like a message in a bottle upon a black sea.

Which is, in a way, exactly what it is.

Upon both Voyager probes, alongside their sensors and transmitters, is a Golden Record etched with copies of the languages, music, and images of Earth. Including: a Chuck Berry track, the sound of rain, our mathematics, birdsong, a photo of a woman in a grocery store, the sound of a kiss on the cheek, and brainscans of a human being. This sample sum of our species was included in the unanswerable hope that someone out there in the unending universe might actually receive it and understand us. Even if the chances of this tiny speck of interstellar sand being found, and a reply being made, is so unfathomably small as to make the whole endeavour seem foolish.

The Golden Record contains one-hundred-sixteen images, ninety minutes of music, and greetings from fifty-five languages. And, the central message written by President Jimmy Carter:

This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.

The entirety of the Golden Record amounts to a few measly megabytes of data.

Meanwhile on Earth, a day in cyberspace is thronged with the traffic of more than four billion sent emails. Instagram is bombarded with more than thirty-one billion megabytes of memes, reels, news videos, talking heads, multi-level marketing pitches, new songs, and more. Between midnights, we send each other hundreds of billions of private messages, containing every conceivable communication a human being might wish to make. Greetings, goodbyes, confessions of love and of hate, job offers, scams, baby photos, and funeral details.

Whatever we send, we hope ours reaches its destination to be read, and that a reply isn’t far away. But replies are never guaranteed. Which is as true for space probes as it is for an email to an estranged friend that has been unanswered for six years, or a late night message double-ticked and forgotten.

Prize-taking, in nautical terms, is the act of seizing an enemy nation’s ship. While it may sound dramatic, and probably often was, it’s also a lot of paperwork. Prize-taking was a largely legal proceeding, with courts demanding evidence to make a ruling. As such, each ship seized was scoured for documentary evidence. As a result, for more than one-hundred-sixty years, the British Navy amassed a trove of more than five-hundred-thousand objects seized from prize-taken ships.

This collection now sits in the United Kingdom’s National Archives, and includes one-hundred-sixty-thousand undelivered letters.

There is a letter from a priest in Lima to his mother in Spain, urging her to get well. Enclosed is a blessed piece of embroidered fabric, to protect her from evil.

There is a letter from a Chinese boy to his father working overseas, who he has not seen his whole life, pleading him to come home and rescue them from poverty.

A love letter seized from an Iranian merchant ship includes a lock of hair from an Armenian wife to her husband.

None of these, or any of the other hundreds of thousands of letters in the Prize Paper Collection, ever reached their destination. Each sender might have wondered why they received no loving reply, no word from an ailing mother, no rescue from a father. But at the time of their writing, they must have hoped.

Reaching out is always an act of hope, without promise. We extend parts of ourselves through space, sound, and sight, hoping that someone out there might have a moment of good starlight to spot our little bottle in the dark. To find our message waiting in their inbox, our letter in the post. We write fewer letters today, to be seized by the prize-takers, but our need and compulsion to extend to one another breaks out in commentless strings of DM’d videos and memes, emojis, and midnight messages on sleepless phones.

Because our cosmic dishes on sinkholes, and the golden probes we fling into infinite space and the bags of letters seized on ships, are for something important: to say something above the noise of life, Here I am.

We also do all of this for the urgent human need to hear back: Yes, you are.

And the truth is that all we can do is survive our own time and, if we’re lucky, live into another’s.

In the comments, I’d love to hear - what was the longest time you waited for a reply from someone? Did you ever hear anything back, or are you still waiting?

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There were nights, when I was little, that never seemed to end.

I’d shut my eyes and try to sleep, but end up staring at the empty ceiling, or at the buzzing digits of my alarm clock. Or out into the mute face of the night that pressed against my bedroom windows.

Maybe something out there, in the darkened scrub, knew what was wrong with me. And if I waited long enough, it might offer up a diagnosis for why my heart sometimes spasmed in my chest. Or why nothing seemed to go the way I wanted. Or why I felt like I never really fit in. But no answer ever came, except the ghostly baby-wail of the bush stone-curlews, calling to say that dawn wasn’t far away and I’d been awake all night.

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The bush-stone curlew is a strange creature. It can fly, but mostly scurries about on awkwardly long chopstick-legs, its dishwater feathers camouflaged with the earth. Perpetually tilted like a precarious stack of crockery, the curlew’s yellow serving-dish eyes seem to flick only between the states of curiosity and deep disdain.

They’ve long been scuttled from the urbanised woodlands around Australian cities to make their nests on the grounds of golf courses, cemeteries, and in piles of leaves and litter that dress the shadowed alleys behind inner-city restaurants. They’re an opportunistic, serendipitous sort of thing that shows up almost everywhere - little strokes of curvy marginalia left all over the pages of a book.

They’re known by a few other names - including the wee-lo. Which sounds exactly as they do in the late thin hours of the night: a long, lilting whistle-scream that sails through the air from somewhere always unseen. For most of my life, it’s been this sound that has met me, bleary-eyed, in the final stages of a failed attempt at sleep, a few hours before morning.

There have been nights in my life that have been objectively terrible. A storm that grounded my broke early-twenty-something self in another city, sleeping on the couch of a co-working office basement. Lost work in an unsaved document for a vital deadline the next day. Or, in the worst of cases, a phone call that carried news of a death like a census update on the population of the beloved.

But there have been more nights lost to an impending sense of calamity that never arrived. It’s a predictable process: as the house lights switch off, something worrisome flickers to life inside my mind with a catalogue of problems to ponder. Problems in the business, relationship problems, or just the run of the mill existential problem of climate change and nuclear war. I know that this is end-of-day exhaustion of my pre-frontal cortex and its waning ability to effectively regulate my emotions, and that the lack of sound and light to distract my mind has encouraged it to find something seemingly purposeful to do with itself. While this is an undeniable fact, it doesn’t help the building pressure of knowing you need to sleep but being increasingly unable to do so.

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When my first son was born, we were expecting a very different experience. The first few weeks, one close friend told me, would be like ‘walking on a cloud’. From the moment we walked out of hospital, our little one bundled in our arms like a bony loaf of bread, we were met with congratulations and well wishes. Other people seemed downright excited for the next few weeks that lay ahead of us.

But then we found ourselves consumed by nights that never ended. We would lie there in the blacked out curtained dark, our son in the cot at the foot of our bed, listening to him grizzling and snorting in the farmyard way that new babies do. It was impossible to sleep. When he wasn’t waking to feed, he’d startle us every few minutes with a sleeping goatish bleat.

Worse were the stretches of time when he was still and silent and the thought crosses your mind that maybe now you get to sleep. But then the second thought pops up that maybe he’s quiet because something’s wrong. That he’s stopped breathing. And so you listen, straining your ears, until he bleats again and on and on it goes all night, night after night, week after week.

Eventually, we divide to survive. In shift work, one of us sleeps in the bedroom while the other camps out in the living room with the kid. There’s an understanding that being in the living room means giving up sleep entirely - and one night one of us proudly announces that we got him to sleep for a whole thirty minutes. It’s on one of these living room layovers sitting with my son bundled in my lap, watching an old sitcom re-run, that I’ll hear it.

Wee-loo. Wee-loo.

Strangely, these witching hour calls started to feel a little less taunting. They were even comforting, in a way, as they signalled that the end of the night wasn’t far off and that soon we’d all be in the sunshine. That the worries that had crept into our thoughts, the thing thumping in my chest in the dead of night, would soon scurry itself away in the bright commotion of a new day.

Not long now, not long now.

Maybe that’s what they were trying to say all along.

The house had settled into some sort of manageable sleeping rhythm, when the currawong came to visit. We’d hear it first - a beautiful bubbling aria that rang around across the townhouse complex around five in the morning. In my wisdom, I decided to ruin this by encouraging our little dog to chase him away before he could mark our balcony with droppings. All this did was wake up the entire house with piercing, chicken-hoot cavoodle barking. The currawong got what he came for anyway - left over bits of dog food.

The currawong would appear around spring, likely carrying off his nicked Nature’s Gift kibble to feed some little hatchlings. We’d forget about him in between visits, especially over the cooler, songless months.

My son has been sleeping pretty well for a while, except for some ghastly early morning wake ups. But we’d leave his mum to sleep in and decamp to the living room for play time, warm bottles, and coffee. What was once a purgatorial space had become our private playground. One morning in early spring, as we play-wrestled on the living room floor, my son suddenly froze. He urgently tapped my arm. His eyes and mouth wide, jabbed a chubby little finger over my belly to the balcony.

There sat the currawong. The bird, my boy, and I stared at each other. It seemed as if the currawong was a little annoyed we were up this early. And in a moment, I realised my son was seeing this thing for the very first time.

When my son is two, we’ll move into a forested little pocket of hillside houses. He’ll sit in the bath one night, chattering with me about all sorts of toddler nonsense. And then he’ll stop and point to the ceiling, What that sound?

That, I’ll explain to him, is the sound of a kookaburra. He’ll repeat the word to me, and then every time they fly over our little cottage he will exclaim in surprise. Kookaburra! Even though he’s never actually seen one. I wonder what they might mean to him, while his little boy brain does the hard work of making sense of everything. I hope they mean something like home, or dad.

One day in the future - and probably sooner than I expect - my son will be up all night with worry. He might hear the curlews. But I hope he listens to what they’re trying say. And that he has the means to think of currawongs, and kookaburras, too.

This is the first in a series of essays-in-reply. Send me what's keeping you up — anonymously, if you like — and I’ll write an essay back. Submit here.