I feel a bit constricted with the images I can put on here sometimes – conscientiously tiptoeing around identification. While, like everything in life, this ‘negative’ is also a positive. A constriction on my creativity conversely presents a unique opportunity to really push my ability to articulate myself with the written word. I have worked on my visual storytelling for a long time, learning to use photography to express how something feels, as opposed to what it looks like, and words present a different challenge.

This week, for me, has been pink. Pink-hued sunset setting over the tram stop where I stand with Vee, having helped her carry her food parcel bags, laden with goods for her son’s access visit. We talk about novels, she consumes books faster than me, and there is a realm of unchartered territory between us as we discuss our favourite authors, not finding many in common, yet a delight finding a fellow reader in an unexpected situation.

Pink slabs of meat, perfectly and uniformly carved by Bee, a woman whose quick wit makes me cackle daily, a woman who is tough, loyal, and a little bit terrifying (who, quite frankly, I am quite glad likes me). Before she exchanged sex for drugs she was a chef, owned her own restaurant. She fried up the meat for Thursday’s lunch, and perhaps the careful onlooker could detect a blush of pink pride under her heavily troweled makeup at the praise that was heaped on her cooking. I don’t have the skill to draw a parallel between the meat, raw and ready, and the sex workers, but I see something poetic, or maybe just cliche, in the imagery.

Finally it has been pink hospital blankets. A mother, herself a prostitute, has a heart attack. Her daughter, also a prostitute, the girl she gave birth to a week before her 16th birthday, sits worriedly at her side. They talk words of love to each other. I’m not sure the love is a healthy shade of pink, like the blooming rose of a tar-free lung, but rather one that is graying and frayed, a product of a hard life, and shitty circumstances. The relationship between these two women is complicated; not breathing easily, but not gasping its last breaths yet.