22-2-2026

on shame.

when i was in primary school my mum packed a banana in my lunch bag every day. i didn't have a lunch box, it was just a freezer bag. inside she'd pack a banana, a sandwich wrapped in aluminium foil, and a bag of smiths salt and vinegar chips. i didn't really like bananas back then, and i would never eat them when they were packed in my lunch.

i came home one day with a banana in my bag. i knew it was in there; every day that week i thought about how if i didn't take it out soon, it would start to smell. and it did. with every day that passed, the banana decayed in the bottom of my school bag - black, rotting, and squished under the weight of my books. mum kept packing me bananas in freezer bags - and i continued to avoid taking them out.

i never really got in trouble for not eating the bananas mum gave me. i just didn't want to throw them away. i just didn't want to admit to her that i didn't like bananas very much.

soon there was so much rotten fruit in my bag that the stench was impossible to ignore. i began carrying all my school books and lunch in a separate bag to school. i would wait until my classmates had left at the end of the day before grabbing my school bag from the bag rack, just in case one of them suspected my lunch was the source of the putrid smell. i was very careful to never walk in front of anybody. i started noticing cockroaches in the grade 3 corridor.

i noticed a brown liquid oozing out of the bottom of my bag. it left a sticky residue on any surface it came into contact with. i tried to mask the worsening smell by spraying the bag with my katy perry perfume, which made it so pungent and alcoholic my eyes started watering.

one day mum discovered it. several freezer bags oozing and saturated in brown sludge and mould. pulverised banana gunk had soaked into each and every crevice of my school bag, it was putrid and rotting and infested with insects. it had stained all of my exercise books brown. the smell was so terrible mum gagged emptying it out. she called me disgusting and i cried all afternoon.

no matter how much you try to mask something rotten and decaying, its vile essence will seep through the cracks and destroy everything in the vicnity! #denialsucks