Catch Her Breathe, A New City.

She arrived in Melbourne with a suitcase that seemed too small to carry the weight she had left behind. The air of the city felt different on her skin, cold, thick with possibility, humming with noise and strangers who didn't know her name. That anonymity was a relief, like shedding an old skin that had grown too tight, too bruised.

There was a time, not long before, when her voice had been reduced to a whisper in her own home. A man who claimed to love her had locked her into the tiny corners of herself, stripping away the fullness of who she was. His words were cages, his love conditional and cruel. Days turned into nights where she doubted her own memory, her own worth, her own heartbeat. And yet; there was still a fragment of her that refused to die. That fragment had taken her keys. That fragment had driven her and her dog 950 kilometres away at four a.m.

Melbourne had met her with rain. The kind that slicks the pavements and makes the trams hiss. The kind that soaks through jeans and hair but also cleanses. She stood outside her St Kilda apartment, watching Acland Street a buzz with locals and umbrellas bloom like dark flowers. And for a moment she thought; I am alive. I am Free. The words were foreign, tentative but they took root.

Finding her apartment had been less than romantic. Freedom has paperwork, many emails, pet security bonds that drain your savings and real estate agents who barely glance at you. She’d walked through apartments with peeling paint, kitchens too narrow for comfort and carpet that smelled of strangers. Still, she persisted, because this time she wasn't looking for perfection. She was looking for safe.

Every slammed door in those unfamiliar hallways made her flinch. Every loud voice in the stairwell reminded her of nights when shouting had meant danger. Trauma followed her across state boarders like an uninvited guest, slipping into her new anonymity, a life without knocking. But she learned quickly; in Melbourne, even shadows have somewhere to hide. She bought second-hand furniture, carried plants in both arms from the Queen Victoria Market, and painted her bedroom walls a pale forgiving shade of blue. Slowly, the silence of her new space shifted from frightening to sacred.

The city asked her to belong in ways that she hadn’t expected. She found herself at cafe tables where the baristas remembered her order after three visits. She wandered through lane ways painted in graffiti, where every wall felt like rebellion against being silenced. She sat at poetry readings where strangers clapped for vulnerability and for the first time, she let herself write about what had happened. Not in hushed tones, Not with shame. But with ink and intention, carving the pain into something that could no longer own her.

Melbourne was a city that didn't sleep, but it didn't rush you either. She learned to walk its streets like an observer, letting the sound of trams and buskers drown out her internal monologue. She discovered bookstores that smelled like dust and hope, yoga studios where she could breathe again, and parks where magpies watched her like old guardians. Each discovery was a stitch in the fabric of a new self.

Still, healing was not linear. There were nights when the old memories clawed at her. Nights when she woke drenched in fear, convinced she could still hear his footsteps. Days when her body betrayed her, shaking at the sound of laughter that resembled his, recoiling at cologne that carried his ghost. He lived in her bones, but she began to learn its tells. She started therapy, sitting in a chair across from someone who didn't tell her she was too much or too sensitive. Someone who told her she had survived something, and that she was still here.

There was power in being believed. In Melbourne. She was believed.

She built friendships like scaffolding around her. A neighbour who invited her over to tea when was crying in the stairwell. A woman she met at work who laughed so loudly it cracked something open in her. A man she danced with in a bar, not because she wanted love but because she wanted to feel her body belong to joy again. Slowly, she realised community was not luxury it was medicine.

And Melbourne, messy, sprawling, chaotic Melbourne had a way of giving you what you needed if you were willing to wander long enough.

Some days she felt like two people. The young woman who had been broken, who carried fear in her marrow. And the young woman who was beginning again, who dared to imagine futures she’d once thought impossible. The lived side by side, learning to trust each other.

She wrote her way to wholeness. She scribbled notes on tram tickets, napkins and the margins of her books. Words became anchors, reminders that her story was not defined by him. That survival wasn’t just about leaving, it was about choosing, daily, to exist fully.

And though moving to Melbourne had been terrifying, it had also been an adventure. She learned to read the city like a lover; its moods, its tempers, its quiet mornings and raucous nights. She got lost in suburbs where streets curved in unexpected directions. She tried dumplings in china town and coffee in Collingwood, pastries in Brunswick. She climbed rooftop bars just to watch the skyline blush at sunset. The city taught her that beauty could be ordinary and ordinary could be enough.

There were setbacks, jobs that fell through. Rejections that reminded her how fragile self belief can be. Landlords who raised rent too quickly. Loneliness that sometimes felt heavier than the abuse. But she endured. She knew what she had left was worse than what she faced now.

When the flashbacks came, she placed her hand on her own chest and whispered: we are here, we are safe, we are free. Sometimes she believed it. Sometimes she didn't. But the act itself was radical; choosing to mother herself, to comfort the girl who had once been too afraid to breathe.

Melbourne became the canvas on which she painted her return to herself. The city never asked her to be smaller, quieter, or easier. It never demanded she erase her pain. Instead it mirrored her complexity; its hidden lane ways, its unpredictable weather, its refusal to be neatly defined. In that mirror, she found permission to be messy, to grieve, and laugh and rebuild without apology.

She had escaped, yes, but most importantly she had arrived.

The adventure was not in cafes, the festivals or the new friends (though they mattered). The real adventure was learning to live again, to choose herself again, and again, and again. The city gave her enough room to unfold.

She was no longer the woman locked behind someone else’s rules. She was the woman standing in Federation Square on a Friday night, surrounded by strangers and neon, realising that freedom was not an end point but a practice. And she was practising, imperfectly but persistently.

Every step through Melbourne’s streets became a declaration: I Survived. I Belong. I am more than what was done to me. An though her scars would always whisper, she had found a city where she could raise her voice louder than the echoes.

A City She would forever run back to anytime she had to find herself again.