Imogen Myatt
Imogen Myatt was a twin; she was beautiful, talented,
hilarious and kind - glowing with youth. Her twin sister, she and I had worked
together for some 3 or 4 years, previous to that, we had been a primary school trio,
the three musketeers. Everyone who knew Imogen loved her; she just had that raw
and honest personality that you couldn’t resist, bubbly, sarcastic and full of
life. My heart lifted every time I saw our names together on the roster and too
many times to remember we would just sit in the backroom at work with chocolate
milk “borrowed” from the store room and talk and laugh. It was here that we
decided to live together with another friend in Brisbane this year.
We were both going to UQ, I was to study Journalism and she
was to study sports psychology, resonant of her pure sporting talent – I swear
she had a toe in nearly every sport there was. We all went house shopping and
fell in love with a house situated within the bowels of St Lucia. The rent was
$190 a week, rather high, and Imogen’s family, having to put three girls through university, was on a tight budget. But
she shrugged it off and said it would be fine. So instead of placing any more
stress on her family’s tight financial girth, Imogen worked full days every
day, burdening every shift she physically could. We secured the house, signing
form upon form - laughing and joking about inviting our real estate agent to
our house warming party, the smiles on our faces huge and disbelieving. We were
finally going to escape Toowoomba, it would be a fresh start, a new life, independent
big city girls. The moving date was set, the 21st of January, and
though the date crept ever closer, it still felt surreal. We ceremoniously quit
our jobs, 4 years of making sandwiches finally coming to a close, and we began
to pack. We discussed ridiculous contributions we could make to the house,
which room we wanted, food budgets, how incredibly poor and happy we were going
to be. Imogen had a week long science camp at Bribey Island just before we
moved in and would be driving back early on the 21st, a Saturday.
Our friend and I arrived at the house around lunch time on
the Saturday. There was no power in the house as all three of us, being quite
ignorant of the moving process, had not realized you had to sort the power out
yourself. We found this quite funny and thought it would be fine living in
darkness for a few days, a sort of induction into Brisbane life. Imogen had
said she would be a little late as she still had a few things to pack and I
texted her about the power situation, jokingly saying that it was a great start
to the year. However she didn’t text back and we began to get a little
concerned as it started to approach mid afternoon. We found her dad’s number
and called, it rang out, her home phone also rang out, even her twin sister didn’t
reply. We suggested possibilities, half joking, half serious – I mean, nothing
bad could happen to us, this was the beginning of our lives, we were young,
invincible. If dark thoughts tried to creep in we would brush them off with a
laugh, bad things only happened to other people.
Evening dawned and Imogen didn’t arrive, we reassured each other
that she’s probably just tired from her camp and would be here bright and early
tomorrow morning. We ate cereal for dinner as it was the only thing in our
cupboard that didn’t require power and laughed at how funny Imogen would find
this. At ten that night, a friend called
me and between thick sobs I was told that Imogen had been in a car accident on
the way back to Toowoomba that morning, that she had died on the scene and her
father was on life support, that he wasn’t going to
wake up. It wasn’t real, how could it be. It was merely a very bad dream. She
was so young, so excited, so much to offer the world. And so we sat surrounded
by darkness in the house we had all chosen together and we cried, eventually
crying ourselves into silence.
Days strung together without break, we relied on routine to
get us through; get up, try not to think too much, go to bed, embrace sleep. We
closed the door to the room that was supposed to be hers and cringed at the
thought of looking for another house mate, but we had to, we couldn't afford not
to. There was no one to comfort us and Brisbane now seemed so alien, so big and
cold. I was never one to cry easily but for a while even a rude customer at a
supermarket could bring me to tears. We visited Imogen’s twin at the Royal
Brisbane Hospital, where her father was still on life support. Upon seeing her
we ran and collapsed into one another, not letting go. Sitting on the hospital
floor, we talked for hours about Imogen and were finally able to laugh again as
we remembered all the great times we’d had with her. I still think about Imogen
everyday and I miss her terribly, she has helped me realise my own mortality and I have her to thank as I now try and live everyday too its full potential, as it could
so easily be my last.
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