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Bianca Orazio
When Mum died, the hospice nurse said, “Oh that was peaceful.”
She said Mum just… “let go”.
But that’s not how I remember it. I remember the air being too still, the clock not ticking, the exact silence of unmade choices. Her chest, not rising. Not falling. Hovering there like it couldn't decide.
Like the universe hadn’t picked yet.
We learned about quantum superposition that same week at school. How something can exist in all its possible states at once, until it’s observed — and only then does it collapse into one reality.
One path.
One truth.
The classroom smelled like dry marker and someone’s too-sweet perfume. The clock was loud, insistent. My pen hovered over the worksheet. I was supposed to be calculating probabilities, but I was counting breaths. Mine. Hers. Somewhere between the two.
As I stared at the diagram, the lines blurred. Possibilities stacked on top of each other. Alive, not alive. She was there in the kitchen, humming; she wasn’t. The diagram didn’t move, but something inside me did. A quiet shift, like a coin flipping in slow motion.
~
Now she’s alive until I open my eyes
Until I look,
And the world collapses.
~
Dad doesn’t talk about her much. I think he’s afraid to say her name, as if the sound alone might fix her in place, might force the memory to settle into one version, when he’s not ready to choose. Every time we remember, we layer one image over another — the way she smiled, the way she didn’t, the last time she laughed, or maybe the time before. Memory isn’t a photograph; it’s a shifting equation, a superimposed echo of what was and what we need it to be. So, he stays silent, keeps her in the margins, where she can be all things at once: gentle and fierce, present and gone. Unmeasured. Uncollapsed.
But I say her name, even when it hurts. I remember her laugh, that snort she’d try to hide but never could. How she’d sing Beyoncé in the car, loud and unapologetic, and no one would tell her to stop because it made everything feel more alive — like the world was expanding, not shrinking. I remember sitting in the garden after another failed attempt to keep the basil alive, and she explained photosynthesis like it was a poem. “Science,” she said, brushing dirt from her hands, “is just another way of saying ‘I love you.’ A way to ask the universe where we come from — and why we matter.”
She was a physicist. She believed in equations, and in the quiet beauty of everyday moments.
“Maybe somewhere,” she’d say, “I survive the cancer. I go to England. I meet you at the airport with a red umbrella and too much luggage.”
“Maybe somewhere we go to New Zealand and rent a tiny car that struggles up the hills, and I make you stop every time the view gets too beautiful.”
“Maybe somewhere we go to Italy and spend whole afternoons wandering through old streets, eating gelato flavours we can’t pronounce and pretending we live there.”
I used to laugh. I’d tell her she was ridiculous, and she’d say, “No — I’m being scientific.”
Now I think about those versions of her all the time.
~
It took me years to finally open her notebook — the one with equations in the margins and smudges of blackberry jam from the toast she always ate while working, pages dog-eared not from study but from being stuffed into handbags alongside half-read novels and receipts for almond croissants. Inside, I found a note wedged between a draft lecture on quantum entanglement and a scribbled reminder to buy more oat milk.
She’d written: “Entanglement means two particles stay connected, across time, space, and death. Maybe love is a quantum force."
I memorised that last bit. Wrote it on my wall. Wrote it on a small, torn up piece of paper that I kept in the back of my phone case. Had it inked into the skin of my forearm. Not because I believe it completely, not because it makes sense in the way science makes sense. But because I want to believe it.
Because the idea that she’s still out there, in some branch of reality I can’t reach — still humming in the kitchen, still burning garlic and insisting it’s “just caramelised” — helps me get through the mornings. Helps me keep collapsing into this version of reality, the one where she’s gone, but not entirely.
Where maybe, just maybe, she’s still there — not watching exactly, but lingering in the quiet moments before I remember.
She’s there in the half-second between sleep and waking, in the way I reach for two mugs instead of one, in the hum I catch myself echoing without realising.
She’s there until the realisation hits — until the world sharpens and the absence settles in.
I’m still learning how to miss her. I don’t know what it means to get through this. Maybe it’s forgetting the sound of her footsteps. Maybe it’s remembering without flinching. Maybe it’s waking up and not expecting her to be there at all.
I’m not there yet.
I don’t know if I’ll ever fully understand where she is now. But I believe she’s somewhere — somewhere real, even if not measurable. A place where she still leaves half-finished cups of coffee on every surface, still texts me articles at 2 a.m. with the caption “this made me think of you,” still insists that the moon looks bigger when you’re in love.
But I carry her with me. I carry her in every equation, every question, every lingering sense of something I can’t quite grasp. I think that’s what love is. It’s not just a force, not just a feeling — it’s the answer to the biggest question of all.
And maybe, in some far-off version of reality, it’s still the only thing that matters.
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Bianca was a 2025 SWN Young Writers Fellow sponsored by Engaging Science Queensland.
