The Audit — by Leila Binesh
Runner-up of the QWC Youth Writing Competition 2026.
Earn. Save. Repeat.
Six forty-five. The same alarm. The same shirt.
The same fluorescent light that flickers once before deciding to stay on.
You learn to call this stability.
The ledger is clean.
Column A: what you owe
Column B: what you earn
The gap between them is the shape of your life—and you have spent every waking hour
trying to close it.
More hours. More output.
A careful, compounding return
On what, exactly?
At twenty-two they hand you
A salary, a desk, a future that arrives in a flat cardboard box.
Be patient, they say. Defer. The payout is coming.
So, you defer.
You defer the trip. You defer the call.
Interest accumulates on everything you leave untouched.
There are assets you forget to record.
Not the super. Not the mortgage. The other ones.
The friend who stopped calling somewhere around year three,
Not out of anger, just, out of practice.
The parent whose face has learned not to wait by the window.
The version of yourself
At twenty-two who believed, with complete certainty,
That all of this was temporary.
Depreciation is quiet. It doesn't announce itself.
You don't notice it until the audit,
Until something makes you stop and count what's actually left.
The window was always there.
Outside it, life did what it does—moved, grew louder, went golden in the afternoon.
You felt it the way you feel weather through glass. Present, and not.
You go back to the desk. You close the window. You tell yourself,
Next quarter. Next year. When it’s enough.
But enough keeps moving.
And the things that don't appear on any statement—
The child's question you answered too quickly on your way out,
They don't show up in red. They only subtract.
When the screen is the only thing still lit, and the floor is empty, and everyone else has gone,
You sit with a number
And you will wonder, what it was all for.
Leila Binesh is a youth member of Queensland Writers Centre.
