LIVING Juliette Salom

Tonight I cried in row F of a cinema that wasn’t my own.

I’ve been working at the movies since I was sixteen. It was my first proper job, one that finally didn’t involve me delivering pharmaceutical medicines to elderly community members on my bike, the first job that required me to have a tax file number and a self-managed savings account. I’ve worked at the cinema for all of almost eight years – the lifespan of a small human. A human that probably can’t get to school by themselves or make a meal beyond cereal, but a human, an actual living being, that can walk and can talk and have things to say. A person, nonetheless.

I turn twenty-four this week and only now that I’m doing the math do I realise I’ve spent pretty much a third of my life in that movie palace. I was there when Star Wars came back to theatres again, there when a superhero franchise conjured lines out the door, there when audiences that’d never seen a foreign film loved a little film from Korea; I was there when light danced and music sang and disbelief was suspended, when