'The difference 5 minutes made at Bondi Beach that day.'

There is a particular kind of guilt that comes from being five minutes early.

Two weeks ago, on Sunday night, my husband, our five-year-old son, our eighteen-month-old daughter and I were in the Bondi car park. We had just been at the Surf Club and were heading home for the bath-bed routine. We were parked right where the bullets would land minutes later.

When we returned last week, the car next to where ours had been parked was marked with bullet holes.

We were safe. That matters. It matters more than anything. And yet, like so many others in Bondi, I am carrying a confusing, uncomfortable weight that I don't quite know what to do with.

It feels important to say something before we go on. There is no way to put into words the deep and unimaginable loss that so many families and the Jewish community are feeling right now. This piece does not attempt to do that. It is also not about centring my family's proximity to danger.

It is about naming the complicated emotional aftermath that ripples through a community when something as horrific as this happens. The strange, uncomfortable mix of feelings that so many of us are sitting with: guilt, violation, anger, pride, confusion — and then guilt again for feeling any of it at all when others are facing unimaginable loss.

Survivor's guilt is a strange thing. It doesn't arrive neatly. It arrives alongside gratitude, disbelief, shame, relief — and then loops back again in a confusing, almost nonsensical way.

There were sliding doors that night that now feel impossibly loud.

Our toddler didn't want to get in the car. She could hear the music from the Chanukah festival and wanted to dance. I suggested to my husband that I take her in for a moment — just a small dance — while he drove our son home. Instead, she wrapped herself around him, koala-style, and he happily said he'd take her. It would be such a joyful thing to do.

I drove home alone with our son. We live only a hundred metres away, but we had driven down because we'd come from a barbecue earlier that afternoon.

My husband walked towards the bridge with our daughter — naked, as toddlers so often are, her towel discarded in the excitement of the possibility of a dance. He later told me that as he reached the bridge, he suddenly became acutely aware that he was only wearing his speedos, that she had no clothes on at all and that everyone around them was beautifully dressed for the festival.

It felt inappropriate. Out of place.

That — and only that — is why they didn't walk into the festival.

The last image I have before everything changed is of the two of them at the bridge as I drove past. That was 6:39 pm. They were the last two people there before the shooters arrived. They danced for a minute, then turned around and walked home. Safe. Unharmed.

I don't know how to sit with that.

Both my husband and I are surf lifesavers. We are trained in CPR and first aid. We know how to respond in emergencies. And we weren't there.

That brings another kind of guilt — the guilt of not helping; of knowing that our friends, our fellow club members, were among the first responders. That they ran towards danger. That they held people in their final moments. That they did everything they could, with skill and courage — and will now live with what they saw.

A silent line of red and yellow formed along the sand at Bondi as hundreds of Surf Lifesavers paid tribute to those who lost their lives in the terror attack at Bondi Beach.⁣ Image: AAP.

We weren't there beside them. And that hurts in a way that's hard to articulate.

There is also guilt in feeling shaken at all — when we are physically fine, when our children slept safely in their beds last night, when others are moving through unthinkable loss. I know many people are carrying this same feeling today: Who am I to feel this, when others are grieving so deeply?

But trauma does not ask permission. It doesn't check whether your fear is proportionate before it settles in your body.

What I keep coming back to — what I want to hold onto — is the extraordinary response of this community.

Bondi feels eerie right now. Quiet. Sad. But it also feels deeply connected. There is a gentleness in the way people are looking at one another. Soft eyes. Knowing nods. A shared understanding that something fundamental was violated - and that we are grieving together.

I keep catching little pieces of people's conversations as we walk past — "Where were you?" "Are you okay?" "I still can't believe it."

Despite the heavy police presence — for which we are overwhelmingly grateful — the place feels like a big country town. I grew up in one. This is what it felt like then: everyone watching out for each other, everyone holding the same unspoken connection.

My five-year-old son keeps asking me to thank every police officer we pass. He doesn't know why they're here. He just knows they are helping.

Listen: The Bondi stories we'll never forget. Post continues below.

There is immense pride, without triumphalism, in our first responders — not just the professionals, who we simply cannot thank enough, but also the surf lifesavers from North Bondi and Bondi clubs who happened to be there in unusually high numbers because both clubs were holding Christmas parties. Highly trained people who acted immediately, instinctively, bravely.

I am so proud of them, I don't have words for it.

And yet pride exists alongside heartbreak. Solidarity alongside anger. Gratitude alongside grief. Confusion alongside certainty that something has shifted.

Across Sydney — and across Australia — there is a heaviness right now. A collective ache. A deep sorrow for the Jewish community, for those who lost loved ones, for those who know someone who did, for those who were simply gathering to celebrate and were met with violence instead.

If there is a purpose in writing this, it is simply to say: you are not alone if you feel untethered right now. If you feel lucky and devastated at the same time. If you don't quite know where to put your emotions — or whether you're even entitled to them at all.

Communities are made not just in moments of joy, but in moments of rupture. Bondi is hurting. Sydney is hurting. And many of us are doing so quietly, unsure where our feelings belong. But it is also holding itself — and that gives me hope, even in the midst of so much sorrow.

Sometimes, five minutes is all that separates one story from another. What matters now is how we hold one another in the aftermath — with humility, care and an understanding that grief does not need to compete to be real.

Feature image: AAP.