australia

dining table at my moms moms house

Perth

10 days in and i’m growing tired. Of what i’m unsure but either way my heart feels heavy. Maybe it’s the heat or the repetition. Or the people. But in me i feel something lingering and it’s almost as if i already left this place some time ago, and I'm so aware of the imminent end it’s difficult to not have leaving in mind.

These days i inhabit a state of constant waiting; expecting the end-date, mentally preparing in anticipation, the present being this coincidental afterthought bruised by precaution. i’m in a time capsule, and i know it, watching the minutes deplete. The funny thing about it, i’m so acutely prepared for all these moments to become the past, compartmentalized in my mind somewhere between reality and fantasy, that being here already feels like a memory, i’m just lucky to for a second to taste it on my tongue,  -constantly making peace with the temporality of it all, watching nowness unfold like an audience member.

Unlike before, time feels overwhelmingly finite. There’s this shortness to every action that leads me to believe i’m experiencing some sort of pseudo-now, still visceral and yet simultaneously i’m able to look back at it, even while it’s occurring. I’m constantly reminding myself of how far from real-life australia is. I think it’s my way of protecting myself from last time, and forgetting what living really is, and it must be working because i almost miss the permanency of home. Friends, family and an identity of my own curation, control over my day to day entirely unaffected by the tides of fleeting family members, some of whom i doubt i’ve known more than a week my whole life.

Before now, I was infatuated with the notion of Perth as paradise. Or maybe i was consumed in the fever of 21 days of seeing all these people that, in the 2 or 3 years you haven’t spoke, slump sweetly and lowly and with no hope of return down a well of certain inscrutability, leaving you treading the boundaries of appropriate and invasive, fumbling small talk and honesty. And though part of me is sad I’ll never love australia like i did when i was seventeen, for the first time in my life i feel wholly un-naive about the impossibility of this place. Or rather the impossibility of me in it. And in spite of the fact my parents grew up here, and their parents grew up here, and their parents’ grandkids, (who’ll probably have their kids here,) grew up here, my own incongruence in being here is like this very fortunate mistake. The kind that threatens thwarting you into a dreamy limbo if ever you were to wade too deep into your ghost-life. I’m not mad -or happy- about it, it just is this way.

When I describe this place as existing in a time capsule i mean that until only quite recently i swear, to me, it’s never really changed. It’s like each 2 years we leave, and upon our departure a spell is cast where the whole town sleeps like a fairytale, family members only aging slightly, everything else stopping dead in its tracks. On our return we rehearse the same rituals we have the past 20 years. In the beginning it was strictly 10 days with my mom’s family, then 10 days with my dad’s, christmas lunch at Peta’s, dinner at Caroline’s. The first day is spent eating vegemite toast on blue doilies, then we go to the local pool, and after christmas we go to mandurah. We cry when we leave, re-enter the real world, and forget again, until we remember, and do it all over. It’s rare you find a place that feels protected. That, however many times you come and go, will still be there just the same, never any bigger or smaller, unspoilt by the outside world, preserved forever-and-ever in a dumb-blind krysallis of revere. In truth though, nothing lasts forever, and one of the reasons I’m less romantic about here nowadays is coming to terms with the fact that, even despite the past 20 years, and all of it’s forever-ness, Perth will cannot and will not always be the same utopia i remember it as, (-not even it’s forever-ness can stop this.)

I so clearly remember the moment in which max tells me he might be moving to melbourne. He went with his friends and met this girl, and he says it’s kind of a pipe dream, but most of all I’m just shocked that he’s even leaving Perth! How dare he! How dare he ruin my snow-globe fantasy for me! How dare he grow up and leave his hometown and go ahead and live his life! What will I do when I visit? Who will I hang out with? Will I have to make my own friends or just suffer through only hanging out with middle aged relatives? What will Perth even be without him? And though I realise in hindsight the whole thing with australia is that we only ever visit at christmas anyways, and chances are, if we’re there he might also be- (so I guess it’s not all that different), I'd never considered anyone who lived there leaving. Like, if I willed them to, I could just trap them right there in my memory or something.

Even scarier, and even in spite of the gullible covenant of a million christmases to come, now that i’m here I realise, while being a kid means christmas with family, with time, comes life -and with life comes interference, change, compromise, and no doubt “christmas this year at... insert-name’s-family’s-place-in-yada-yada”. I’m twenty next year and Saskia’s twenty two and aurora’s the only reason left not to roam astray. My dad says we won’t do this ‘big trip’ anymore, it’s too much, and so really this is the last time it’ll ever be like this, the same bi-yearly pilgrimage we’ve taken forever. In the future we’ll filter into this forgotten dream in dribs and drabs, and if by some miracle, some two of us happen to cross paths...like in a dream -it’ll only mean that somewhere far, far-away we’re thinking about each-other. Maybe when i’m not young anymore perth will become this make-believe place I tell myself, the kind of make-believe memory that disappoints until it’s too sad to return. I don’t know what it is about change that irks me to my core, but in the glaring silence between me and mom, and her dad being gone and andrea being here, and show and tell between the two families, and then; my moms car, like actual real-life divorced parents, parked out front, “but not coming inside”- the sameness of life as I’ve formerly known it escapes me more everyday. Even now, in the hot air of Nenek’s garden a growing hint of too-good-to-be-true is trembling beneath the blue and green. There’s a humm of betrayal to this perfect morning, and with it the wind says: ‘I never promised you anything! I never promised you forever!’ i get up,  collect my clothes from the dryer, kiss my dad goodbye. i sit in the car. I watch the day boil on. i think to myself: is it possible to miss something before it’s even gone yet?

the oval behind my cousins house 

Mandurah

i'm in mandurah and the air is cool. The whole thing is a lot more bearable with a dull slur to it, so I decided to get day drunk, or at least somewhere within the sphere of inebriation. It’s after christmas, and a million moths just hatched because of the time of year, crowding the ceiling when it's dark. There’s a strange rarity to the emptiness of the house yesterday and today that's like a sigh of relief, and still: as if some huge piece of furniture is missing. Its funny the way in which my mom slides with seamless-ease into the role of Peta, and i'm reluctant to make any fun at all: the romantic-notion of solitude being the only way i can justify it to myself, being here. I’m fully committed to my brooding, stunned by the narcotized impossibility of doing anything but think, and get drunk, and think some more, but not about perth or whoever is there (luke) and whatever they (he) might be doing. And though in truth i wanted more alone time here;  the incessant perseverance of the reality mom, andrea, and the rest of the world, even through the shiny grey beach, persists.

And my body aches! And my heart won't let me rest! By now I can feel myself on the edge of drunk-ed-ness, and there’s the ceaseless urge within me never to settle, to always force myself out of my comfort zone into danger, for no other reason than because I can. Only like this do I begin to miss australia or see a future where I’m mourning it. And in creeping clarity before drunk-sadness i'm thinking about what max said: where are you now? Where will you be? (luke) Three beers in and I’m positively defeated, buzzed with warm stillness. And it’s beautiful here, but beauty's just a heavy burden that’s vain without someone you love. So i'm in the water, and the water is good, but I feel as if i’m wading in a bath i left too long and let go cold. The whole town sleeps under a blanket of slowness and inertia that it becomes strange to me that people actually live here. There’s truly very little to do but be sloth and be idle, and that, in itself, feels far too self-serving, like entering a dream where you know you, solely, can curate the entire narrative. The people on the beach are quiet, reticent projections of your subconscious, and even the hot-sun shining down on you feels soulless. There’s this nothingness to the beach that never changes, and, though it’s not necessarily a sad beauty, it’s like, all this wide-open space is wasted on you or something, like your existence here is so futile, you almost can't believe it.

Its 6 o’clock and i’m on the beach again.  It’s sprawling and spiky and there’s all these rock pools so perfectly me-sized i could just creep into them and curl up like a baby. After a while there’s a flat plane of rock, shallow on one side, the other opening into the ocean. I wanna walk out on it, but there’s all these people fishing, and the water’s relentless, and i don’t wanna be that dumb bitch with a tote bag caught out at sea, and everyone’s like  “who’s that dumb bitch with a tote bag? Should we go help her?” 

So instead i sit on the wet sand and watch two people kiss and wonder if they are in love, or if they’re on fire; or if kissing is kissing, something like tying a hair tie; or if they’re in heaven, or somewhere in-between, and the sun is shining on me and the sand hurts so much, and if that’s what it’s really like to be with someone; when you’re realistic about it; some place in-between it all, (the beauty). And I’d be lying if i said i didn’t come around here to see whether the straw bench me and max sat on two years ago was still here. And if i said a small part of me didn’t want to find it and manifest something of the memory i’ve failed to describe so many times it now feels like some idea i came up with, and not a memory at all. But the sand is too high, and i can’t tell from down here. I wanna sober up and writhe around in the sand like a cat falling asleep, dreamy in the quiet, no more than a dumb-worm in the dirt.

And in the end, when it comes to it, the suns behind a cloud and i’m climbing a dune, writing this. There’s something about this time of year when, almost, i can tear up on demand. maybe it’s the beach, or something about it, but that shit makes me wanna cry every-time. I'm tryna sob and i can’t get it out. It’s not that i’m sad, but there’s so much inside of me. mostly im stuck, until it’s there and it flows, and being alone here feels both sad and right. i’m a king on top of this sand! the more i breathe, the more i lean into it like a hug. It’s nothing like the bliss of before, and my existence in this moment is humble and unremarkable. For a split second i can appreciate the dumb simplicity of what i know to be true: that the horizon is comfortingly flat, and my feet are in the earth. i’m glad enough to think of absolutely nothing at all; and sinking into the evening i’m not hiding, in fact part of me is free to roam. It’s not the same as when i was 17, but the grey sky and sea and the malleability of the floor beneath me are in their own way, heaven, or somewhere between the two. and i'm right there in-between this place that's now and the reality i've known formerly as living. Yet for the first time i think i can handle knowing both exist, and existing, mostly, in one. And despite the beach before me being a blink in my existence that, with every passing moment, becomes a story i tell myself, i’m here and i’m alive! i'm on my own, and i’m okay, and my feet are in the earth and the horizon is flat. Everything is still going and somehow also shiftless, and maybe I’m not wholly at peace, but was i ever really? The beach is slowly becoming just a beach, and in all it’s miserable glory i’m begin to think it might be better that way. "I’ll call this a diary, but of course I know you’re there. I don’t know if I ever intended to keep any of this to myself."