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june 29, 2001
Work is finished. My flatmate and I have moved out of our apartment, leaving it white, empty, and smelling lemon fresh. Everything I own in Australia is currently packed into the trunk of my Toyota Camry (by the way, I have a car now and will be driving around this country). While it makes me feel a bit nervous to have everything stashed in my car, it's an oddly freeing feeling. At any time, I can just pick up and move wherever I so choose - I have nothing solid to return to (here in Australia anyhow).
I'm going to be in Sydney for the weekend, living off the backs of various friends. I will push off Monday sometime, heading north up the coast towards the warmth of Queensland. Not that it's exactly cold here in Sydney. It's supposedly the dead of winter and I was wearing a tank top last weekend. A rather strange definition of winter, in my most humble of opinions.
As I am moving again, this will be where most of my posts go from now on. Wish me luck on my travels and pray that my car lasts for a complete circuit of this continent. I'm keeping the ocean to my right.
posted by tina 6/29/2001 10:26:51 AM
june 3, 2001
Since I have been away, there have been moments when I am overcome with an intense satisfaction with where I am and what I am doing. At first I took this to mean that I'm doing the right thing being so far away from home but I have come to realize that I have experienced the exact same sensation when, for instance, sitting on the bus coming down from SFU at the precise moment of sunset over the city. Or at other times when sitting on the beach in the Okanagan in the slow-motion haze of a hot summer afternoon.
I can think of several such moments in the months that I have been away. On Friday, I joined a group of co-workers for hot pot at one of the others' flat. Amidst the chatter and the steam and the raw garlic making my mouth burn, I felt inordinately pleased with where I was at that particular moment. Similarly, I got the same sense a few weeks ago in a pub on George Street, as I was between schooners of beer with two friends, one visiting from Canada and the other an Englishman who I met while hiking in New Zealand months ago. And yesterday, it was just from the feeling of spending an intensely lazy day by myself scouring the neighbourhood bookstores - new and secondhand - and being completely oblivious of time as I meandered down to the beach (in winter!). There have been countless other moments, too numerous to detail here and, anyhow, they would probably be rendered less significant by translating them into descriptions.
However, over the last two weeks or so, I have been experiencing sudden bouts of what some might call homesickness. These moments of happiness and/or satisfaction of which I write are not exclusive to my travel experience; I still miss the ones that I can only have in familiar places. For example, because of my limited computer access here in Sydney, I got to thinking about my computer at home. I was thinking about how I used to stay up late in front of my computer even though my eyes were blurred from sleepiness and my boyfriend at the time was snoring on my bed, and I suddenly missed my bedroom so completely. I thought about the ugly rug on my floor and how I often lay on it staring up at the entirely white low ceilings. I thought about my armchair covered in accumulated books and papers. I thought about the sound of the wheels on my brother's chair on the floor above me as he participated in equally late nights in front of his computer. I thought about the muffled darkness as I sat at my computer after everyone else in the house had gone to bed. I miss these things, as a place, as an experience. I have also been intensely missing irregular Sunday morning brunches with Cynthia and pancakes at IHOP with Andrew.
And then there are the other times, particularly at night, when I feel alone and slightly homesick. On further consideration, I do think it might have less to do with being far away from home than being lonely in a more general sense, in the same vein as what I was feeling during January and February of last year. I wonder if I wouldn't be sometimes feeling this way regardless of where I was. No matter where I might be, I think I would still be missing the warm tangle of limbs under covers in the night.
posted by tina 6/3/2001 03:11:23 PM
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