i’ve felt this weird transitional phase in the move between cities, that i didn’t expect to last for this long.  i left brisbane just over two years now.  in a lot of ways, i feel like adjusting to living in melbourne took as little as a month, but there are still occasional instances where i feel somewhat between the two cities.  i love melbourne - there’s pretty much nothing i really miss about brisbane - but there’s still a sense sometimes of having not quite established myself here.  of course these things take time, and the two years i’ve spent here cannot compare to the twenty-five in brisbane, be it in terms of establishing friendships, lovers, professional contacts.

i guess what i hadn’t so much expected was how ephemeral those connections are once you leave them behind.  two years on in melbourne, still now and then feeling like a stranger here; i hadn’t expected to feel so much more like a stranger in the city that informed so much of my life.  i felt like a hotel guest staying in the old bedroom that i lived in for six years.  the bedroom i first had sex in (don’t even get me started on how weird it was to pass that guy in the street - twice).  visiting old friends was lovely, but it didn’t feel like it used to.  i sat in that strange, familiar bedroom wondering who i could call.

so much of this is completely bound up in the amount of time i spend in my own head, theorising conversations and catch-ups to the occasional point where i feel like i don’t need to have them, i’ve thought it out so much.  part of its just the realistic recognition that i’ve changed a lot in the past two years, and everyone else has too.  and that’s fucking great, but it can be difficult to bridge as well.  the challenge becomes to move past the futile gesture of pretending for a night to be the people we were back then, to have the fun we had back then.  that challenge paid off when i met it.  i think.  i’d like to say it did.

i bought a new macbook pro (15”) to cheer me up about my terrible haircut.  don’t expect any (crystal clear) gpoys for a while.

(i look like a british rugby player.  everyone cover their drinks.)

last night the friend of one my current collaborators came over to help.  he looked like ryan gosling.  a less attractive, slightly portly version, but i still got all weird about it.  i’m pretty sure the mention of his ex-girlfriend was just for me.

i keep having dreams about new york. more accurately, about failed attempts to get to new york - lost in massive, deserted airports; waking up half an hour before a flight and feverishly packing; stuck at customs without a passport. occasionally, i’ll make it through an board a flight that never lands.

waking up like i’m straight out of lost, “I HAVE TO GO BACK.”

so i’m going to. soon.

i can’t remember the last time he even addressed me directly. the last couple of times i went to see him - blinking fresh into the sunlight, early morning flights from late night pints and grim half jokes about “granddad’s last christmas” - i held a stock still smile against hospital room chairs. my sister, or our father, or our kind but addled aunt, would slog away at conversation. my sister had a particular tenacity for maintaining a cheerful tone without verging into pantomime, even with the heightened volume for his failing ears.

my father would get exasperated quickly, the only time apart from my teens and the challenges thereof, that i really saw the wear of emotion on him pushing on to resignation. my aunt was, and probably still, occupies her own doddering universe as distinct as the particular trains of thought that granddad rode ramshot around his head in.

there’s no real sense of loss over this legacy of non-communication. no feeling that i’ve missed out on any hallmark exchange of tales that would have bound us across the gap that our two generations have stretched unequivocally. i never really had anything to say to him; and maybe recognising that he never really saw the point in asking. maybe he was just concentrating on remaining alive. so the men in my family seem to be; islands (how common, how gauche). but in a few short hours i’ll be by my father’s side as he says goodbye to his, still unable to articulate much to him and myself unable to find the words for my father. and how long then until he or i are at the others’ cold side; the dead weight of empty air, of nothing to say and no way around that straight line of silence that holds us all taut? no sense of loss, then; but something’s still here; the question of how that works or what that means. i don’t know. i don’t know.