In a few days I will have been living in Brisbane for four months.
This is the longest time I have not boarded a plane in more then four years. I've not in fact remained anywhere since the begining of 2000 for a three month stretch.
It feels odd. Last week my suitcase got unpacked and put in storage. I've been living out of it for several years now. Having clothing all in dressers and closets feels so strange. Growed up. Permanent.
I've been transient so long it became a natural state. Unfamiliar surroundings were somehow comforting. Once you've traveled a fair bit, you begin finding similarities in all sorts of very different places. They all blend together and strange places can seem familiar. Every fucking city's just the same.
I'm a very odd mix of homebody and gypsy. I crave the stability and safety and comfort that comes from having a sense of "home", whatever that is. Home has been something I've been searching for a long time.
But I also thrive on the adventure of new places, new faces, new challanges.
They are hard interests to meld, really.
I'm far too easilly distracted by shiney things, i guess is the crux of the problem. I can settle in and adapt to my surroundings quickly. I've done so here; fallen into (and enjoying!) housebitching and home rennovating -last weeks project was a pool! whoot! But its not been warm enough to use the bloody thing since.
On the other hand, there's a bit of wanderlust remaining. I've draged the boi, or had him drag me, over as much of the state as we can feasibly do on his days off. I want to do Sydney while I am here. Maybe New Zealand. And I daydream constantly about dragging him off to globetrot with me.
London to dance at the Electric Ballroom and Slimelight. Shopping in Camden. People watching in Leicester Sq.
Canada, to watch him with family and friends. I particularly want the approval of my boys back home.
Take a car and do a longassed unplanned roadtrip accross the US.
He's treated me to slices of his life here. I've gotten to see where he grew up, hear his stories. Hear his parents tell embarasing antecdotes about him as a child.
I want to show him the places around the world that bring me peace.
I want to push him into the atlantic ocean and laugh when he whinges about the cold (payback for all the amusement he gets from watching me battle the waves here).
I want to teach him how to make a snowman, proper snowballs, and snow angels.
But you know what? I'm not, for the first time in a long time, in a hurry. There's no rush for the rest of my life to happen. I finally have come to the realizaion that my life is happening. It's right now. And I don't want to wish a moment of it away.
There is still the flightly little voice in my head though, nagging at me to not get too complacent. It's hard. The safety and contentment I've found here is very seductive. And letting down my guard is a dificult thing to do. I can't help but to want, occasionally, to withdraw inside of myself, draw the walls back up around me.
I spent the last few years drifting, spending time with friends, travelling about, getting to know myself a little better. And, despite the close friends who helped me through everything, it was a lonely process. The lonliness, however, was not only necessary; it was quite deliberate. I purposefully drew into myself. It was the only way I could work through things. It was a good decision, and on some level, I enjoyed the time out. While sleeping alone sucks ass, being alone also means no one can hurt you, yanno?
Being alone, however, also becomes habit. I've had to learn how to be with someone all over again. And, more then that, I've had to learn how to be with someone in a healthy fashion. The concept of a relationship without fighting is a foriegn concept to me, really. I grew up in a house where fighting was the norm, and moved into a primary long term relationship that could certainly be labelled volatile.
A lifetime of that results in a measure of automatic defensiveness.
I think I've stopped pre-empting things, though, and have accepted that small conflicts don't need to be major blow out events. This open and honest communication thing with a partner is bloody hard, though. For years now, the boys were the ones who got to see my innermost self. It feels unsafe to expose those bits to someone I'm dating, though.
I can imagine thats bloody frustrating! My first reaction remains to curl foetal when something goes wrong. Recent plans to teach english next year in Asia, as a way to skirt around our citizenship dificulties, for instance, have gone amiss. so it's back to the drawing board. My way of dealing with such things is to go off, alone, to think things through. Cry, rant, then think, actually.
Running off to be alone everytime there is an issue is not exactly condusive o a parnership, though. so I've been forcing myself to stay put and get control of my emotions. So things blow over quicker then they did in the past.
More productive, perhaps. But alot of work. Sometimes I just want to let go.
