They say you have free will, but whether I landed here freely or not is debatable. We're like butterflies buffeted by the wind, landing tattered. We start flying with some idea of where we're going but before we know it, we're right back where we started, or perhaps somewhere we didn't have the imagination to foresee. Along the way, we have some grand adventures, the dust of our wings falling on cobbled streets and sandy shores where the ocean you started at laps in some form, though it's many many thousand miles away.
I remember being on my local beach thirty five years ago, staring out to see, willing myself to fly. I did not want to stay in a town where everyone knew me. In a small place, everyone knows your business. They know who your parents are, how you stole from the school canteen, sleep with the boy too old for you, all your failings and all your potential. Looking out to see, I wanted a new name. My wings were caught in the buckles of my backpack where I carried the weight of my first twenty years.
Back then we didn't drink coffee with upside down foam hearts and filigree leaves. We weren't asked which alt.milk we'd like and our names weren't written on the plastic lids that would contribute to landfill. We had coffee with elbows on people's benchtops, pushing aside bongs and surf mags and bags of shopping yet to be put away. We talked of our future on back decks in the sunshine, knees up, odd cups cradled between knees, chipped and sharp. We'd have chai and herbal teas fresh from pots in the garden, or beers and cask wine. 'Let's go for a coffee' was a never heard sentence. The paths of our lives were planned without sacrifice of five dollars fifty, more for oat milk, more on Sundays to pay the staff.
Leaving became easy in the end - a series of admin jobs to go offshore. Passport, wallet, backpack, airport. Small change for expresso standing at bars with old men in Italy, ordering Americano because one simply did not order a soy latte in Portugal in 2001, chai with samosa in India. Coming home and packing up and going again, never again wanting to frequent the bars and cafes I worked at growing up, or to stay on that side of the train tracks at all.
If you're Australian, it's a right of passage to leave. But then there was something so intensely longed for that it felt like a genetic memory, but was just the stories of the generations who left Europe and landed so far from home. The grandmother from Munich telling you that it wasn't when you came back, but if, as if she was to travel home vicariously through you. The Yorkshire grandfather longing for 'ome, for England's green fields. This wasn't choice. This was programmed. You left, and what happened next would determine everything.
The moment I think of most often was my Mum making me a chamomile tea with rescue remedy the night before I flew out. 'Fuck it,' she said. 'Just put brandy in it, same thing'. It was strong and good. I went, reciting what I had to remember at the airport - kid, wallet, passport, backpack. I fell in love with my ancestral homes desperately and completely. I came back scared after September 11 and promptly returned, met an Englishman, the love of my life, married him, and drank an awful lot of tea. It wasn't til many years of marriage did we start drinking coffee.
England in those years was a golden place, perhaps because we had drenched it in love, but I was homesick. Just as forces beyond my control had pulled me north, the call of my wild southern ocean was calling me south. One does not simply ignore the salted air of childhood. My family, too, were so terribly missed.
And many years later, here in a coffee shop by the sea post surf, my wings coated thickly in salt, wrinkled worn tired wings, happy and content wings, not so much a fluttery wings but a steady beating flap, I don't wonder about the choices that brought me back here much at all.
It was where I was meant to be all along, sipping an oat latte right here.
With Love,
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It just never felt right, wherever I landed. But it only took me less than 10 years to land back in the valley I was raised in. Here, I knew where north and south was, if I knew where the river was... This valley was home.
That's the most poetic thing I've ever seen you wrote! Beautiful.
I love your beautiful story. I'm also from a small town, and what you say is so true: everyone knows your life, even if you don't leave your house. There's nothing like a big city where you can do whatever you want.
There's definitely freedom in the anonymity of big cities or traveling - you can reinvent yourself, be truly you. Then when you are strong enough and big enough, it doesn't matter where you go!
It's nice to hear your story and happy you move, I have the same feeling about my home town even worse because my dad was a addict and a bad person and everyone know my past and relate me to my dad, I lived far from my hometown for years than o came back 3 years ago and I still don't like live here, people still have rumours around me and my family and bad gossiping, luckily I'll move next year to another town..
Oh that's such a sad story. Stay strong. My small town grew bigger and so did I, and I was gone long enough to remember all the reasons I loved it. Mind you, I live about twenty minutes away, still on the same coast, but I don't know anyone from the old days now. Things change babe. Promise.
This made me chuckle! I'm always baffled when I meet someone from a small village, who does not have a passport, and has never been to not even the nearest town... yet married with several kids...
I love your story, and it might not live up to everyone's expectations, but at least you've lived an interesting life. :)
Ha I know right. There's a lot of girls I went to school with like that! Me and my bestie though, we did things. We did and still do fave interesting lives x
Hey there!
Thanks for stopping by:)
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