It took me by surprise. As my train pulled into Central, I saw the clearest of blue skies looming overhead. The sun commanded my attention. The carriage was quiet. It felt good to be back. It felt good to be home. It felt good to have Sydney feel like my own.
My nearly five weeks back in the States visiting my friends and family was the remedy I needed for feeling like I was choking six feet underground. Coming home to the open arms of family and friends slowly helped me to dig myself out of the hole I was in, helped me to learn how to breathe again.
My brother and his wife had a beautiful baby girl, Evangeline Taylor, who when I held her made me feel the simplicity of life in a way that I hadn’t before. Curled up in a ball against my chest, Evangeline would just sleep the day away when I first got home. Slowly she started to become more human – as stupid as that sounds. Each day something would change. Her eyelashes would grow half of a half of a centimetre. Her skin would appear less translucent as her complexion changed. Her eyes, which reminded me of the velociraptor from Jurassic Park (sorry Michael and Lauren), each day seemed a little clearer and more focused.
She would stare up at me when I held her in my arms or as she laid in my lap, and it just was so simple (naturally, this was when she wasn’t fussing). Her breathing was rhythmic, her movements were seemed precise, her gaze seemed like it was trying to make sense of the situation. It just felt almost like she was looking right into my soul. She was so pure and so simple, and I loved hanging around my niece. She showed me how to press pause, to cancel out the noise in my brain and to just look into her eyes and love her back. There were no rules or conditions. It was just there.
When I first got home, things were a whirlwind. From the holidays to catching up with family and friends, the birth of my niece to my stepmom and Dad making it official by getting married, my brain was just running at full speed. Things eventually settled, people went back to work, and the painful reality of the months that stretched ahead weighed down on me like a summer’s day.
I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I mean, most people in their 20s (much unlike what my little brother thinks) don’t have a damn clue about what they’re going to do. The quarter-life crisis it’s called apparently. Well, my quarter-life crisis felt more like an apocalypse.
To make a long story short, my relationship didn’t work out. It’s really unsettling to look back at a time and a person in your life and have it feel like it was another lifetime. Often it feels like a dream in the same way it does when I look back on all the places I’ve lived and left behind, moved on from. Did that really happen? Was that really my life?
I guess what I needed to realise is that it wasn’t my life in that it wasn’t forever – it was just a chapter. It’s hard to think of something as over, that you’re not going to return to something. Even when you were expecting something to come to an end or preparing for it to be over, it’s like there is a part of you that still feels like it’s a holiday. A break of some sort. You’ll return to that life eventually – I mean, it’s the way you’ve been living for so long, right? You don’t know of anything else. It’s just a momentary slip off the track, but you’ll be back.
Then one day you wake up, and you realise that it’s gone. It’s all in the past. You’re not going back. And instead, you’re going to keep going forward in this moment right now. This moment right now is your life, and it sort of happened without you even knowing it.
Those same questions echo again in your head as you look back on what once was: Did that really happen? Was that really my life? It’s hard to believe that it was, but at one point and at one chapter, it did really happen, and it was really your life.
It felt good to come back to friends who were happy to see me. Friends who gave me a hug and meant it. When you’re living overseas, these people aren’t just your friends, but they become your family, because often times you have only one another.
I’ve tossed around a variety of different ideas and game plans in the coming months. Soar through the skies in New Zealand, explore the waters of Fiji, feel the earth beneath my feet in Indonesia. I have been DYING to go back to Indonesia. That will all come at some stage in the future, another chapter to write and more adventures to be had. Though part of me isn’t excited to do it all alone, I look at it as yet another challenge to overcome. Another mountain to climb (literally and figuratively).
For now, I am trying to do things for the story. It’s scary to think I’m going to be 27 and have no clue about what the fuck I’m doing or where I will come to create my home. It feels at times like a clock is just tick, tick, ticking away. There are a lot of pressures – professional, personal, romantic – that come with age, so yeah, 27 scares the shit out of me, especially when for a while it felt like you had a clear view of where you were headed.
I’ll have it all figured out at some point, though. One day I’ll wake up and look at my life and smile, and I’ll look back on everything that I did and smile.
And I mean, right now it’s kind of hard not to smile right now and laugh at life. It’s summer time in friggen Australia. That in itself is awesome. And not to mention, I currently live in a house where I share a bed with not one but two of my friends while two of my other friends share the bed upstairs and two girls have their own room. Yes, seven (single) girls, four beds. (There’s actually an eighth girl in there at the moment, too.)
I remember when I first arrived after my break up, one of the girls in the house said to me, “There’s extra space in my bed if you want to share. I’m trying to save anyway.” And soon I was sharing not only a room but a bed with someone I just met. At least if you’re climbing in bed with a guy every night, you’re getting something out of it. (Sorry, that was a joke – but I mean it is true.)
Yet somehow we’ve all been making it work, even with one bathroom and a matchbox-sized fridge. When I stop to think about it, I start laughing to myself. It’s such a joke, and it’s pretty damn funny. Needless to say, when you live with seven single girls, there is always something going on.
It all works out in the end.