Minesajackdaniels' Blog

Having had enough of the hit and miss availability of journals.ie, the persistent password renewal problems and various other things, I’m off.

To here.

http://minesajd.livejournal.com/

Damian, see this?  The inspiration for this is your fault, you and your msn subtext.

Many, many moons ago, I worked with a lovely creature altogether, in the happy land of PR.  She was funny, skinny, and utterly messed up without showing it.  She had that sort of silky, mix-tape-ribbon shiny brown hair, and brown eyes that topped a nose that turned up too much, and a smattering of freckles that gave people who looked at her free rein to decide how they felt.  She was one of those people. 

If you felt bad about yourself, and a little spiteful, you could decide she was a big long tall drink of water with freckles.

If you felt bad about everyone else, you could concede she was pretty and simply judge her on her imperfections in a way that was guaranteed to make you feel better.

If you felt bad about specific things, you could decide she was the sort of friend you’d like if she wasn’t so up herself.

Me, I was in a sort of novocaine state of half-being, half-unbeing.  I felt bad about nothing and everything.  I thought she was beautiful, witty, engaging, and gangly, possessing all the qualities of your new bestest friend, a supermodel and a newborn foal.  There was an attractive gangliness, a captivating elegance and a sort of disarming honesty, all combined in one person. 

When you fed her drink, this girl (and this is still my blog, you people, so there’s always going to be drink involved), she would open up to you like a flower.  Like a snapdragon – pretty and flouncy and so pot-bellied full of things she needed to share, one squeeze and she’d talk.  I loved that.  Other people may have thought it was locquacious and ingratious.  To me it was like a drink of water to a thirsty person.  She felt to me like the person I’d have been if I hadn’t been sheltered, cradled and then cast on the fires of someone else’s resentment.  To all the CS players who’d accuse me “Joo are teh GHEY” I cast them aside: she was beautiful, from the top of her head to the tips of her toes, and every imperfection (including her uncertainty about her useless boyfriend, bless his misguidedness) made her more so.

She had a fascinating background, of acceptance and parting and necessity.  There was ownership of a pub involved, and a short, sharp, inelegant dose of lung cancer that robbed her of her mother.  But her background was similar to mine - in the way that you look at two similar pieces of canvas, painted with blue skies.  Then hand two artists the same palette of three colours, and the same two brushes.  Then watch, watch as two different pictures unfold.   

Hers was the dramatic, creative, daring artist.  Mine was the one who painted the picture they thought would sell.  Both our fathers left Ireland in the midst of the building recession, to work, to hunt for jobs.   But hers struck out on his own, while mine lived with my uncle (his brother) and came home every six months.  Her father delivered her an alternative life – he bigamistically (a word? who knows) partnered another woman, had two children by her and eventually came home.   My father worked until they sent him back, and arrived back to two resentful teenaged boys and a girl child who didn’t know him.

My only memory of my father ever kissing my mother was after nine months away in England, after my mid-teen brothers had tried to steal the car (until my mother sold it in desperation) terrorised the neighbourhood and generally been 17-odd years old.  It stuck with me for a long time as a testament to my parents’ connection.  Then in later years I wondered if, given a little longer, she’d have greeted the man from Medecins Sans Frontiers the same way.

My PR friend, she of the half siblings and the second life (no TM) told me something once.  It was something her own mother told her once, like my mother told me “When you get married and have children your life’s over”.  Her mother told her “You have to hold something of yourself back”.  Sometimes I wonder.  I wonder what it’s like to part with the person you love, but also the person you end up with through expectation and marriage and circumstance, because of the stark, claws-out reality of unemployment.  See, my mother did it, but my mother didn’t love my father.  Well, to be fair, she did, but.

But he wasn’t ‘The one’.  She had the one, and he died, and she never forgot that harsh, claws out, face-slapping fact.  How could she?  My father wasn’t the one.  He was ‘The one who came along’.  There’s a difference.  And to be fair to him, I don’t pity him for it.  My father, he got what he wanted.  He met my mother, and within one week he proposed to her.  She accepted non-committaly, and he bought a ring because he knew what he wanted what he saw it.  My mother, she just knew to go along with what came her way.   He put the ring on her, she accepted the ring, and so came all of us.  You know, us well-adjusted kids.  Us kids who recognised love when we saw it, and still left home to a man at aged 17.

I thought often about the shiny, brown-eyed, funny PR girl.  Just before I left my job, she sent me the sort of gauche, heartfelt email I’d send to people, about accepting her and showing her the ropes in her first real job.  I sent one or two emails like that myself, and never felt like anything but a fuckin’ eejit after I’d sent them.  But her email, I hope she doesn’t feel that way about it.  Her email, to me, justified the 18 months of politically-motivated rubbish I’d been through.  Don’t get me wrong – PR is a great career if you fit.  But I’m awkward and disagreeable, and I’m like a fish with a bicycle in everything I do.  I’m memorable for that very fact, but I’m not effective because of it.

Her thanks vindicated me.  Especially against the background of my controlling looney of an ex-boyfriend – I felt like she was thanking the one tiny part of me I’d managed to keep sane.  But that viewpoint – like my own mother’s indoctrination of ‘have kids, blah married, blah life’s over” – it stuck with me.

You have to hold something back.

There is a part of me you cannot have.  I’m sorry.  I don’t mean to hurt you, but this?  It’s me.  I protected it for too long, and got proved right to do so, and now I’ll never, ever part with it again.  There is a core of me I value.   I don’t share it because it’s the depths of me.  You’ll catch glimpses of it, hints of it, accents of it.  But if I were to lay it out all the time it would become like beef jerky, and I’d have nothing left to hold back within myself except hardened, dried up nothing.  If you don’t hold something back, what have you left to fight off the world when it shows its teeth?

I don’t understand how people do it.  The inner well they never thought they had?  I don’t have one.  I’d blow away on the wind, the way shallow pools scorch and wither in the summer winds. 

I cannot be dust for you.  I would rather be a storm that wrecked everything, than something that blew away from under your fingers.

I used to have a cat.  She was small, and black and white with golden eyes.  Her black was very black and shiny, and her white was very white and clean.  She had tiny, neat paws and all of her pussycat imperfections were expressed through a black smudge on her white nose, as if when the God of cats had finished making her, he’d said “Oooo you’re so cute!” and bopped her on the nose with his paintbrush.

My cat was like all cats, in that she had a secret other life when she wasn’t with me, but like all cat owners, I accepted that and never suffered for it.  When she was happy, I was happy.  She came home one day covered in creosote, and she was not happy.  Neither was I.  You wonder, sometimes, what your cat’s doing when she’s not with you, but you never really believe she’s in any danger.  She was examined in horror, she was shouted at for trying to clean herself, and then she was immersed in a bath of warm, soapy water to clean it off.  Like all cats, she was a hedonist, and in the depths of her dispair she found comfort in the hot water, until she was closing her eyes and flattening her ears and sticking her little face into the warm jet from the shower head without being prompted.  (And then sneezing explosively.  She was still a cat, people, she had a tiny brain.)

My cat was moody.  She came to live with me by accident, not design, and she arrived in as a savage little kitten.  She had no fear.  If you cornered her she wouldn’t cower, she’d come out scratching and hissing and whoever was trying to help her the most in any day, that was the person she’d scratch the hardest.  After a couple of years, she stopped scratching people, and never scratched anyone again.  She just joined in with whatever was being done to her – teasing, helping, playing.  My cat had no reason to want for anything.  She was loved.  She was stroked.  She was fed.  She was entertained. 

But still, she was moody.   Some days there was no pleasing her.  When she was in, she wanted to be out.  When she was out, she wanted to be in.  And because we loved her, we tried to please her.  (My mother, in particular, one summer’s night with insomnia, spent the small hours between 2am and 5am letting the cat in the back door when she mioawed.  She would then come up through the house, lie on the bed for 15 minutes to be stroked, then leap up and onto the windowledge.  Out through the open window, along the ledge, she’d execute a five foot bound from the second storey window onto the first storey roof of the neighbour’s extension and she would prowl out of sight for half an hour.  Then she’d reappear at the back door, miaowing plaintively, and my mother would get out of bed and let her in again.)

My cat got a lot of attention.  I was in my mid teens when she appeared first, so she never lived in a house full of people distracted by other things, as houses full of children tend to be.  She had a steady routine that varied little and as a result she flourished.  She became more than her potential as a small, black and white stray moggy would normally have allowed.  If you love something enough, you can bring it out of its shell and past the markers of its boundaries and it will be a joy to delight you.  She lived in a kennel.  (An indulgence of my father’s, who could never quite get past wanting a dog.)  She played fetch.  (An indulgence of mine, because I could never quite get past thinking it was cool that my cat did things you’d normally associate with a dog.)  She played hide and seek.  (An indulgence of my mother’s, who made a game out of chasing her out of the house while never quite banishing her.  She’d been won over by the simple fact that my cat was tiny, pretty and feminine, over and above that natural, effeminate, feline grace.)

In spite of the attention, the love, the sheer level of involvement offered to her, my cat still had days where nothing fit for her.  She would prowl the house, corner to corner, with her head low and her shoulders doing that lazy, circular bob that I will forever associate with the movement of a far bigger cat.  We would ask her what she wanted.  We would try to interact with her.  We offered her the back garden, the front garden and the best seat in the house in that order and she wanted none of them.  We would ask her what was wrong and naturally she couldn’t tell us (or we would have made millions).  But I don’t think she even knew herself.

When my cat died, it was from something that happened to her outside the immediate sphere of protection we offered her.  She had Feline Infectious Peritonitis, and it killed her within 36 hours of being diagonosed.  I think she was eleven when it happened.  (Though her age was always a non specific calculation averaged based on household events.  After all, we spent nearly two years together before we all admitted we belonged to each other.)  Apparently she could have been carrying the virus for years before it manifested. 

When my cat died, we all reacted differently.  I had moved out of my parents’ house years before, and my father was the cat’s primary carer.  He responded as he does with such things – he removed her belongings from the house.  He quietly dismantled the kennel he had built for her.  He scalded out the china bowl that doubled as her feed dish, and placed it back in the crockery cupboard (from whence it had been banished for the duration of the cat’s life).   He managed to hide or wash or shred or bury or burn every last physical object associated with the cat, down to sanding the wood of her kennel to remove the paint and placing the pieces back in the pile of timber in his workshop, ready to be recycled into something else.

I responded as I do to such things.  My first response had been to offer the vet the not inconsiderable credit facility on my Visa card to make sure he covered every available course of action after diagnosis.  He promised he would give her every chance.  The upshot was that it cost me £120 to have my cat die under anaesthetic.  I don’t begrudge him a penny of it.  Especially not after I got the itemised receipt and realised he had refunded the £5 it cost for the cardboard pet transport box we had taken so we could bring the cat down to the surgery.  It is the small and seemingly insignificant things that stay with you.

My mother responded as she does to such things.  She pretends she doesn’t care for a long time and just when you think she really is okay about it, she explodes with something.  (She did something similar when I left for Australia.  She hugged me at the back door, said ‘I hope you have a lovely life’ and walked away into the sitting room.  I didn’t go after her, she didn’t seem to want me to.  Five minutes later, when our car rounded the corner and I could see the front of the house, there she was, standing at the top of the garden, in the full view of all the neighbours in the valley of the squinting windows, waving both of her arms over her head and blowing kisses.)  She was fine when the cat was sick, fine the day she died, then she woke up the next morning and spent the rest of that weekend going about her daily business with tears streaming down her cheeks. 

See, by the the time our cat died, there was just the three of us left in Ireland and it was ages since anything traumatic had happened to us.  Ten years I think (which would have been the departure of the current father-to-be for England, when he was just the newly-graduated-golden-child).  It was a reminder to us that no matter how much you love something, there are things you cannot change.  You cannot love something dead back to life.  If love were enough, nearly everyone on the planet would be happy.

Today I dug a hole in the back garden.  I went out into the dry, hard, stony dirt and started digging a 4ft by 2ft trench for a new compost heap.  Every swing of the pick jarred from my fingers through to my feet because there has been a drought for months.  The soil is baked firm, entagled with old roots and full of sandstone that shatters with the impact of the pick.  I learned a lot of the ‘manly’ skills when I was a child – how to swing an axe, a pick, use a shovel, a trowel, a drill – from my father and my brothers.  So I swung my pick rhythmically, using its own weight and velocity to break the ground, and after a while I began to enjoy the labour.  (Manual labour is cathartic.)  As I dug, something struck me – a story from my childhood, when my father was digging a hole in our garden and a nosey neighbour asked him what he was doing.

“I’m trying to get to Australia” he said to her, “but I can’t afford the fare.”

I kept digging.  I am not sad to be here.  I love this country.  It suits me.  But if just love was enough, then we’d all be happy. 

Aha!! The first mistake!!

What’s new to me?

Australia.

What’s familiar to me?

Work.

So I arrived in Australia two and a half weeks ago and I started working.  In a sort of, hand over fist, things to do kinda way.  Free space?  Fill it with work!  I clamoured to all of my existing providers of work for jobs, thinking they wouldn’t rate me after my move.  The upshot was a week of 16 hour days.  Oops!  But anyway – I got a new PC.  And a desk.  And a chair and a lamp.  Speakers.  I set up all my bits and pieces and paraphenalia – cams and phones and mics and stuff.

Oh lost I was, me in the country, barely a sniff of gum tree and I was head-to-keyboard.  Type type type.  Edit.  Revise.  Check.  Spelling.  Grammar.  Work.  Awake?  Check email.  Asleep?  Wake up and check email.  I know my work.  I can do my work.  It’ll keep me stable.

Various other things – saw people, went out, had meals.  Bought skirt.  Wore it out in public.  (Indvertently into a pub full of Australian men: whole other blog.) 

The result?

The result is I feel like I’m on secondment from my day job.  You know the feeling – you’re somewhere foreign, but you’re still working, and even the evenings don’t feel quite like they’re your own.   And just before bed – no matters how late – you check your email. 

Then today, I went to do all the basic important stuff – tax file numbers, state medical care, ‘hellooooo I’m self employed’.  And the aussies?  They don’t want to know.   I’m here.  I’m here for good.  I’m working for myself.  Look! Look at my paperwork! …oops, sorry, I thought the clasp on that file was closed.  I’ll just pick those up.  That one?  Yes I need that one.  No, no don’t worry about the coffee mark.  I’m sure it will dry out.  DON’T RUB IT.  Okay.  No, don’t worry, it doesn’t matter that you made my name illegible.  I’m sure it’ll still be useful.   Thanks. 

That’s what did it, you know.   I’ve worked so HARD to get here, and some poor creature in the tax office can’t tell the difference between ‘citizen’ and ‘resident’.  I want to shout at her about what this has cost me – physically, financially, emotionally.  But I don’t, because she’s trying to be helpful but she just doesn’t understand. 

I am here.  I am staying here.

How long do I have to be here before you believe me?

There are days when thinking comes easy.  There are days when thinking comes hard.  There are days when the laughter comes easy and there are days when the words come hard. 

And then there are days when you’re pootling through your new life on about two hours sleep and you’re feeding the chickens and your mother-in-law’s goddamned jack russell terrier decides he wants a chicken dinner and in a simultaneous gesture that proves the origin of ‘birdbrain’ one of the chickens sticks her little chicken head through the fence and there’s a quicksilver launch and a snarl and a squawk and then there’s total, utter, chaos.  Feathers and barking and swearing a blue streak a mile wide and it’s 7am and just after first light and most people aren’t properly awake yet and I’ve got a 10lb menace by the scruff of the neck and a 5lb bantam with a bald throat and an expression of indignation and a need to wash my mouth out with soap and all I can think is I want a manicure and a dirty martini and a shotgun.

There is a lot going on for me at the moment.  I’m adjusting to a lot of things.  I’m coming to terms with a lot of things.  The last thing I need is for the backdrop extras to start goddamn eating each other.

I am so tired I have the shakes.  I think I’ll put them to good use by picking up a small dog and throttling him.  It won’t solve the problem of the small dog’s behaviour.  But it will make me feel better.  What is it about small dogs?  I’ve got plenty of large dog friends.  Give me a rottweiler any day over a fox terrier.  People coddle small dogs.  And they turn into little savages.  Nobody coddles large dogs (nobody with any sense anyway). 

See I don’t usually do this.  I don’t usually blog “one day I went to the shops and you’re all bored already” but this is an exceptional circumstance.  Because this morning I was rudely and succinctly reminded that the world has teeth, and it can take a bite out of you whenever it wants to.  However innocuous or inconsequential it may seem, however harmless and manageable, it can turn and take a chunk out of you when you least expect it.  You just need to be careful that you don’t stick your little chicken neck too far outside the fence. 

Hi there, new life.

I’ll be back in a few hours.  I’m just taking some time out to dabble in my old life again and see if there’s anything left in it that I want to take with me.  This blog is coming.  I dallied with the idea of leaving it behind me and moving onto something else, but this isn’t a complete story yet.  This is just a complete chapter.  I’m not done with it.

As for the last five days – well what can I say.  You’ve been fantastic.  Being in you is like being in new love.  I’m still in the shiny days where you give me butterflies.  Thinking about you can stop me in the street, stop me in my tracks and steal my breath away.  I’ll stand still a moment while the feeling passes through me, from my toes upwards, a sort of delicious shiver of potential and excitement because you’re so new, and fabulous, and nothing has ruined you yet.

You’re like being in new love in lots of ways, actually.  I’m still not comfortable with you yet, for instance.  I still make a huge effort to be on my best behaviour.  We don’t quite fit together perfectly yet.  We’re like a newly milled jigsaw or a piece of that flat-pack furniture.  Peg A is due to go into slot B, it’s in the diagram and it’s obvious when you look at the pieces that they should fit, but there are still rough edges that need to be planed off with use so we fit together properly. 

We’re still at the stage where we’re going to expensive restaurants together.  We know we can’t keep it up, but we’re trying to sample a bit of everything so we can come to a decision on what flavours we like best.  Thankfully so far we’re liking the same things, you and I.  Well I hope we are.  (I assume you’re not pretending just to impress me, because that’s always a terrible idea and we’re just going to end up having that embarassing spat in a few months where you tell me you never liked Chinese food and you just go for my sake and actually, it gives you gas, and there were better ideas for your birthday.)

The best part is the feeling of giddiness.  That sort of silly excitement where you can’t get the grin off your face.  I get that with you, new life.  I sit in this house, with the sunshine outside, and the quiet and the stillness, and I can’t shift the goddamned grin off my face.  Every hour is like the morning after the first night I’ve stayed over.  I feel strange, and sort of wrung out.  I look distinctly preoccupied.  I can’t concentrate on much for thinking of you.   I have loads of things to do but can’t focus on any one thing for long enough to get anything done. 

…I’m having a secret affair with my new life. 

It’s a good affair.  Nobody will come off badly in this affair.  Except possibly me, and I don’t believe I will.  Me and my new life – we don’t have to sneak around.  It might serve us to be less than public about any teething problems we’re having, but otherwise it’s all good.  We’re adjusting to each other and binding together and it feels right.  We’re learning each other, the way you have to, learning the landscapes and the noises, the reactions and the faces.  We’re learning when to push each other and when to leave each other alone.  I’m adjusting to my jetlag and my new life is adjusting to having me here, in person, instead of shouting at it from a distance like I have been for such a goddamned age.

You and me, new life, we’ll get there. 

…I got here…

Hello there, new life. 

We’ve not met before, though I’ve spoken to you a few times.  Or rather, I’ve shouted to you.  I’m not sure you’ve heard me, or seen me wave, but I’m nearly there, so I thought I’d give it another go. 

I’m going to be dishevelled when I arrive.  It’s taken me a long time to get there, after all.  I’ll have baggage – thankfully, though, most of it will be physical.  The emotional stuff has fallen by the wayside mostly.  Even if it gets its hooks into you good, as long as you keep moving and fighting it, it loses its grip, withers and dies eventually.  That’s assuming you haven’t fallen in love a little with your baggage, and mounted it on your shoulder like a small creature that you keep fat and glossy, feeding it and stroking it so it never wants to leave.

Anyway, life, I just wanted to have this little chat before we meet properly.  I have a lot invested in you.  In fact, I have everything invested in you.  There are a lot of things I want to do with you.  Personal development things.  Things I largely ignored in my twenties.  These are things I’m hoping will flourish in the sunlight and the quiet and I’m really not open to the notion that they won’t work out.  If they don’t, I’ll simply change my angle by degrees until they do.  An oval peg won’t fit in an oval hole unless you get the angle just right.  There’s no point trying once and giving up.

Life, I have a secret.  It’s been loitering at the back of my mind and I haven’t really spoken to anyone about it.  You know, it’s not really even a secret.  It’s just something I don’t talk about.

If things don’t work out, life, I’m still not coming back.

That’s something I think people will find it difficult to understand.  They think Australia is the end of a journey.  I think it’s just the beginning.  If one small town doesn’t work out in Australia, I’ll be trying a big city.  If that doesn’t work out, I’ll try another small town and another big city.  There’s a home out there with my name on it somewhere, and I’m off to find it. 

I got rid of my debts, life.  I let go of my baggage.  I paid off what I owed and said what I needed to.  I found a job that I can do anywhere, on my own steam.  I found a person who feels the same way.  I married that person.  I acquired material goods, and recently sorted them into what is important to me and what isn’t.  There’s never a reason I can’t take what’s important to wherever I’m going – my important person, my important job, my important baggage. 

The people who think “It’s okay, if it doesn’t work out, you can come back” – there’s something they don’t know.  They don’t know that there’s nothing for me to come back to.  I don’t have a life here.  Certainly I have people I can come back and visit, but I don’t have a home.  That’s why I’m leaving.  I’m leaving to find my home.  The very shapelessness of that concept is so attractive to me – the unmarked potential of everything that involves.  Oh happy roadside shack!  Happy string of consecutive hotel rooms!  Happy empty field with a set of blueprints!  Happy cottage and happy garden and happy trees and happy dog and happy me.

My view changes by the day at the moment.  I’m so close to going that my view of what’s to come is like watching the sun rise.  It’s different by the minute.  It’s very fast, when you’re this close – everything speeds up.  People have stepped back and things are packed away.  The way forward opens and it all becomes clear. 

Nothing in my life felt finer than the moment I realised I was leaving to go home. 

It’s seven days before my stuff leaves for Australia.  I’ve decided to put everything that’s not to be shipped – me, my case, my boots, my passport – into the living room and barricade the door when the packers are here.  Then I can hide like a frightened pilgrim while the Indians sack the rest of the house. 

The very enormity of this move hasn’t sunk in yet.  I know it hasn’t.  I’m walking around my flat and it’s not registering that this time next week, my things won’t be here.  I’m having trouble processing the concept of time.  If I were sitting on a bunch of work that I had to have in for 9am Thursday, I’d be planning and mapping it now and it would slot neatly into my mind as things to be done and when.  As it is, I’m just moving my entire life in a week and it feels like there’s ages to go yet. 

I have a feeling that ‘the last minute’ is not going to be my friend this time around.  There’s lots been done already – goods given away, sold, dumped, binned and packed.  Still though.  There are things that, by necessity, have to wait until the last minute. 

Apparently this includes realising it’s the last minute.

I should be working.  Writing this blog and taking this time out to write a blog instead of working is a bad idea in terms of productivity, and one I’ll be paying for tomorrow.  But right now I need to sort my head out and working on inaugural cultural conference speeches and technical pensions analysis isn’t going to cut the mustard.

Goodbye isn’t what it used to be.  There is no god given reason that, within minutes of you leaving someone, you can’t be speaking to them on your mobile phone.  Or messaging them on the computer.  Or speaking to them and looking at them on a video chat.  In fact, it’s so easy to stay in touch these days we’re often remiss in our thank-you cards and our RSVPs and our keeping of appointments. 

Now that I’m leaving, people want to say goodbye to me.  That’s fair enough – I’m always up for some beers and blather and remember, when I walk away at the end of the evening I’ll be texting you to say I’m home safe within hours and speaking to you tomorrow afternoon to see how your hangover’s coming along. 

This time though, people are saying goodbye to me as though I’m going to be dead to them.

I freecycled my ironing board to a stranger last week.  She thanked me when she collected it, and asked me one or two polite questions about Australia as we were bundling it into her car, along with the iron and a clothes horse.  Then she thanked me again, looked right into my face and said ‘I hope you have a lovely life.  Goodbye.’  It was peculiar, just for a moment, because it is peculiar to hear things like that.  But it also wasn’t peculiar because I don’t know her and I won’t get to know her and I’ll really never, ever see her again.

When I say goodbye to people, I’m already thinking about the next time I’ll see them.  I’m not staring at some yawning abyss ahead of me, stretching as their absence lengthens.  People have been leaving me for my whole life.  They move abroad to work.  They go elsewhere to live.  They get on with their lives.  It’s nothing personal against me, it’s just the way things are.  I’ve had that in my life since I was a child.  My father left to work abroad for months at a time during the building recession.  My brothers both emigrated.  And I see them again.  And I talk to them again.  The shape of our relationship changes, but they’re still there.

So I never give goodbyes a second thought.  I have walked through airport gate after airport gate, leaving people on the other side of the departure barriers and not looking back for more than a grin or a wave.  It’s so easy to forget, when you’re off somewhere interesting, that they have to go back to their lives, looking at the space where you used to be and wondering what to do next.  I can’t for the life of me understand why I’ve not thought about it.  I mean, I know how it feels, going home on your own and the place is empty and silent and – if you’re really unlucky – the dishes are cooling in the sink.  I look forwards when I move forwards.  If you go forwards when you’re looking backwards, sooner or later it’s going to hurt when you collide with something.

We’re nearly at the crescendo now – our stuff ships a week tomorrow.  The flat goes a week on Monday.  I feel like I work and pack and pack and work.  My social calendar is blocked solid with lunches and beers and coffees.  I have a to-do list that would be invaluable if I wasn’t adding two things to it for everything I cross off it.  I know I have to be selfish to do this because otherwise I won’t get through it and the packers will arrive and leave without something I desperately need, or they’ll arrive and leave with my passport and when I look for it it’ll be on a container ship on it’s way down the West African coast. 

But today I had a moment, I had a moment of remembering all the times I’ve been a bit useless at airports, and said “bye” to people as though I were popping to the loo and I’d be back in five and we’d keep drinking and laughing like nothing had happened.  I never thought there was anything wrong with it.  Then I thought back a litte further, to that moment you get home to a quiet, empty house, and tacky dishes.  And you can still smell coffee and a hint of the last meal you had together, maybe cigarette smoke, aftershave or perfume.  Later in the day you’ll open a warderobe or a cabinet and discover something they’ve forgotten when they were packing.  A moisturiser, or a pair of shoes, or a jumper on a hanger, or one earring they lost in your couch. 

Then you lose yourself in cleaning them out of your house.  You wash the bedclothes and the towels, and open the windows.  You put what they left in a bag to take to the post office.  You make fresh coffee and fill the house with new smells, the familiarity of you on your own without them. 

For the next while, you feel down.  It being the first quiet chance it has, your mind goes over all of the things that happened when you had company – the stories, the squabbles, the laughing.  The time when and the time that, and then the moment when and the morning that…  This recycling of recent memories is just your way of processing what’s happened, but it can be an awfully maudlin pastime when you’re on your own.

I remembered that sometimes I have trouble breaking the silence – like turning on the radio or the television, because then the outside world will come in and break the sort of strange period of non-time, when they’re gone but maybe not quite.  It’s like when I turn the radio on they’ll be gone for good and then it’ll be time to wait for the next time they come back.  It’s a strange fact of life, but even when someone whose company you haven’t enjoyed leaves your house, you still miss them when they’re gone.   (Though you may do the laundry and turn the radio on a little quicker.)

See?  I remember what it’s like to be left.  At the moment, that doesn’t make it any easier to split my focus between what I’m doing and being nicer to people, but if nothing else, it’s reminded me to be gracious.