Every Thursday evening I sit down to write this post and I think to myself, wow, wouldn’t it be nice if nothing had happened this week?
But of course, I know that is impossible.
For I am alive and so are you, and so by that measure something is always happening: good or bad or mundane, there is always something. And that in and of itself is a good thing. We’re lucky to be here. I’m lucky to have you reading this.
I’m lucky to have the time and energy and space to write new sentences this evening, which has been few and far between in the months since I launched this project and started actually facing the reality of my recovery.
I guess, what I’m trying to say, is that Pitbull was right: every day above ground is a good day. I’m trying to take his advice and remember that.
Indeed, in the last week of travel, I have much-enjoyed being able to ground my otherwise very chaotic freelance-journo-media-editor-backpacker life into something with some resemblance of stability.
I file all of my Australian client work by 6pm every Thursday over here in the UK. Then I go for a walk or I go grab a bite to eat with a mate or I post a shit tonne of memes on my Instagram story and then I lie down in bed and I write to you.
It’s not always my own bed. Sometimes it’s a couch at an Airbnb. Sometimes it’s my friends sofa. Sometimes it’s a hotel bed if I can splurge, sometimes it’s a hostel dorm. But wherever it is, on any corner of the globe, I do enjoy writing to you — wherever, and whoever, you are.
It’s been really sunny in Scotland this week, and as we know, I am a mere simple organism that thrives off sunlight and sea water.
This time next week I’ll be far, far away from the ocean — up in the clouds instead — and I’m very much looking forward to where (and who) I’ll be when I land.
What’s in a home, anyway?
My gorgeous friend Shivani wrote a piece about this very topic last year on her Substack — a few weeks after we met in a ridiculously weird and yet very typical fashion of both of our lives — that summed up my feelings towards the wayward traveller life better than I ever could.
And while I feel at home in three different places in the world, there is an undeniable truth of where my heart lies and where I yearn for: the backyard of my childhood home.
Living on acreage meant that backyard wasn’t just a backyard, it was my own Terebethia.
It was a place I could run to. A place I could hide. A place I could write, a place I could swim, a place I could read, a place I could laugh, a place I could cry. A place I could jump on fallen down trees with my neighbour. A place I could ride motorbikes with my brother. A place I could camp in a tent in the middle of winter or go for midnight swims in the scorching Queensland summer.
And it still is.
November 2023 — my niece’s first birthday — was the last time I stepped foot in my literal home soil, and I’m noticing in the way my body craves the salt water after too long in a city that my bones are now aching for the feel of that very grass beneath my toes.
That feeling is, quite frankly, the best Valentine I could ever hope for.
Eavesdropping on public transport
A few times in the past two years I’ve found myself in the situation of helping tourists with directions here in Edinburgh.
It’s a funny thing, isn’t it? To cross over that bridge from ‘tourist’ to ‘local’ yourself, even if you still feel so detached from the city you’ve been calling home for so long.
Sometimes these tourists will ask me directly for help, and other times I’ll get too anxious on their behalf that they’re about to miss their stop because they can’t understand the Scottish accent announcing our arrival at Haymarket or Waverley.
In those instances, I always say “Sorry, I don’t mean to eavesdrop, but we’ll be at [insert their station] in about two minutes…”
The thing is, I’m never, ever sorry to eavesdrop. I fucking LOVE to eavesdrop. I love to listen in to people’s conversations on the bus, on the train, at a coffee shop, in the park. I thrive in overhearing these whispers between friends, between lovers, between colleagues, between strangers.
And while I myself was on the train last week, approaching Haymarket, I heard two boys — no older than 18 — discussing their weekend in Scotland.
They were English, and it seemed as though they were dating, but it was also 3pm on a Thursday and I’m so ridiculously in love with my own friends that I forget other people don’t have the same blurred attachments.
Nothing they said was of much note, until one of the boys stared aghast out the window, looking at the moon.
The other boy could not have cared less, and voiced as much.
“It’s just the moon,” he sighed, turning his eyes back to his phone. But myself and the other boy stared on, marvelling at the moon in the bright blue sky at 4pm on a Thursday.
I’m so thankful for my friends, all of whom are scattered around this planet, all of whom know it is never, ever ‘just’ the moon.🌙
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