song of the moment -

it’s just a drop in the ocean
a change in the weather
i was praying that you and me might end up together
it’s like wishing for rain as i stand in the desert
but i’m holding you closer than most
cause you are my heaven
- ron pope, “a drop in the ocean”

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so it’s october, again.

i felt it stronger than ever in york – stepping deliberately into piles of fallen leaves by the pavement, listening to the crunch crunch sound of crisp red and brown beneath my new boots, wrapping my jacket tighter round myself as the wind whipped at my hair and the ends of my scarf. the air up north always smells fresher, cleaner, lighter.

just like a time warp, i thought, and later said. so much i knew and loved is still there, unchanged; york hogroast, the milkshack, the starbucks near the minster, where we used to sit in the window and people-watch. i swear the shops in the town square round the fountain have barely changed at all since my first year, when i first trod the cobblestones of the shambles and marvelled at diagon alley made real. yet there is always also something haunting about it – almost tennysonian, in memoriam-esque, where i’m acutely aware that the people who made the place for me have left and moved on. and the city, as i stroll through it, is peopled with ghostly memories: shadows stealing round street corners, spectres in the doorways of shops.

leaving is always so difficult. i’ve been saying goodbye, bit by bit, piece by piece, to the dreamlike spring and summer of ‘09; yesterday was my last farewell. time to stop hanging on. time to let go.

…or not, really. It isn’t that cold here in Sydney – an average of 12 to 14°C during the daytime, dipping down to maybe 9°C or so during the night; significantly colder than currently-summery York but nowhere near the frigid depths of northern English winters, and nothing I can’t take (wait a couple of weeks and I’ll be complaining about not being able to type my dissertation because my fingers are freezing off).

The last couple of weeks in York were whirlwind – drinks, pub quizzing and suffering random harrassment from a creepy American chap with Mander; Red Chilli with Susanna, where we had to order fish to share because she doesn’t take any other meat and I discovered for the first time that York sometimes does have very decent fish indeed; Eleena’s visit and the first proper cooked breakfast I’ve had in York all year, with scrambled eggs, baked potato and bacon; a frenzy of Railway Children activity at the Theatre Royal which involved the filing of a million press clippings and reviews and 1.5 hours of standing at the National Railway Museum giving out flyers; yummy Garden of India takeout and plenty of random chitchat with Kevin and Rokey, thinking this might be the last time for a long time that I see either of them boys; lots and lots and lots of packing and moving, and of course the dissertation final draft (here a misleading term which actually means only about half the thing has been written, and mostly crappily).

All of that, plus passing through Singapore and meeting up with my lovely, lovely friends there, and finally touching down here after two solid days of travelling has stirred up in me that old feeling of being pulled in a million different directions, that question of… how do I balance all this? How do I portion out my time and myself for all these different places and people when I love them all, when I don’t want to leave any of them, when I just wish foolishly that I could pack everything and everyone with me in a bottomless suitcase, have it all in one place? Just when I thought I had it sorted, I find again that I haven’t a clue, I don’t have any answers. I know something’s got to

Now that I’m finally here with my family after nearly 10 months of being away, all I really want to do is catch a breather, sleep in for a week and recover properly from jetlag… but I know I’ve not done anything for a week, dissertation-wise, and if I want to knock out another 10,000 words before September 22nd I have to hustle soon.

breathe, just breathe, I keep telling myself.

“Sometimes,” he sighed, “I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.”

It occurs to me, chillingly, that the older I grow the better I get at goodbyes – not because of any laudatory emotional control I’ve developed, or because I’ve learned that precious skill of letting go gracefully – but because a part of me just doesn’t get as attached anymore. Whether it’s a self-defence mechanism against a long string of farewells or the inevitable conclusion to an over-nostalgic youth, I don’t know. Everyone has graduated, everyone is leaving, tomorrow there’ll be an empty house, and where I would have been a nervous ball of tears a few years ago I find myself now fluctuating wildly between a silent, throbbing sorrow and a firm faith that this isn’t goodbye, just a hiatus till the next time we meet again. It’s really the latter that’s anchoring me right now, but I don’t think I’d have been able to find that anchor back when I first came here.

Daddy told me a few years back that I ought to be happier about moving out and moving on, throwing away the old, leaving the past behind, because it meant that we were on the cusp of a shiny new future. I hope, perhaps unreasonably, that I’ve managed to learn that lesson; but I know somehow inside that this new alacrity with goodbyes isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I almost wish I was a nervous ball of tears, because my emotions felt so much more real then. I wonder where this clinical, rational thinking came from, I wonder if it’s a cold, icy self-preservation to keep the ball-of-tears version of me from wasting away after the millionth farewell, I wonder if I haven’t lost something in gaining the new calm.

It’s strange, isn’t it? I spend almost three years trying to get over goodbyes, to get used to the idea that everything comes to an end, and the day I find I’ve finally done so, I want nothing more than to undo it all and just cry like a child again.