Heartache

I miss Boy.

Everywhere I turn, everything I see....just reminds me of him. I realise that the day will come when I'll be able to move forward but right now....my heart is just so full of missing him that I can't see straight sometimes.

I can't help it. He lit my life up with a kind of technicolour sparkle and I miss living life that way.

Adelaide

I'm so glad that I deliberately planned to start work next month just so I could fit in a road trip to Adelaide with a bunch of friends. It turned out to be an incredible amount of fun. We talked, listened to music, bickered and snoozed in the car through the long drives and just generally cozied up to each other.

We drove overnight from Melbourne to Adelaide in an 8 seater Tarago so we all drove a couple of hours each then went straight to the German village of Hahndorf for a seriously meaty German lunch. That lunch.....lets just say that I literally gag at the thought of a bratwurst right now. I think that I ate enough smoked pork and sauerkraut to last me years. But we had fun wandering around the village and managed to fit in one wine tasting at the Bridgewater Mill before heading back to Adelaide city.

The second day was ALL ABOUT THE WINE. Sunny, beautiful and deliciously boozy Barossa Valley just begs to be explored and tried. Seriously, if you harbour any pretensions of being an oenophile, you must go there to try their wines. The cheese poem posted earlier was taken on that day, at a small village in the Barossa where we stopped to buy cheese for lunch. Funny how a simple lunch of fresh tomatoes, rye bread, ham and cheese can taste so good when eaten with friends sitting around a groundsheet in some out of the way park. It was just so gorgeously fresh and delicious.

The third day, we went camping in a national park. One of my friends, B, a camping virgin was totally wide eyed and shocked the entire drive into the national park. One of the guys had spent the entire trip telling her that she'd have to pee in the Margaret river and she was really afraid that there wouldn't be any proper toilets(there were). Her exclamations of joy and excitement when she saw the bathrooms were a riot. I've never seen anyone else get so worked up about seeing the toilet sign and I don't think I ever will again.

This was a sort of 'Goodbye beautiful Australia, I'll come back someday' trip for me. We passed the 12 Apostles on the way back and I waved to that long lovely stretch of coastline that I never tire of seeing. I don't think I'll forget it, the wildness of the bush and country, the cool stretches of blue sky, beach and sea and most of all, that sharp tang of eucalyptus.

I don't know if I'll get so immured in the dirt, sounds and smells of the city that I'll forget to come back. But I'll try to remember how good it was, how my heart lifts at the sight of open spaces...and how even city girls like me could wind up loving the country.

Yesterday

Yesterday, I said goodbye to the city I fell in love with, fell in love in and had my heart broken in.

Yesterday I sat in my favourite cafe with Boy, wearing my cuddly cashmere coat, eating focaccia surrounded by happy gourmands and people out to do their Saturday morning grocery shopping at the Victoria Market.

Yesterday, I cleaned out my apartment, the apartment where I'd thrown countless parties, cried in, learned to bake and cook and love in.

Yesterday I left Melbourne.....boarded a Qantas flight and flew over the desert and bush, back to Singapore.

Yesterday....is over.

I'm back...but I'm not sure if I'm home.

Taken in a South Australian cheese shop

One of my favourite cafes

Goodbye

I rarely blog anymore and there's a reason behind it and that reason would be my ex boyfriend (who is not to be confused with the Boy and will be referred to as X in future) and I was just thinking about that whole debacle last night.

To put it baldly, I closed my old blog in the months after the break up with X because I realised he was still reading it, still commenting on it and still used it to feel involved in my life. In short, I realised he wasn't letting go and the blog facilitated that. I also closed it because I realised I had no right to stop him from doing any of it. This is the world of the internet and I was fully aware that a blog is part of the public domain. I could have locked the blog with a password the way some of my friends did but it would take away some of the things that made blogging fun.

But the nature of my break up necessitated the closure of the blog and I did it because I owed it to myself to break free of the guy who was and is the worst thing that ever happened to me. I wasted 6.5 years of my life with him and enough was enough. I was glad I was a thousand miles away in Australia and I wanted to be a thousand miles away from him in any and every possible way. I also owed it to Boy (with whom I was starting a new relationship) to cut my ties with X once and for all.

I still miss my old blog. I had a few regular readers who'd leave me comments and emails every so often and I miss that. I feel like I never really made this blog my own the way I made the other. But I have no regrets closing it because getting away from that guy was worth it.

Last night, as I was falling asleep after a long phone conversation with my best friend, it suddenly struck me that I never really blogged the way I did previously, because somewhere, in some corner of my mind, I was still afraid of X. I was still afraid he'd read it and follow it and use it to get to me somehow. I was still afraid.

X met me when I was a stupid, emotional and vulnerable kid and I stayed with him because I literally knew no other life, no other guy. In the years I was with him, I grew anti social, was isolated from my friends and grew to hate myself for that emotional dependence on him. All those parties and outings I missed or skipped out early on? All due to X.

How to describe him? X was screwed up, selfish, liked to argue and needed to be right over every issue no matter how small. When he was late for our dates and I got mad, he'd tell me that I was too anal about time and that time was merely a human construct. And seriously, when I look back I can't believe I was gullible enough to swallow that crock of bullsh**. He believed himself to be an iconoclast, someone who was different and who didn't need to follow the usual rules of society.

I'm not there anymore. I'm not afraid anymore and I don't want or need or love him anymore.

I can write freely again.

Stranger tragedies

I got woken up by a call at 4 am this morning and it led to a strange and surreal day. A day in which I wound up at the hospital, staring down at the unconscious figure of a girl I knew only from the briefest of email correspondences.

When you move overseas and live far away from friends and family, particularly when you're new to the country, there exists a network of acquaintances and friends whose telephone numbers and email addresses just get passed along to you. Because, sometimes, when you're alone in foreign country, it may be that your contact person in case of an emergency might be a mother's friend's brother or friend's cousin or some similiarly distant person.

Today I wound up being that person, because today, the offer of "call me if you need any help" was finally taken up in a way I never imagined.