A balcony in Subiaco, overlooking a road with clean lines and modern buildings. Little human activity. The sun is slowly sliding down the western horizon, oozing a warm orange over our reading forms.
The scene (at least in my head) is magestically poetic. And so fucking perfect my toes won't uncurl.
We are into day three of the Christmas madness and the wonder still hasn't ceased, or shown any sign of abating.
We are somehow brazenly, unstoppably happy.

On Christmas Eve, during the day, I pottered and cleaned and prepared food and had luxurious and wonderful thoughts. I went to Belmont to see Eamonn and Lisa and had my hair 'done'. For the pleasure I also had to endure the Bayswater/Belmont bus, but in the end it was worth it.
Back in Maylands I treated myself to a delicious and fresh raw tuna bento and walked home up the hill in a heat-haze of happy.

Everything about our first Christmas was perfect. Honestly. Yeah maybe we could have tried a different flavour on the bruschette, and maybe the duck would have fared better at a different temperature, but seriously, it was the happiest December 24th since I left Kolozsvar, and that was a bloody long time ago.
The gifts were giggle-making and thoughtful by turns and even the conversations with Dad (in the bath and minus Margo thank fuck) and Mum, Sandor, Tusi and Laci didn't lead to tearful renditions of Mennybol az Angyal and Pasztorok Pasztorok like I had occasionally feared.
It was especially good to hear Laci's warm rumble - of all my very few relatives, it is he who pops into my head the most, and how despite his big heart and endless reserves of love he is back living with his mother, aged fiftysomething and alone. It also makes me think about how Tusi feels, that both her children in a sense failed at married life - how much of that burden do parents carry?
But moving away from the maudlin, the conversations, while brief, were all entirely happy.
I think I am finally proving to myself that a family of two is indeed possible. Ed was a sourpuss all night, but he still gets to be our plus one :)

Christmas Day dawned with the same seared blue sky and clear light as the day before and we had lunch with Shannon and Paul and family to look forward to. I thought, for a very short few moments that it would be odd, us orphans and then the rest of them all family, but as it always is with Shannon, it was effortlessly warm and familiar, and we spent the next happy twelve hours drinking and eating and talking and splashing in the pool with the dog with the prettiest ears ever.

And today? After a bbq breakfast of leftover ham, apple and pork sausage, tomatoes dressed with fresh basil and Margs olive oil, eggs and toast we trundled home, to appease Ed, to drink coffee, to lazily plan the day, to marvel at our great good luck.

We lay for a while on City Beach (and how glorious to be there again, at 'my' beach), read our books, did some splashing (me very wussily just at the ankledepths) and returned to Subi before our hunger turned to hanger. Alas, almost nothing in the deserted streets seemed open, and when even our burrito dreams were dashed with Zambrero being closed, we settled for the market, and feasted on quite incredible chicken tagine with the most divine chilli paste, and some fresh Vietnamese rice paper rolls with zingy dressing.

And now here.
Dusk, and then sunset. Pipe smoking, beer drinking, slow reading afternoon. And absolutely nothing is missing. Birds alight randomly atop the building across the road, and their sharp silhouettes graze the sky. But otherwise there's a small breeze and nothing else. No hubbub, no stress, and certainly no seasonal fear.

I have just started to read Hemingway's biography by Carlos Baker and whilst I am only up to his first entry into the war, I already have that transporting feeling I always get whenever I read Hemingway, or Fitzgerald (both of them). It's lovely and a little sad to read of a time when letters were still written with intent, and objects were named because they weren't every day and pedestrian. When we gave weight to things and occasions and behaviour and appearance mattered.

Part of me wants to look back on the year past, and make promises for the year to come, but the past 34 have taught me that it is a pattern I keep repeating for no real good.
Recently I came across the three year diary I had bought at Kikki-K which requires a sentence a day and that I had started back in the Greenwood period- it was interesting to read back the things I was fleetingly thinking a year ago. It's good that I have moved on.
So essentially, I think I just want to go with it, and at the very least and very most do my best to be present.

I talked to Bud today- that head-shakingly impossible sensation of being so damn proud of her yet railing at the injustice of this latest move. It seems we really will have to wait till we're 85 to sit on a porch in the dying light and be bored together.

But this sitting in the dying light of day, doing not very much at all, and reflecting suits me well now. I have space and courage in my heart to just sit and think and that is a new thing, and a very wonderful thing. And there is jacaranda outside the window, and a gentle greying of the evening, and insulated in this bubble, which thankfully is porous enough to let the world in, I am ridiculously, retardedly hopeful.

Christmas

What I am about to write is very hard to believe and to imagine. It is just 7am on Christmas morning (well, Christmas Eve morning then) - and I am rested (despite the 4.30 waking) and HAPPY. I am listening to Mahalia Jackson Christmas songs and there are on tears in sight, no sad thoughts, no Christmas panic. 

As I listened to her gorgeous rich voice rise in Hark! the herald angels sing, I thought I should write now, because the next few days I might be busy living life and not thinking about committing it to paper/blog. 

Where did the fear go? 

Don't get me wrong, the tunes and crowds in shops can still make me homicidal, but I have to say I organised my logistics so well this year that shop visiting has been minimal. 

But the fear... being in love like this- this crazy, safe, unquestioning love- makes everything possible. Even creating new Christmas traditions in our family of two (sorry Ed, three).  

Today is flower buying, present wrapping, nail painting and relaxing, waiting for my love to finish work and come home. 

Today is gratitude, genuinely, not just for facebook - for everyone and everything that has helped me claw my way out of what I will call the Greenwood situation and find my feet and heart here in this little shoebox flat. 

The sound of the washing machine, the sunlight streaming in, promise of 32 degrees today - seriously everything strikes me as beautiful today. And there is so much hope in the future. 

I can't get no sleep

- cue heart lifting, mind-racing track from Faithless and an onslaught of summer memories -

Actually, it's not glamorous. And at the moment for me, inexplicable. I wake up, at 3 or 4 some mornings, and just can't drop back to sleep. The cat is confused, and I'm getting grumpy.
During the daytime, thankfully, it's not a fall-asleep-in-meetings kind of sleepy, but rather a bone-deep lethargy.

I swear part of it is the time of year. Part of it is all the bad shit that is happening all around us, and despite my lack of TV and no longer religious listening to Fran, it still seeps through (thanksalottwitter).
And not just in the wider world, but friends who are suffering, feeling alone. This time of year lends itself to misery far too easily. When instead there should be nothing but love, and the crisp scent of pine needles, and candlelight, good food and drink and no stress at all.

When everything should be shiny and sun-splashed - and for the most part it is - I'm still waking up with too many heartbeats and a too full head. Full of what? I actually don't know. The first feeling I register when I note that it's not quite light enough outside and Ed is still curled peacefully at my elbow is panic. Naked panic like oh no not again as I look at the time.

I'm tired and fat and oversensitive and so incredibly desperate for a few days off work. And they're coming.
I've recently re-read Joan Didion's essay on Self Respect and it echoes so strongly with me. I want to live a good life, in the present and I don't want to waste time.

On the way to Melbourne in October

On the plane, the grass silvered by the wind as it is tufted by the sun. Turned, lit and dancing. I watch the light start to change as we taxi and I wonder if this is the start of a protracted farewell?
If it is, I know with a deep calm that whilst it will be difficult and painful, I won't be beset by the same keening panic as before.
We rise, and Perth's dear minimalist skyline appears in the afternoon haze - as if soft filters had been applied.
As if sketched in charcoal the buildings shimmer in grey-brown. We rise higher and beyond the city, the sea - an undefined body. And before the city, the river - a shining golden snake glinting in the just setting sun; the just setting afternoon.
We bank sharply left and now there is the wing - just the wing and the sky and the changing colours. As we track east and the sun abates more rapidly there is that colour. That unique colour the thought of which used to rip at my heart when I lived away. That singularly Australian mix of not quite-night and no longer day. And now, edging closer to the east in this magical tin box - again, there is no panic. No aching fear of the change.

Forgiveness is an odd thing, and something I've never been good at.
Obviously my memory kind of stops with Very Old Spice, but I'm sure it began before that. I am good at apologising - perhaps because I've felt I've needed to do it so much, and hence have plenty of practice, but the idea of letting go of some comforting anger stumps me.
Even when there is really no cause for the anger. And even when I myself don't understand why I continue to nurture it, or even where it began.

At lunchtime today, walking back to the office with Christmaspresent books in my hand, I ran into SM - a girl I had had a stupid not-talking-to-you not quite fight with, because ... because why? Because GF stopped being my friend when they fell in love? Because he's the douche and not her? Anyway, it was all very childish (yet you'll note that I am still not  letting go of any anger directed at him) and slowly we've started smiling and talking again, and lunchtime today was a proper long chat. And it was a pleasure.

I walked back to the office both smiling and shaking my head at my own stupidity, but there you go.


When the hormone and full moon monsters aren't chewing my equilibrium I am currently in a place where I can go for long walks (and soon runs as well hopefully) with no distraction in my ear and listen to simple things, like the waves and the wind, and not feel a quickening of panic in my chest. These are the good things. And there are so many good things at the moment, that my thoughts trip over themselves in their hurry to be heard.

I keep asking myself, with regards to love, now - how did this happen? And I know it's not a question seeking an answer, it's just that this thing is so ripe and wonderful and real that my little mind boggles at times, and then I need to just lie back and pinch myself and be present.