Dear Perth,

Exactly one year ago today, we loaded that wonderful workhorse Norma with all our belongings that weren't in Allied Pickfords land, and, somewhat tearfully in my case, headed towards Kalgoorlie.
It was early enough that the roads were clear, and the pictures from our last lunch at Clancy's at City Beach were still fresh in my mind.
It was also all still new and unreal enough, that the concept of leaving hadn't properly sunk in.
It was shitty saying goodbye to everyone, that eye-burning, throat lodging feeling of an ending... but we all very bravely said "we can visit".

There followed six of the most scenic and beautiful days of my life. Jamie and I shared the driving and writing of the "captain's log"; we enjoyed home made banana bread and fresh coffee, crouched in rain swept truck stops in the desolation of the Nullarbor. How I love that space.

When we passed the "Welcome to South Australia" sign, I cried like an idiot. Without any concrete sorrow to pin the tears to, just chalking up another goodbye in an already lengthy list.

For a long time after arriving in Melbourne, in this familiar yet immensely strange big city, I have missed you Perth like I didn't think possible. I broke down at hearing Winton interviewed, I still read the West (oh god!), and I yearned for any glimpse of coastline or bush that would remind me of you.

There is very little space here, and far too many people crowded into built up streets and narrow houses, not to mention smelly trams and trains. And even now (and I suspect forever), when I go to Dan Murphy's, I linger by the bottles of Shiraz or Cab Sauv that are from the West. The romance of that frontier has not grown old or worn, remaining a steady refrain of love.

Slowly, I am growing into this new home. Here, I relish the man-made, and man-thought. Sometimes, when, from the 31st floor I look out towards the Dandenong ranges, and see the clouds scudding and the thin wet wintery sunshine drool down over the streets of Carlton, I feel a warmth for Melbourne. Not yet love, but no longer indifference.

Here, the people take centre stage. The vast and colourful medley of strangers in our neighbourhood, the friendly, the scary, the hospitable and generous strangers who populate Brunswick and Coburg with colour and life.

We are so 'in the city' here, that it's easy to forget that Melbourne too is a coastal city. That here, whilst not facing west, one can still have the continent at one's back, and be grounded.

Dear Melbourne,

Be patient with me.

This is not a new relationship - though it sometimes feels that way. More like a relationship that we began in high school, and now we're together again, sometimes reminiscing about the things we remember of our youth, and sometimes proudly showing off all that is new, and sustainable and great.

It's a growing process and here, now, after a year, I can freely admit to loving some of your bits. Perhaps this is best described as an adult relationship after some years together - we know each other's faults, accept them, and celebrate the positives with respect and restraint.

...

Sunday morning. Poetry and coffee while my love is sleeping and the suburb slowly ekes out a wakefulness from the night. This learning to get out of bed and carry on, even while he sleeps is a new experience. A loosening grip of novelty, without taking the other for granted. The curve of back in the dawnish light, coming in strips through the blind, the even breath like a sigh of comfort as I usher the meowing monster from the room.

The small spaces of the small apartment grow dense with what are now shared belongings (mixed tupperware!) and there's a certain peace with the expanding and contracting of this space.

Zan came over for lunch yesterday and after hours of gossip she took away the planters, from when I had wanted to plant violets under the lemon tree that didn't survive...and the big pot, with four dead horseradish plants, so now there is a dirty space by the front door, confusing the cat, reminding me of my ungreen thumbs.

It's International Women's Day today, and while the rest of the country goes militant feminist, I am reminded of a warmer, potentially more chauvinistic time, of flowers for the ladies in the office, recognition from Dad and a kind of benevolent condescension. Hmm, now that I write it, perhaps it's not such a good thing, but I sometimes feel tired by the man-bashing lady soldiers whose invective shows up on my feed.

Sunday morning. Unbroken blue sky, Perth's gentle slide into autumn not even beginning, as if she's loading us up with summer to haul us through the Melbourne seasons ahead with stored up vitamin D. And how close those seasons are now - I can see us, booted and coated, walking through close streets , under arching plane trees and over root-disturbed sidewalks. Cafe temptation at every turn. Hip flask of warmth to add to hot lemonade. And affordable haloumi. And words and music and us.

Time for a second coffee, now shared, rising into the morning.

The light was an incredible translucent green, and the little city hung, suspended as if in a dream. The sun had recently set, and those vestiges of day clung to buildings and the sky, and the moon contributed to the gentle milkwash of evening light.

I felt happy after a wonderful catch up with P+L, reflecting on the vast changes that have happened in me in the last year or so, and holy shit the changes still to come.

Terdhajlat

The day is still warm in the pavement beneath my feet as I flip my shoes off on my side of the street.
I love this summerness, or rather, it seems later, this is the summerness I love. Not the searing wet heat of the sun at noontime, but this muted, shaded night-time summer. Bringer of voluptuous frangipani smells that waft over me like a heavy scarf. Heat making the illusion of stars simmer, tremble at the edges.

There is something sensuous about heat like this at night. Not the dense blanket of unbreathing in a closed bedroom, but this festival heat - illusory lights and jaunty music, crowds milling despite Monday. Skin-revealing, smile-making enveloping summer.

Hamvas Bela wrote, in his Philosophy of Wine that the most sensuous part of a woman, the place where her essence is smelt is the bend of her knee. Terdhajlat.
I remember reading the slim green volume in Budapest, aged twenty perhaps, still naive (and still!) enough to sigh at such description. Now I think perhaps Hamvas had had more wine than philosophy, but perhaps there is something to be said for that difference. I can picture cool shadows in a springtime meadow, wine with a proper cork, skirt lifted to just above the knee and sunshine abandon. I like this emerging. It's the winter retreating I fear, but seriously, after this much 800% humidity, I am ready to sweat less.

Not the red army

All over central Perth there are plasticked, flapping flags proclaiming Red Army - the Perth basketball team, whateverthefuckthey'recalled. While this is reality on Hay Street, in the vaulted chamber of the Perth Town Hall, a group of dancers from Tbilisi sit on chrome and leather chairs, facing away from the audience.
I am in the front row, randomly next to a guy from work and his wife.
The hall is close to empty, but I have knots in my guts from wanting to hear this, and somewhat also see it.

The lights go down- the red enamel making the houselight quality diffuse in a warm wash. Bizet begins  Perhaps not in the exact chords in which I am accustomed, but Bizet all the same.
The female dancers are all clad in shiny black lycra, with mesh back-inserts, while the men wear loose back trousers and pleated black tunics, all perfectly fitting.
All of their shoes are black with red soles. The simplicity in itself is moving.

It begins, and almost immediately I am transported in a way that makes me dread the end. The blurb was right, even without words the movements and the feeling convey the Prosper Merimee story.
When Carmen herself emerges from behind the curtain to join the women in the cigarette factory, her head of flaming red hair swarms about her shoulders like a maddened clusp of red butterflies.
Her bones jut, yet she is voluptuous. Her cheekbones lend mischief to a wonderfully angular face.
Her cobbled spine shines under a spit of sweat in the light - no black mesh to mask her here.

Don Jose, swarthy, long haired, perfectly pathetic falls for her, clutching the imaginary flower in his trembling, empty hand. The dance is sensuous, close, but non-committal, after all "love is like, a gypsy child..."

And the dancers return to the stage, with skirts draped around their rounded hips. The music makes me eyes bubble over and my heart soar.

Then Escamillo enters, and here is the magic of interpretation. Escamillo is slim, almost skinny. For some reason he is also in a wheelchair, which detracts none from his sex appeal to the writhing women on stage. Yet even without his usual bulk, and even without his usual honeyed, soily voice he is a captivating presence, and as necessary, he finds his Carmen.

And about the magic of interpretation - Carmen at the Highgate Hotel - she was five months pregnant and anything but gypsy but she was perfect. Carmen at the Statsoper in Berlin - the most minimalist stage set  I had ever seen, and neither the singing now surtitles were in a language I understood, yet there was more emotion in that performance than at the Sydney opera house.

Then, the panic of the crowd increases. The women return with black mesh shrouds and wrap their faces, swinging their arms above their heads - a false Greek choir in Seville.
In the end, Carmen in her sorrow pulls Don Jose's knife into her centre and the story is complete.

I loved it.
I wished the audience was more full, and I wish it had lasted longer, or that I could have just pressed replay. I sat on the bus on the way home with a smile dancing on my face and them Bizet tears in my eyes.


And before Carmen, on a wild blustry very un-Perth afternoon, I found Matt again and we sat in the worst pub ever, 43 below or some shit like that, and drank a bottle (bobble) of bubbles "let's get fucked up" and spent a perfect hour laughing and making bad bad jokes. This week has started with far too much booze to be healthy, but so much damn perfection.

I am ready for all the crazy change this year is promising.
And now, cat furred from a necessary hug, and sleepy I will put on the Suites and lie on the bed.

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.