andrew, in waiting.

i have been, 'officially,' adventuring for eighteen months. sometimes on nights fuelled heavily with gin or wine or homesickness, i've looked through fifteen plus pages of my blog and marvelled at the enthusiasm i displayed when this first began, in early 2014. how i'd gone home to rest for a year before, i imagine, coming out here and buying a camper van loaded with provisions to scare of snakes. i've still never seen a snake. i'd romanticised the whole thing like i'd always done.. drinking coffee and wine, falling in love with strangers who'd come into my life and leave the next day, friended on Facebook, as i packed up my travelling patio suite to carry on to wherever next google maps may suggest to me and off i'd go.. merrily leaving lovelock markers all over a country bigger than the continent i came from.

and yet, not so obviously to me at the time but predictably clear to me now, about two weeks into the whole shebang i'd found a new family. because it seems that i'm not just quite the free spirit i'd thought myself to be. in an attempt to guarantee my continued stay in Australia via visa criterium and limited cash earned/cash spent ratio, i'd landed myself a voluntary role and as if the whole act of hand feeding kangaroos and emus weren't enough, i'd happened upon a pair of souls only too happy to embrace me and welcome me inwards to their odd little home, and then chaperone me upwards at night to the room built into the roof of their warehouse.. inclusive really of the rats, surprisingly, the whole thing was rather homely. so to leave after 4 months in chase again of adventure felt a little bit more scary in practise than the whole act of showing up there in the first place truly had. kilts and all.

and when that ski season adventure ended and i rolled of the mountain for an interview on lygon street, hopeful of excitement, i wondered where i'd end up. i got the job - but i never showed up for my first shift. i wasn't so broke that i had to accept a shitty wage the same day so instead i took to a balcony in Docklands and i got ship wrecked and lost my shoes. that same night i spoke to a boy and some three days later, i rolled up to his house, full of amusement  at the whole mess of my life and laughing at how i'd explain myself until this point if he dared ask. he did. i don't really remember anything else from the whole sober night, except him eventually breaking our kiss at around 2am, muttering 'you're killing me' and wondering where i'd kicked off my shoes this time.

i guess the fuckery of the whole situation is that i didn't really expect so much from it. i was just looking for a brief connection and i didn't hold any hopes that i'd see him again, because experience left me bereft of positivity and y'know.. i didn't know too much about him. i didn't really know what to expect so i expected nothing and as he drove me home at 3am, i tried to distract myself from thinking about how i'd like to see him again by reminding myself that i held no ties to anything and was leaving again soon enough and it was probably all for the best anyway, because i'm a clusterfuck of emotional ambiguity and no one deserves to put up with that, even if they kicked a kitten once by accident when they were a child.

so really, it all kind of came as a surprise to me tonight when i came home from work and sat down on the sofa i first sat down on over a year ago to take off my shoes and talk to my father in law, a man who a year ago was in Greece as i lay all over his sofas watching films with his son, who's second name i was convinced was Collins, then to go upstairs to see him sleeping in my bed and kick my shoes off before planting myself in my usual seat on the veranda in the Melbourne spring, thinking about how this all happened and where it came from and why and where the time went, and how i have to be up early in the morning because we're day tripping, and in ten weeks we're going home to spend christmas with my family, and it'll be the second time in a year we'll be spending time with them together, and probably the last before we go back to the uk and..

it spins. the whole world spins. sometimes i feel sick from it all.

but the last year i have had this precious man holding my hand when the dizziness has been consuming, and i hope that he's appreciated me holding his when his world has been trying to cast him into orbit too.