settling in canberra of sorts

not settled, no, but i am here. i take a lot of photos of the streets. i want to find this cemetary that someone i knew in another life sent me, with a beautiful angel looking over the ground.

the churches here are small and beautiful and there are trees on every corner, starting to turn auburn already. it's almost autumn and i am far from home, and trying to make a new home here, in streets that are oddly familiar, and completely alien, looking at books in stores i've heard of but never seen, living out what was a dream of 7 years ago, only vastly completely different. a totally incomprehensible distortion of where i thought i would be, i ended up in canberra anyway, wandering the streets alone, and feeling almost happy to be here, and very happy to be alone, but tired of the lonely. i look in electric shadows, this beautiful indie bookstore which is two streets over from my apartment, and i try to learn to cook, stutteringly, with vegetables and peanut sauce from a jar. i have a bunny, named by my ex boyfriend, and best friend in the world, my soulmate in a friendship sense, while walking home, after midnight, dreamily through new farm. i miss him, i miss my streets, my new farm, my valley, my city, and i am in this alien place that smells strange, and is filled with memories that aren't mine.


i am starting to find a way around this city, in this new skin, in my new job, the Dream Job. i am knitting more again, thinking about drawing, perching around markets, learning to blow glass soon, writing emails to my friends and missing them with every night i don't want to go out because it feels forced and i listen to friend's music, i listen to steel guitar and i think of my henry, and the magical few months we had when the world iced over with our love that melted horribly fast... and i think of jule in ever footstep around, missing him, missing his world and seeing the perfection and beauty that he glosses the universe with. i miss lachlan like air, gasping him in with daily phone calls, poking on facebook, he sends me receipes. i miss my beautiful eliza and her smile that glows, glows glows out of her heart across the state, sometimes i almost feel it here this far away, and my katy, i want to do jigsaws, and snuggle her and write little poems to each other. my joe and my tani, my beautiful friends who most people would never be comfortable with what we all shared together, but they, they wouldn't understand how beautiful it really was, and how sacred, and trusting, and sharing, and understood it was. how natural. and that, that is a fragment of who i miss and how i miss them. i miss anita, my special, special sister and housemate, my jordie and his wide green consumptive eyes and that hair that slings into them, the way he'd drag a strand across his cheek and chew on it absently...

i find pieces of the past i never lived in my workplace, in pancakes, in a large reflective lake but it's all so distant that i feel wry, slow, behind, about the shadows. i grasp for poetry, and i remember things, and i fall back into other words with my henry, and our own shadow that swallowed us. remembering to take it out of words and look at people before i lose my heart in language ever again, knowing it's hard to learn, it's hard hard hard to learn. it makes me feel young, and old, at the same time, smelling this air that tastes like trees and green and the verge of raining, and the dryness, the lack of sweat, the promise of coats and velvet, and of those parks that lead me dreaming, of holding hands through them, interlaced, with someone i love. i can place so many people i miss there, but i feel.. slowly excited that there are new people, new people whose hands can lace with mine as we wander the parks. i miss my friends no less because of this. and the shadows don't haunt me at all, they just deepen the view.