can’t sleep, won’t sleep, lie in bed, miss my rcm family, miss the rides to school, and the 8-10am room bookings that would spur me into the shower at half six. • lie in bed, miss my friends, dream all day of kissing sydney mates on the cheeks and laughing in driveways about swiss german accents as homemade carrot cake is passed from hand to hand, heart to heart. •
can’t hate loving home, can’t hate missing the people who are ten thousand miles away, i love them all and i’m stretched halfway across the globe. • go to bunnings, go to bunnings again, put seeds in the ground, mark on the calendar when they’ll come up. fertilise the herbs, don’t forget to do the parsley again this wednesday. knead dough, recipes from friends half a world away, make pancakes (the ones mum made when we were small), all these different times and places all colliding in myself all at once right now. •
learn about bagged milk in milk jugs in canada – then our milk bottle breaks and our milk is in a milk jug too. simple things, small things, bubbling yeast mixes and darned socks bringing us all closer together. the present is closer to the past and future than ever before. •
i am a bundle of nostalgia wrapped up in my doona on the floor, doing a puzzle i have done four times before. i know these pieces and still they play the same tricks on me… • it’s time to go to bed; the night has whiled away and though i am sleepier than ever before, my head and heart are so full of the friends i carry with me. big loves sent by messenger, kisses by phone call. it’s time to sleep and wait, wait for the thoughts to be thought through and tied up like parcels for later. when the packing in brown paper and string is done, then i’ll slip off into the land of nod. all of this just takes time: time winds around itself, like it always has (except this time we notice).
