A good year.

I woke up this morning with my sister staring intently into my eyes. She was laying on a bed about a meter from my own. We'd been forced back into our childhood sleeping arrangement, our parents snoring in the next room, by an unexpected interstate trip.
She whispered my name and maintained eye contact."It's not alive, but there is something next to your face" she said, always good in a crisis, always slipping into damage control mode.

Ew. Mush and a little wing. Vague, half asleep recollections of something crawling on my arm came back to me. The rest of him was not found until later that morning when my sister spotted his mangled body just outside the bathroom.

And today is two years since you wrote that final note. And as much as I tried to enter that space, you know the one, the space where I recognise I have grieved you but I am still mourning you, the one where I miss my husband and feel angry at the world, that special little place in my mind where i miss you and hate you all in the one impulse, I found that I could not.

Because I got to wake up this morning. You didn't, the cockroach certainly didn't, but I did.

see ya.

I just dropped Welsh off at the tram stop. I know, I know, I am a bad girlfriend for not driving out to the airport. But i wanted to avoid the whole crying at the terminal, clasping on to his leg at the gate scene. So i parked in a no standing zone next to Luna Park and watched him walk away in my rear vision mirror.
Big backpack, brown arms, sun bleached hair. I hope today is the start of a new adventure for him. He left his jacket at my house so i assume he will be back at some stage.

Then I went shopping for some new clothes for my new job! The aim is to look slightly less homeless than the homeless people. Did I just say that? Really? It's been two years since i worked in a profession where flip flops and a sun dress are probably not appropriate. I bought new jeans. If there is one thing i cannot compromise on, it is jeans. But i also bought black, neat casual tops. When i tried everything on, i looked like my old self again. Not the art making, home hair cutting, op shop clothes wearing woman i have been for the last two years. I will keep her hidden away for the weekends. I'm excited though, to rediscover this part of myself. I want to see how i have changed as a worker, where my boundaries around stress have shifted to, how my role in the world will merge with my role in the workplace. So much has changed in the last two years. So, so , so much. The biggest shift i am feeling right now is that i am not nervous about my first day. In fact, I know that they know that they are lucky to have me. That's different.

Updates

Hello blogworld!!

Here is an update:

Running i have done recently: none.
Been going to the gym? yes, once this week.
What did my personal trainer say? He said: "What is that?"
Where did he point when he said that? At my stomach.
Am I 5 months pregnant? No
Then why do I look like i am? Because i eat dip for dinner.

Welsh is getting on a plane on Tuesday. I am going to use this quiet time to GET MY SHIT TOGETHER. And by "quiet time" I am of course referring to the fact that my boyfriend is getting booted out of Australia. Whatever immigration, you can take my boyfriend but you cannot take my dip!!! No! I am not eating dip for dinner anymore. That is just crazyness! And lazyness!

I am going to run 3 times this coming week. I am going to drink lots of water and I am going to eat vegetables every single day. And i am not going to make a huge scene at the airport and i am going to write a beautiful speech for my cousin and I am also going to buy a wedding dress from an op shop for my divorce party. And I am going to iron my clothes for my new job. And get early nights and charge my ipod and and and and and i am going to stop drinking wine during the week! And what else? I am going to stay so busy doing stuff and not doing stuff that i will not even notice that my boyfriend has left the country. Yep, that's the plan.

lost.

I've been asked to speak at my cousins funeral next week.
And i am staring at the blank screen as a thousand memories compete for space on the page. And i wonder if i should go for light hearted, sentimental, short and sweet or something else entirely. And I have ideas about writing about how mental illness can effect people, and about how i once nannied two cousins, a boy and a girl and about how i dreamed of them on the night he died. My sentences keep starting with "I only knew a few months of life without him and now even a week seems too much to be without him again" or "we were thick as thieves up until his life took a turn in an entirely different direction to mine and now we will never be on the same road again" or "Why on earth did i press reject on the last phone call he will ever make to me? I was busy filling in divorce papers with a man that he never thought was good enough for me."

None of this is what i want to say about him. About his life. About the little blonde kid who taught me the world "slut" and stole my dads rum with me one year in Byron Bay. About the teenager who dressed in drag and let me take photos of him around the family pool. About the adult who shared a cigarette and rum with me behind a water tank, because even at 29, we didn't want to smoke in front of our dads. The thing is, i don't know what i want to say. What is the thread? The rum? Times he grinned in my direction? Things that went wrong in his life that never went wrong in mine?

For the first time ever, i am lost for words.

Something I wrote after reading this thing on this thing.

Check out this cool thing:

http://thereddressclub.blogspot.com/

They set writing challenges and other cool stuff. So i wrote this thing.

I've lost my vocab after a job interview today.

It's called This Time Two Years ago and the challenge was the write a 600 word piece that started with "I could never have imagined" and finished with "And then the whole world shifted."

Here goes.....

I could never have imagined that 25 hours in transit would feel so long. But checking my watch again, I see that I am still an hour from Europe. Sixty minutes from Di Vinci airport, Rome, to be exact. I sit back in my seat and focus on the tiny airplane as it makes its way across the screen. Converting miles travelled, into kilometers I had now put between myself and Melbourne, I close my eyes and wonder again why I am doing this.
I’ve left behind my job, my husband, everything familiar for a month long trip abroad. Alone. I need space, room to breath, time to think. I needed to let my hair down, shake off the stress. I need to get away.

I open my eyes and check my watch again. The women beside me stirs and shifts in her seat. I glance at the man across the aisle. Cute, mid thirties, generous hands. I look down at my own hands, to the place where my engagement ring usually sits. For safe keeping i had told my husband as i slipped it into my bed side drawer, i don’t want to accidently leave it in some hotel room. I ball my fingers into a fist and dig my nails into my palm. I let out a sigh.
I wish he had come with me; that our marriage was exciting and impulsive and not a carefully measured sum of me doing what i want and him doing what he wants and counting on the illusion that someday, somehow, those things might be the same.
I dig around in my bag until i find my creased itinerary. February 14th: Venice. Valentines day alone in Venice. How romantic.
I fold it carefully back into a side pocket and watch the night sky out of my window. Mostly all i can see is the woman staring back at me. I study her face. Dark brown hair-a legacy of 3 months in Asia and hair dye from the 7 /11. Blue eyes. Broad nose. Perfect bow for a mouth. No wrinkles. Yet. Not a grey hair in sight. I am 27 years old.
I recross my legs and take a swig from my water bottle. It tastes of copper and my ears pop as we begin our decent.

Despite the late hour, I can see plenty of lights around Rome. It looks so different! So European. So beautiful!
I practically sprint towards the luggage collection area and within minutes, I have grabbed my backpack and landed in customs. The officials speak to me in Italian and I giggle as they use the word Bella on me.
“Ciao” I practice as they hand me back my stamped passport.
I head for the exit sign.

I don’t know right now, that in a few days, I will come across the Colosseum by chance and drink coffee with new friends in the old city. Nor that within 6 days of my return to Melbourne, my life will implode. No idea that my marriage is about to fall apart. Or that two years later I will be booking a flight back to Paris, to celebrate my thirtieth birthday, and divorce, with my sister, brother in law, an ex boyfriend and my new boyfriend.

I do however, have an inkling that I am on the brink of a big adventure. So with hope in my heart and a smile on my face, I take one big step forward and then the whole world shifts.

Starry starry night.

I've got this boyfriend right. He's Welsh and unusual and i may have mentioned him a couple of times. Anyway, on Sunday night, i had a small melt down about this whole, well there's no way to sugar coat it, fucking divorce. And i cried until i got a headache and basically did that really attractive thing that we sometimes do when we are in a new relationship-babble for hours about our ex partners. I mean, that's really hot right? Puffy eyes, irrational claims, wet pillows and unfounded suspicions that your new partner will turn out just like the old. The man has seen me throw up, with hang overs, mid argument with said ex partner and at 5am with hair that got wet in the rain the night before, then dried stuck to my head while i slept. ("You are so beautiful in the morning") and he is still around. He is clearly insane.

So come monday morning, i was like a zombie at work. 95% over it and one irritating conversation away from going home early to sulk in my bedroom and listening to Craig David or Macy Grey or something equally whingy.

But then my phone beeped with a message from Welshy.

"Your stars for the day: You deserve to be happy. You haven't done anything bad or wrong. Or even if you have, has it really been that bad? And that wrong? If you have been justly sentenced to a life of misery, surely you'd remember the hearing and the verdict. If you received the punishment in a previous life, how come you don't remember? That's totally unfair. So i repeat. You deserve to be happy. And events this week will bring you happiness."

i don't even know if it's a real horoscope or if he made it up, but I'll tell you what, either way, I'll take it.

What are friends for?

Hello blogland.

It's quite early in the world of jogging and blogging but i had a spare few minutes so it the spirit of seizing the day, i thought i would start it but sharing some thoughts with you all. Because really, is there anything more fascinating than my thoughts on a Monday morning? Surely not.

A couple of years ago, a few to be exact, i was wandering around South East Asia for no particular reason. It was kind of like an extended holiday, a chance to reflect on my life, an opportunity to spend time with my new husband sans housemates, work, family pressure (his, not mine) and really, an excuse to quit my very stressful job.
Whilst away i did manage to reflect on many aspects of my life-I decided to go back to study for example, one afternoon when smoking a Burmese cigar and watching the river, simply because I could and I felt a great sense of social responsibility towards contributing to this beautiful world in any way that i could. Luck affords us the luxury of choice.

I also thought lots about family. We decided to move in with my mother in law when we got back to Melbourne. She'd been depressed and was struggling a little bit. I envisioned afternoon cups of tea and long talks about my husband as a child. I imagined we'd cheer her up just by our very presence. That we'd envelope her in our newly wed love and she'd suddenly bound out of bed and be ready to live her life. Nope.
Another thing i thought about was my friends. I missed them all SO much while i was away in the way that one does when one is stuck in a country with little more than a bad photocopied version of American Psycho and ones quiet husband. I remember thinking to myself that i have a friend to cover all bases. Someone to tell me the truth no matter what, someone to tell me what i want to hear no matter what. Someone who has seen all the bad bits and still loves my guts and friends who are new enough that I want to do my hair before meeting up. Friends that i can call when i want to get drunk. Friends i can call when I want to whinge about the fact i am so hung over.

I had no idea at that time that my friends would become so important to me. Even more important. I didn't know that those afternoon cups of tea would turn into meeting up with my friend Kate in cafes so i could cry endlessly about the mess i had found myself in. No clue then that the long talks about my husband would take place not with my mother in law, but with my sisters. Didn't know then that our newly wed love would hit an enormous speed hump and that by our third wedding anniversary, i'd be attending my own divorce party with my incredible friends.

What would i do without them? Really? What on Earth would I do?

And now i have friends that my ex husband does not even know about. Links and connections that are so strong that our own shrink in comparison. There is Welsh, of course. So funny and strange and beautiful. Then there's a new work friend, also funny, inspiring and insightful. My new house mate. Friends of friends.
The circle keeps widening and i knock on wood and thank my lucky stars that I have them. What are friends for? They are saving my life a thousand times over and for making my life one worth saving.

Wait a second.

I've just been reading a post by Chantelle over at fatmumslim

She poses an interesting question; What are you waiting for?

It got me thinking about the stalls and procrastinations that are circling my happiness like sharks. Welsh still has no definite answer about his visa. We live in limbo-somewhere in between euphoria at having met and a low grade, simmering panic that this has made life very complicated.
There are options, of course. There always are. He can work illegally and risk being deported. I can pack up my life and move across the world. We can kiss goodbye at Melbourne airport and thank our lucky stars that we had 4 beautiful months together. But those options seem so SUCKY. I want my boyfriend to stay in the country. I want to not be so stressed about it, that the very reason he wants to stay becomes blurry.

This frustration comes from a couple of places. One, i like control. I like being the master of my destiny. Even making no choice is still making a choice. I am just about ready to march down to immigration and demand some sort of explanation as to why something as simple as being with the man i love, is being made so stressful. And two, i am really impatient.

While studying, i came to the realisation that often, the problem is not the problem. The problem is your reaction to it. For example, say your washing machine leaks all over the floor. It's only annoying because you have to mop up. But so what? The actual problem is that you don't like wasting time and you don't like making a mistake, But let's look at these a little more closely. Are you under that much pressure that 20 minutes spent mopping is really a waste of time? Let go of your expectations of how your afternoon should look and enjoy the experience. And as far as making a mistake, sheesh, go easy on yourself for once. Once the irritation is neturalised, you can actually look on the bright side-clean floor, toned arms, funny story!
Obviously, sometimes the problem is the actual problem but more often than not, letting go of expectations is the answer. For me anyway. Of course i want to to spend the next 20 minutes wasting time on the internet but wasting it mopping is also okay.

So i am not waiting for his visa to get approved anymore. I quit waiting. Whatever will be will be and i will be okay with it. I will be great with it in fact, because with or without Welsh, in Melbourne or Wales, I will be okay and I will still be happy.