tigertail in new york

My Dear Friends in Australia,

I miss you. I miss having people who know you really well and are there for you in ways you don't even think about till after they're not. I miss calling people up on the phone for a good yarn (talk) and knowing it's only going to cost me around 30c no matter how long I talk. I miss hanging out on weekends in the summer in Sydney with no real plans - just going to the beach, an impromptu bbq, walking by the water, dinner parties - oh how I miss dinner parties!!

I miss girlfriends who listen to your stories and problems and remind you how you told them three years ago you weren't going to do stupid things like that again. I miss hanging out with my posse of gay boys. I miss lunches in the park or Chinatown halfway between my work and my friends' offices. I miss late afternoon chocolate runs to the convenience store and knowing who in the office wanted want if they weren't at their desk.

I miss house parties in the inner-west, in the eastern suburbs and in suburbs that used to be all industrial as you started to buy places. I miss hanging out in kitchens talking about food, and late night emergency dinners over bottles of red wine. I miss new friends and old friends and oldest friends in the world, and friends-of-friends who became friends, and friends of friends that I saw all the time. I miss women I grew close to in my last few years in Sydney as I started to rebuild my friendships and develop new ones after the end of a long relationship. I miss my girls, and my "girls" and my boys.

I miss having lots and lots of different groups of friends, and bringing them all together for parties and special events. I miss remembering parties "back in the day" and looking around to see who is still there. I miss seeing people I've known for years and years change and develop and grow into new people, new couples, new individuals while still maintaining their old values and old friendships. I miss buckets of sangria, and all-vegetarian dinner parties, and our standard order at Saigon Bay with all the foods exes and partners didn't eat. I miss going a few suburbs over to hang out with girlfriends, and driving back late at night to still find a parking space outside my house.

I miss dressing up to go out dancing, and never finding any places where we really, really liked the music. I miss complaining that all my friends live in a different area, but all the while preferring living near the beach.

I miss random connections and random meetings in the street and shop keepers who know you and work events where you really can have a good time. I miss wandering around my city and remembering events that took place there when I was a kid.

I miss roaming thru city parks and streets full of memories of friends who are no longer friends, friends who disappeared, friends who changed into people I didn't recognise. But I miss remembering them as they were - back when time didn't matter, back when life was stretched soooooo far out in front of me I couldn't imagine being more than a few years older than I was then. I miss seeing the ghost of myself cross the same street I did 10 years earlier, trying desperately to remember how I felt then, and realising how much I'd grown.

I miss re-visting places of significance - first kisses, first street-pashing, first break-up, first dates, first meetings, favourite restaurants, fave new spots, fave old spots that change names a thousand times, last meal together, last boyfriend's favourite bar, last place I saw someone cute and went and spoke to them.

I miss knowing my city, and being able to share it with new friends who'd just arrived...



A package arrived today from Australia. It's from a newer friend - someone I became friends with in the last 6 months I lived back home, but became very close to.

The last line of the accompanying letter reads:

I miss my friend. I think of her often

I'm crying as I write this... I miss her too - both my friend who wrote the letter and her friend. The one who encouraged her to stay in Sydney when she felt overwhelmed. The one who told her she'd love it there and would make lots of friends, the one who had no doubt that just as her friend could move to the other side of the world and have a good job and a nice place to live, and lots of new friends, that she herself could do the same thing, no worries.

I miss that fearless, determined, don't take any crap, stand up for what you believe in, party-for-your-right-to-fight, world citizen girl. In some ways I wonder if she ever existed, or if she was a projection of other people's opinions of her.

And yet - sometimes I find myself telling people about some of the things I've done in my life, and I see from their expression that they can't believe how fearless and brave I am. A lot of the time I don't feel fearless and brave. Sometimes I feel tired and scared, and overwhelmed. Sometimes I feel like someone somewhere has made a mistake, and soon someone somewhere is going to look at my file and realise I was meant to have a mundane ordinary existence, and that this moving to new country and actually getting work and moving very quickly through the ranks was all a dreadful mistake. That the fact I've made a lot of wonderful new friends was all a clerical error and they'll disappear with a little magic eraser. That my cheap rent will sky- rocket tomorrow with no offset in location, features or cleanliness, and I'll have to live out on the street or somewhere in Jersey.

I came home today at 11:30pm. I left my house at 5:30am and I've only been at work, so that's basically a 16 hour work day plus travel time.. I'm exhausted.. And I've come home to my room being messy, and it looks like my roommate's cats knocked over my dresser, and all my jewellery is on the floor, and all my clothes in the drawers are wet from my water glass that was on top. And I'm about to crash and then get up and do it all again tomorrow.

But the package and the accompanying note got me thinking...

To my friend who sent it - thank you.

I miss you too.

Posted by Ness on Wednesday, August 29, 2007 at 11:40 PM | Permalink