Leaving Sydney

It's been more than 5 months since I left Sydney though I went back for a few weeks to wind up and clear out my flat.  The years since I came back from a brief stint in Brisbane and resumed my old life seem to have coalesced into one. In between there was an incapacitating illness, deaths in the family, a very blue year, travel back and forth.  The mid point of this marked a transition, a new phase in life where everything is quietly hopeful, quietly hopeless. Yet I could not say I was unhappy.  Rather if I felt afresh the shock of grief, I felt happiness. And too keenly at times.  At the point when I was ill and had days to myself and the year was blue, blue, blue I would often walk around slowly in the afternoon. The day as often in Sydney would be mildly sunny, small pink eucalypt flowers would litter the ground, my niece would come rushing to the door of her house if I was in the neighbourhood and dropped by and life would feel absolutely simple for a moment.  I never feel this way elsewhere.

When I was a child, my brother and I lingered at a house with a TV, a rarity those days.  A documentary on the Nullarbor plain was screening and something in it held us rapt. My aunt had moved early on to Australia, to us inured to American tales it felt suitably distant and different. My Brilliant Career spoke to me as a teen. Years later in my first serious relationship which happened to be long distance, my then boyfriend was briefly working in Perth. It was the only time I considered dropping everything to move.  In a way the country held a place in my imagination.  It lay in wait for me as I for it.  I am not Australian, rather there are parts to the country that suit me. And there is no other place outside of India that feels this way. For the moment it is goodbye and there has been much to feel happy about by way of family and being home. Which is the reason for moving. But for all its distance Sydney remains a second home and I think about my years there often.