Tonight I saw an Ozzie comedy show, with many Oceanic celebrities, everyone having fun, in-jokes, etc.....
When I'm really frustrated – aching, rather than bitter or resentful – at the Sydney debacle, at not living in that city, I don't think about the really grand or remarkable times or scenes – not the bridge, not Mardi Gras, not the trips to Waterloo and Hobart. I remember the small things – late-night Asian fast food with John along a scruffy stretch of those Redfern back streets; looking down into Woolloomooloo as you come out of the Botanical Gardens; walking down a tree-lined side street off of Oxford, very early in the morning, after a night out. It's the casual and everyday that I miss the most: despite not having been allowed to do those everyday things very often or for very long before I had to leave, I somehow fell into the ones that I did do, and they became entirely natural for me – they feel like ghosts of an experience not had, like phantastic images of an everyday life that I wanted to experience, and almost did.
It's imagined like an alternate path, one that might simply and unproblematically have simply happened – and I almost experience it that way: as though that entire existence is, itself, a ghost....
Comments