Yup, I’d better come clean. The thesis isn’t actually finished and handed in. All the hard yards are done, and I’m kind of kicking back making small structural and wording changes as they are indicated. So, technically it’s finished because all the research is done, gone, over, but unfinished because the supervisors are poring over it looking for inconsistencies.
In other words they’re doing the hard yakka now.
Anyhow, leaving Australia once the final draft had been submitted, and saying goodbye to Melbourne was probably the best move I’ve made in years. The city is great, and I’d love to live there again, but maybe not for a long time.
I’ve lived in a number of cities now, on a couple of continents, and returning to Wellington has been something like an emotional homecoming. Not emotional in the sense of getting at bleary and not wanting to let go, but emotional like it just feels ‘right’.
As each chapter comes back, with amendments and the digital equivalent of big red scrawl, I’m drawn back to that tiny little office space, in a pokey student dive, with a three feet view to a grey paling fence, flowers grasping over the tops once a year or so to brighten up the spring.
These days I’m sitting in front of a picture window, with a view across Te Aro to Mt. Vic, with the hospital at one end of my view, and the hills surrounding the harbour and Hutt Valley at the other. How things change in a year ay?
I get to walk to work, as I did in Melbourne, but here I see places I recognise as something else altogether, and have memories of people I used to walk with who are no longer present. I get to point out places that once housed people I knew and streets I may well have stumbled along in drunken stupors. I get to meet old friends with whom a distance has fallen and remained.
That said, there’s something ‘deeper’ about being here. In Melbourne it was always like I was spread too thin on the ground? Even after six years I knew half the city all too well, had found out all her secrets, had friends I’d known for as many years as all but my closest and oldest mates, and was intimately familiar with her moods, but there was still that intangible feeling like I didn’t really belong.
Here though? Here I can cast my minds eye back to days long gone, to a montage of changes and incremental difference falling past me as I push them down into the earth and the past when my feet carry me through rolling and variable time.
There’s something to be said for that impression we each make as we go about our daily lives with the flakes of our memories burying our feet in the places we stand.
Another way to see it is standing in the shallow waves. They pull away the sand around your feet and sink you while some remains to anchor you there, the cold water keeping you keenly aware of the changes taking place.
In Melbourne my feet never really reached the ground. It was always like I walked above it all, a traveller, itinerant, unrooted. I was the water more than the feet, one of the people who washed through the city without really leaving an impression but for the few lives my own reached?
Here though? Here I sit and read chapter after chapter written in that whole other place, and while I see the ideas and who I was forming layers around the person I was becoming, the detritus of the daily life in that world has rotted away leaving little.
And so it is, the wind has swept me up and brought me back to a place where wind belongs, leaving scattered behind me bits and pieces enough to lead me back should I choose to return. And I romanticise the past as the past deserves, and joke about the hardships.
But here I am all the same, happy, content and a little too secure. Surrounded by an old home that’s bigger than just the four walls of this room, one that reaches to the shores where my people came off sailing ships, married local and carved lives out of rugged bushlands.
A place where my feet touch the ashes of lives who have shared mine but have long since passed. A place where I stand, look up, and see tomorrow’s memories falling graciously, gently, toward me, and for which I am happy to wait.