Sounds of the Backyard

In Fairfield the city mellows with the oaks and the gentle hum of inner suburbia.

The whistling chirp of birds mucking around in my backyard scurries about an afternoon as rich dropping-away sun melts and basks rays spilling and bursting over my right cheek. Humble wind sways the draping green trees, flitting the rays of the sky, glittered in warmth. Stalks and branches scrunch and fondle, kissing each other.

On cue, the 5.49 express barges its way into the chaotic symphony en route to Flinders street Station. Bells chime with the beat of a metronome evoking the flashing of duel red lamps and meeting of wooden drawbars. Horn calls yawn and shrill intermittently through the neighbourhood, a wavering ballsy B-flat that lumbers and startles as it swims over the sub-hum textures. Triplets of rumble and clack percuss over wooden girders at the mouth of Station St, an intermittent slicing of steel denoting speed and the due intention of it’s course.

In the distance, the under-roar of peak hour commodores and falcons pulse past Chandler Highway overpass, deep and fast through the main artery to the eastern wing of the city’s sprawl. It is a gentle hum, like the static roar of a far off ocean, each vehicle a passing wave, ebbing in unison down a tried and tested trajectory to each organism’s rightful dwelling.

A phone rings; it reminds me of an old cack olive unit with the handset vertically spread, and dial twists bereft of luxurious modern buttons. Someone picks up and it is silenced. Neighbours next door arrive back home in their car and throttle each other with stern Italian dialect, slamming their doors and ranting. I struggle to translate what they’re saying, whether or not the tone is one of frustration or basic assertion, whether they’re actually having a laugh and joking on each other. Another neighbour in the distance sneezes from pollen rife in the summer ether. The bellowing catharsis reverberates around their tiled interior and booms out from the open back door to my earshot.

The birds now fly in flocks overhead, alone in the sky but for endless baby blue and a couple of smudges of white cloud; setting off for the night to another part of town. When they get there, the sun will have dwindled and the tones of the sky will have changed, and someone, somewhere will be watching them and breathing in and taking note of their shared existence. Breathing in the air in their vicinity and noting the sweet, unique symphony of sound of their own backyard.

Yellow Mondays

The bright yellow tram clipped flashy and fresh and smooth on the turns. Inside was lonely but for a faceless driver with his back to little more than a handful of early travellers sprawled about the interior. Daybreak sun spilled through the sparse carriage, flickering like an old movie reel as we coarsed through the waking city. Joggers in small shorts were left for dust in the mirrors as Monday-gazing suits traversed high-panted in common routes, nonchalantly commencing a crisp week of routine existence.

The faceless driver halted his route at the foot of the Carlton Gardens where the rays of the sun shot and reflected off the majestic mandala windows of the Exhibition Buildings. By the iron barricade stood a man in navy, gaunt and tired, chatting away to a young, unhinged girl. The man’s ringed eyes twittered, the girl’s were equally glazed and both heads stiffed and twitched as they spoke like the cautious movements of paranoid possums at Treasury Gardens in the night. Conversation filtered into the carriage with the opened tram doors. It was an empty exchange; loose, lost and compensated for by cadences of cool bluntness. The man and the girl sounded as they looked, helplessly incarcerated inside their own private universes. Prematurely the tram door shut and her feminine arm grasped desperately for access. The faceless driver palmed his button and let the young girl on. Marks on her face glared in the warm luster of the morning.
They were dark blemishes, brown and scabby, scattered about her forehead and her cheeks.

As the tram stationed the girl remained preoccupied and distracted deep inside her universe. There was room for nobody and nothing else. Her fingernails matched the lemon yellow of the tram, her hair, dusty brunette hung long and wavy. Lucidly she graced the aisle brandishing a one-strap sports bag shaped like an old water bladder with a single zip that contoured the hem line. The girl’s lemon nails clawed and pierced into the fabric like everything she knew and loved in the world might be found within it. She cowered on knees, planting herself on a seat behind me as the man in navy stared emptily outside, chewing into the ether. The faceless driver took off and the man and the girl were forgotten to each others’ world - no thought for their prior colloquy, nor for a parting wave.

The yellow tram cut along the metal tracks as the girl thumbed and fumbled her little black bag, opening, then shutting, opening again, a few times over and then some more. Restless. The speed of life was too slow. She had to go faster that this. Sitting was draconian in her present state - she stood again and re-occupied the aisle, roaming back and forth the steps toward the door she came in. Her two arms clung to the dangling yellow nooses holding up an abused, struggling body, languished and limber and manic. She muttered to herself, as emptily as if ‘old navy’ was still beside her back at the stop. She swayed and edged, frustrated, bursting at the seems to explode from out of this moving limitation into wherever it was her mind told her she needed to be.

A stale automaton voiceover declared the tram’s approach to Murchison St.

The girl repeated the name of the street over and over in subtone mumble as she swayed from noose to noose. The robotic voiceover had tempted her, verging her body ever closer to the exit, offering only her back to all except the driver, whose back was all anyone ever got to see.

The faceless driver halted the tram and opened the doors at the first stop past Elgin.
Like a rocket, the girl with yellow nails sprung headfirst into the mild morning, surging like a mindless child, a pre-loved toy doll in its early stages of malfunction.

A 16-foot truck appeared out of nowhere in peripheral vision as the electronic tram doors opened. My body paralysed itself in chill. Each lung seized, rendered unable to harness any breath.
The truck sped.
The brunette hair of the blemished girl feathered in the morning breeze, her yellow fingernails, out of view.

Bat Country

There may be an absence of juice on the minutiae...

Tomorrow morning i drive a 15 foot truck from New York to Vegas.

Juice to come..

Adios.

Whatever Happened to My Home Town?

How Many Cabs in New York City

How many cabs in New York City, how many angels on a pin?
How many notes in a saxophone, how many tears in a bottle of gin?

- P. Kelly (not R Kelly)
‘Careless’

For years now I could have told you with decent authority how many notes you can pull out of a saxophone. I have sweet bugger all idea on the volume of tears in a bottle of Bombay Sapphire, and stymied on the quantity of angels you can ram on a pin. After spending just on 2 months roaming around New York City, I can answer an otherwise rhetorical phrase that this joint has a colossal shitload of cabs.

Rhetorical or not, Paul Kelly sure knows how to pen a lingering lyric.

There are many reasons why this humble axe wieldin’, harmonica blowin’ nugget of Aussie goodness gets my juice a’pumpin whenever I tune in his wares. His command of the evocative; an understated lyrical wisdom and a humble depth of insight into life’s foibles; the way he carves poignancy out of life’s moments and the niggling emotions that make up everyone’s day to day. That deep, dulcet, yearnin’ twang. His subdued nature, his mystique. His ultra careful use of words; when he speaks and when he writes. When I listen to PK, I feel pride at our mutual origins, proud of how beautifully he dwells on the landmarks and homeliness that I love so dearly. PK is a humble genius, an unassuming troubadour and the poet to share a pint with.

I saw PK in Cork a few months back. Just me and a hundred-odd diehards in a little old run down theatre in the old quarter by the main drag. I drank Guinness after Guinness, soaking up the magic. In dark suit and dim light, he captured our imaginations with them rich-drizzled lyrics, arming us down a winding road of love, life, childhood, death, and all the beautiful, bittersweet, funny chunks n twinkles in between. I bonded over his old tunes with a random woman old enough to be my great aunty. Young and old come together to dig the ways of PK. The man sure knows how to evoke a tune.

I can’t believe how fast time has gone since Cork; since the months in South East Asia – since I set foot in America; in New York. It’s flown by. This year. This decade. My life. It’s a chilly arvo in Queens. I’m a long way from Melbourne. And like the speed of time, the distance between here and there is too far for a regular sojourn back to the warmth of my family, the camaraderie of my friends and the city I love. But whenever I need to go back somewhere to relive old moments I thought I’d lost, I tune into PK. I listen to ‘From St Kilda to Kings Cross’. I soak up ‘When I first met your ma’. Shivers of warmth infiltrate my soul when the lead guitar break throbs in to ‘Before too Long’. With PK’s tunes I always have reassurance and an emotional passport back to my old stomping grounds, in lieu of a tangible plane ticket. It’s a good substitute. A nostalgia vehicle.

I turn over memories of my childhood, imagery of suburban Ringwood living with mum in a rundown white brick flat-house. 23 Caroline St. The passionfruit crawler that engulfed the side shed and the dodgy toilet that I used to get scared of. Beach holiday at Easter in Point Lonsdale with Barb and Pat. Shining snippets of carefree Saturday arvos drenched in the summer sun - Dad with a blonde mullet washing his Subaru with a running hose, me Bolting through the sprinkler on the front lawn. That unmistakable musty smell of seared, sudsy dampness on boiling hot concrete.

PK’s timeless empathy, his understanding of the human condition and carefully selected words unpretentiously smithed into aural art – it’s my ticket to anywhere I want to be, anytime I need, anywhere I find myself. Regardless of how many there are, no New York cab can ever possibly take me anywhere near as far.

The Golden Age

It’s the day after the 2008 United States Presidential Election.
I bask in what happened last night. Like many, I’m still taking it all in, for it was indeed a seriously profound event; a remarkable night in our modern times.
Midnight Oil’s ‘Golden Age’ strums through this Queens apartment and heightens my proud reflections. This nation and the world has entered a new era and it began last night at eleven o’clock.


Times Square is a melting pot about to boil. Anticipation runs rife through the air as crowds begin to converge in the heart of New York City. Film crews and sweeping boom cameras fly over the streets in live crosses from CNN and ABC news hubs adjacent the pools of cordoned off masses. Folk vye for their twenty seconds of fame, getting as close to the camera crews as possible. Down the sidewalks, all walks of life gather with necks bent skyward, keeping up to date with every second of the election coverage splayed on the massive array of news screens. This is a veritable sea of heads united in mass hope for the hopefully inevitable. Merry pranksters and larrikins dance around in pro-bama make up and uniforms of ‘Change’ t-shirts with banners brandishing pro-blue slogans. On the busy sidewalks, touts flog a variety of novelty election condoms with the reminder that ‘hope is no effective form of contraception’. Sarah Palin condoms seem to be selling particularly well – the McCain variety less so. It seems no one even bothered to manufacture a Biden variety. The Square pulses large with blacks, whites, gay, straight, young, old, Americans and foreigners – everyone finds themselves bound together here in an electric undercurrent of immense anticipation.

At ten o’clock it looks good for the crowd favourite. On 207 electoral votes to John McCain’s 140-odd, Barack Obama sits more than comfortably as exit polls suggest that the initial projections are probably right on par with the reality going on across the nation. Voters have come out in unbelievably unprecedented levels this year and it’s a good showing for the institution of Democracy. Grassroots are showing how strong they really are when given their rightful moment in the sun. The hour of eleven approaches and suddenly, Foxnews and CNN break the news that the dream has come true - Barack Hussein Obama is President-elect of the United States of America. Shock, disbelief, tears and awe, thousands upon emotional thousands of human beings nod their heads, mouthing ‘yes’, some leaping, screaming, all going absolutely wild for this truly amazing flicker of history. Fists puncture the air, hands wave furiously, slapping high fives and h tens to all receivers. Everone smiles at each other, strangers turn and speak to each other about their collective elation, bound together. For the lingering moment everyone is everyone’s friend. New York City has rarely ever been this energised, alive, electric or united.



In the morning, the Times would write:

“This is one of those moments in history when it is worth pausing to reflect on the basic facts: An American with the name Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a white woman and a black man he barely knew, raised by his grandparents far outside the stream of American power and wealth, has been elected the 44th president of the United States”

An educated, measured, charismatic orator with the ability to instill a hope many thought was dormant forever, someone who finally - finally just might be able to steer things back to the level of optimism that was crushed when this century dawned. Someone to quell that craving for optimism, tolerance, love and humanity that has lacked so dearly in the leadership of the past decade, where war, violence and death has permeated the world, spread like a virus by the toxic politics of fear.

But even more so, the election of Barack Obama as America’s first black president is set to yield an untold ripple effect on so many aspects of this nation’s consciousness – a catalystic event that speaks of the end of race barriers, the end of old, outmoded ways of thinking. Obama in the White House has ‘electrified the world’. There is a sense now, that anything and everything is possible.

God I was overjoyed with pathos standing in Times Square at that moment. It was absolutely stunning staring up to a massive NASDAQ screen at montages of a smiling 47 year old Obama – this nation’s great leader to be. The First black American president. I kept reeling that through my mind. My body burned in swells and sparks of spine chill at what this all meant – what it meant for everything! - and the unbelievable sensation of being right in the middle as it all went down. I savoured a moment that I will one day be able to tell my kids and grandkids about, that remarkable second when history was made and the world was changed forever.

I danced at Trade’s Hall when Howard got the boot last November. Here, I revel in the heart of New York City as the era of Bush comes to an end.
In the words of The Nation’s William Grieder ‘Let us congratulate ourselves on being alive at such a promising moment’

"So tell me what you see
Tell me what you hear
And if it's the same as me it's the Golden age"

Wandering in the Midwest

“All of life is a foreign country.”

- J. Kerouac

I ride at the speed of life on a highway somewhere in middle America. As if on fire,
corridors of trees flitter coloured leaves of every imaginable flavour. Silos, corn-fields and haystacks abound as Dylan swells, yearns and testifies, his poignant youthful croak breaks in a collusion of stimuli that emotes our collective perception. Mary and Sarah revel like Queens in the front seats, smoking Camel lights with blonde locks flowing in the breeze and the twinkle of elated latitude in their eyes. We three souls constitute one tiny unit of life ambling north underneath a magic blue American sky - a vista that circles tilted about the endless scope of black infinity at the frontiers of our imagination where the sky limits nothing.

The air in the Midwest is so damn breathable I swear you could can it and sell it to New Yorkers for the same price of Vitamin Water. You don’t realise how congested and maddening the big city is, how it subtly hypnotises and coerces your spirit, until you get on back to the wide open spaces and the sweet inhalations of a full lung. In this car, I’m in my element and I shine a smile that gives the warmth of the countryside a run for its’ money. An elevated, unworried mind wanders and wonders, recounting the lighting chains of events and the endless potential of its’ future all the while doing its’ utmost to ground itself in the here and the now. Suddenly I’m awash in my own head; Imagination set on fire like the trees. Head pulses with a bloodrush. I absorb. I Let go. Aware of everything going on right now. Henry Miller was right. To live this life is to be aware – joyously, divinely, serenely, drunkenly aware! In exhalation I smirk, privately agasp at the remarkable places I seem to keep finding myself. Sarah turns half face at me with a smile and a wink as Bobby’s harmonica yowls steely treble through the tweeters. I offer my glance out to the countryside and again forfeit my imagination to the fields and corridors of flittering fire.

Duluth came across initially like an overcast fall town in a John Grisham screen adaptation. Trees lining the streets had been half stripped of their shimmer by the equinox, as marvellous Lake Superior sat silent and imposing down at the banks. The smooth brick clad main drag pulsed us through the faded glory of the old lakeside matron, the town’s Vaudeville grandeur but an old ghost lurking behind tawdry patches of neon makeover. Still, the town’s cosiness, warmth and comforting charm appeared a seemingly unshakeable rock. Duluth is famed for being hometown of one Robert Zimmerman, a young lad who set off from the lake to New York in his late teens in order to transform himself into an influential cat named Bob Dylan. The mystique of Dylan is still rife in the air here, no thanks to the local council, who’d renamed the lake esplanade ‘Bob Dylan Way’ in a flagrant move to capitalise on the great man’s legacy. Still, I ensured I got a photo near the sign.

After meeting Mary’s old college buddies Teresa and Juliet in their wooden penthouse apartment overlooking a sensational view of Superior, we graced Sir Ben’s - a British style brick pub on Dylan Way that served green olives in its happy hour pints of Sam Adams, and provided cosy respite from the sheen of chill hushing on the town up from the ripples of the windswept Lake. Mary, Sarah and I gasbagged on brew and warmed ourselves, due reward after conquering a mighty stretch of open road. After a home cooked meal at Sarah’s Aunt Lori’s, we heated up on neat Jameson and stout at The Brewhouse, in the presence of a youthful blues cat wailing and fingerpicking tunes on his steel hollow body. We hung out with Jed, Mary’s college pal, a red bearded gentle lumberjack, a vagabond in crime, travelling around country with his car and ukelele. We smashed piss until the hours became wee and eventually crashed in the wooden penthouse with an old radiator that made noise like the Antichrist.

If you told me six months ago I’d one day be roaming around Minnesota with a bevy of gorgeous American women, invited to a couple of hometown weddings and welcome to a dose of the American Dream, I guess I would have said anything’s possible. Fluidity is everything. The freedom in choosing to move with the flow of things at a given point in time affords that gambler an unparalleled sensation of liberation, destination regardless.

I flew from JFK to Minneapolis-St Paul the week before the Duluth stint, reuniting again with Foxy, again taken under her wing and ferried back to her parent’s leafy hood in the little town of Chaska. In my first taste of warm, Midwest hospitality, senior Foxes Barry and Jane welcomed me into their home with open arms. Baz, a quirky trumpet-wielding former school band leader and Jane, a sassy sax playin’ folk singer, whose turkey sandwich was one to write home about. We gnawed on a big steak meal later that night and mused on US-OZ cultural peculiarities. Jane was an avid a fan of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and insisted on a mid-meal rendition; regrettably my recognition of the six middle verses were not what they used to be and I struggled to keep up between mouthfuls of steak. Later in the trip Barry would knock off a few stubbies of Killian and pull out his faux-bogan-cockney take on ‘Botany Bay’, a song that he loved but made his kids at school want to punch themselves in the head repeatedly rather than playing the tune with their instruments.

Singing too-ra-li oo-ra-li ad-dy,
Singing too-ra-li oo-ra-li ay

I couldn’t help but marvel at how much I’d been looked after on this trip. I was truly blessed with hospitality and the company of amazing, beautiful and genuine folk. Must have clocked up a decent share of karmic brownie points dealing with so many needy bastards when I worked all those hours back at the hostel. I was being guided through the whole way by some benevolent force.

Sarah flew in later that first Friday night and we heralded in a big weekend. Annie’s wedding never went ahead in the end - a tale of thwarted marriage probably best left untold - but we partied on regardless, celebrating the non-wedding with rounds of olive-beaten dirty Martinis and shots of whiskey in a red-pleather-booth dive bar named Liquor Lyells. We crashed at our friend Katie’s place, ripping the tear where the night turns into morning and elongating the hours without promise or excuse. Katie owns a magenta blue cat named Zeus who strutted around like a ham on four toothpicks and pretty much owned the joint.

As well as the Foxes, I was fortunate enough to also meet Sarah’s parents throughout the course of the week. Barb came off a strong, amicable women with a temporary steeliness that made way for warm connection once she got to know you. Over tall lattes, the three of us were reduced to tears after an artillery of head-shakingly hilarious stories involving Sarah’s old man, Craig - a bloke with a hunger for life - all nine of them - and a magnetic capacity for enduring near-death blunders. Craig was an enigma, a man who got as close to death as possible if only just so he could laugh in its’ face and implore it to go fuck itself. I met him in person with the girls a day later, sharing a burger lunch at a classic Midwest beer den called ‘Lions’ Tap’. It was the type of wood panelled, neon beer sign roadside dive where your burger might be in danger of being hocked in by a flannelette hunter named ‘Sea-Bass’ if you expounded your penchant for liberal politics in too much more than a whisper. An accomplished outdoorsman with handle bar moustache and hint of ‘go fuck yaself’ burliness, Craig got into matter-of-fact detail as to how to properly gut a male Elk after you shoot, it the three of us chomped away queasily into dripping double bacon burgers.

Over dinner at Barb and Craig’s place in Lester Prairie some nights later, we reeled the stories in his presence. A while ago one of Sarah’s Irish mates joined them for a meal over at the ranch – Craig did his utmost to make the bloke feel extra welcome, pumping ‘Celtic female hits’ on the stereo before offering their guest an oversized tray of Potatos and a knowing wink. At another dinner he got up from his chair and lurched over to their guest to vigorously demonstrate how to shuck a prawn, wherein he sat heavily back down, falling through his chair in a mess of wood chip and panel, ass over tit on the dining room floor. Fed up with the poor satellite reception one night, Craig decided the surrounding trees in his backyard were the signal-blocking culprits. With chainsaw in hand, he gave what for to one massive oak, before it tipped awkwardly and destroyed the roof of his recently constructed shed. In a rash of ‘Fuck, shit n’ cocksucker’, he gave the saw to another one. This tree also fell askew, landing plumb on the roof of his truck. In additional flurry of ‘Fuck’ he missed the rest of his show cleaning up the damage. To his credit, the reception improved. I could go on about Craig’s many stories, all equally gold.

Already completely awash in the spontaneity of the journey and the joy of the unexpected, it was once Sarah and I drove to her family log cabin that any lingering dramas of the world spilled away, soaking myself completely in the natural order of things. The road on the way was the kind you’d see in ‘Stand By Me’ where badasses smash roadside postboxes with baseball bats out the window of their hotted up chevies. Damn kids.

On the banks of a tranquil Lake and surrounded by thick woods, Sarah’s digs ended up being the archetypal B-grade horror setting, a textbook scenario that could easily have inspired the Evil Dead or Friday the Thirteenth. It was brilliant. We sat under stars at the foot of the glorious Lake as the last of the day’s sun filtered into darkness. The silence was deafening, like something out of a Steinbeck novel – thick, tacit but for the odd rogue loon bird rousing the banks and the soft echo of our private conversation sailing across the expanse. Craig’s massive trophy Elk head stared into taxidermic nothingness at the foot of the staircase to the upper loft.. We warmed inside with a wood stove-fire and watched ‘Boondock Saints’ in blankets and I’d rarely felt as content or as cosy in my life. This was the American dream

Waking to wilderness in the balcony window, we were joined the next day not only by Foxy, but her cousins Erin and Nikki and mutual friend Phoebs. Again, I was to be tortured with the company of five beautiful women. As classic rock crunched out through the ancient solid state RCA, beer o’clock was hollered early as we rugged up and set the outdoor heath aflame for a good old-fashioned marshmellow roasting. Sky turned to starry blackness as maturity levels dwindled, my masculine constitution suffering considerable bereavement as it struggled to keep ahead of the impenetrable wall of estrogen.

I met a lot of Mary and Sarah’s old friends and acquaintances on this trip – old friends who’d come out of the woodwork; some who never got out of Minnesota, some, I’m sure who never left town. I’ve met so many characters on this trip I can barely put it all together and keep up with the faces. The biggest onslaught came the next day at ‘Grano’s’ wedding - a good mate of the girls from way back in high school who finally got his ass into gear and got hitched. We dolled up to the nines and I managed to score a sweet poo-brown Ralph Lauren suit on loan from Mary’s brother, thus avoiding a potential arrest by the fashion police draped in Craig’s ‘formal woodsman’ corduroy pants and sportcoat. Though the Lutheran priest forgot the bride’s name mid-speech, and one of the grooms made an unsettling oratory on par with Steve Buscemi’s dud-brother in the Wedding Singer, the wedding day overallwas a hit. Standing at the reception bar in brown suit and bright white TUK Jam sneakers, I was branded ‘Clark Griswald’ by the father of the groom - clearly the old man had little concept of taste, because this footwear continually garners positive commentary from randoms everywhere I go. The tune ‘Holiday Road’ was henceforth implanted unbudgingly in my head, on top of ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Light’ and an entire playlist of cheesy 80’s awesomeness, a bevy of DJ hits which forced us to shake our bits with matrimonial abandon across the parquetry dancefloor.

The 9am wake up was rough the next morning, especially considering we were checked in to the Radisson. Ordinarily a saviour, the round of Bloody Mary’s instead made us feel foul and limped the morning off to a poor start. Duluth today felt grimy and overcast, cold and foreboding. We bid our farewell to Zimmerman’s home and returned back down highway 61 to Chaska.

***

Back at Sir Ben’s pub in Duluth on that first afternoon, I remember standing outside in my white scarf and jacket. I smoked and stared at the horizon smothering the great Lake. Everything at that moment felt electric and heightened. Felt like I’d come a long, long way since May 15, and the most of it was that I suddenly struggled to see how I could ever possibly feel the same way about living back at home. For years I’d been reluctant to go too far, for too long – the allure of home, the safety and all the triggers to old memories I never wanted to lose – they were all magnets. I thought all I’d ever need would always remain where I began. My old frame of reference had been stripped away; my life was no longer where I left it. It was here. That ever shifting here that kept on spurring and sparking my soul, augments my interior universe with the replenishing sensation of infinite possibility and flow of a limitless imagination. I breathed in. I looked up.

.. the sky is a luscious warm blanket; perfect trimmed trees leaves bristle in chill Lake Superior breeze. A lone bird circles overhead in the grey heavens – wandering, but never lost. My airbound compatriot, my brother in crime…

Suddenly, all life and the concept of ‘home’ had been transformed while I let myself get swept away in the stream. Fluidity was everything.

My life, a foreign country.