From Melbourne to Sydney: Making Room for New Things to Come

Emotional causes and effects are not proportionable equations at all. The result from capital employed in the production of any movement of a mental nature is sometimes as tremendous as the cause itself is absurdly minute.

Tom Hardy,
Far From The Madding Crowd.

It's the dead of a windless night under a star-studded sky. The balmy air floats like soft feathers suspended overhead. The ocean gleams under the silvery moonlight like a colossal stage looming out of the darkness, quietly awaiting in anticipation.

Lying flat on my back on the logs of a raft I traverse the sea in a state of dreamy contemplation. My raft drifts slowly and the water trickles and burbles softly as it flows under the uneven logs. The stars look like fireflies twinkling softly in the distance, caught up in the sky that now appears, now disappears behind the heavy curtains of my eyelids. I'm drifting, blinking, tiptoeing around the edges of sleep. It's such a sweet, peaceful night... . The depth below me is pitch-dark like a bottomless well, yet I scarcely spare a thought for it. The ocean is so still... Has it come to a complete halt? It can't have, I'm still gliding.

Oh! What was that? It sounded like a bubble bursting. I must have dozed off, let me listen closer... Nothing but sickening silence now. Sickening did I say? Just moments ago the very sound of that silence was lulling me to sleep. There... It wasn't a product of my imagination, more bubbles bulge now, swelling the water in sinister tones of greenish black, bursting ominously. Blop, blop, BLOP.

In a matter of seconds, the sea is in aggressive effervecense around me and a disquieting thought of the unknown darts past my mind making me jerk to a sitting position. My raft is swaying now, - what can possibly create bubbles this big?.

Wait. I'm at sea. How long have I been out here for? It's the open, wide, fathomless sea...--what's that piercing the water open? The salty breeze must have dried up my eyes and blurred my vision, my brain cells must be starved - or else my mind wouldn't be playing tricks on me. The muscles in my stomach lock in a solid clench and paralysing fear trickles down my spine like ice-cold water: it's not a vision, it's jaws the size of an icebreaker's bow shooting out of the ocean! I scarcely have time to react, than a whole creature of mythical proportions pierces the water, writhing and squirming like a frantic fish out of water. it's devastatingly big and I can feel courage fleeing like a rat as I strain my neck to look up at it. Moved by sheer instinct, I grip the edges of the raft when the beast hurls itself back, like a mountain collapsing into the sea. My body won't so much as twitch even if my life depended on it now. All I do is stare fixedly at the creature plunging and disappearing amid the swirling water. I can feel a silent scream building up inside. Oh dear, it's coming out again.

The notion of a creature of these proportions had never entered my mind before, it'd never even been the shadow of a thought in sleepless nights, a sneaking feeling in my gut, nor the slightest inkling slipping through my awareness and yet, here it is, loud and real. I can hear a faint voice inside, taunting me -perhaps the same muted voice that suppressed the scream: 'why should I concern myself with the deep darkness of the sea? Surely, there's no need to look down ...' You fool!

The beast dashes against the water and sends it gushing and splashing everywhere. I'm soaked to the bone. The waves lash against my raft rocking it dangerously, I'll capsize! I must have grown claws - the way my fingers are clinging to the logs! My heart is about to gallop right out of my chest in a panic. Looking at the convoluted sea, I am dead certain that if I fall in, I'll be devoured. Well constructed as I thought it to be, this raft cannot really be expected to hold long together, unless the sea swallowed that creature whole of its own accord, and made it disappear forever. Oh won't you, sea? But the sea has provided the stage for this spectacle. My prayer is not likely to be heard nor answered any time soon, is it? Oh what if it comes out again -the beast- what then? The little voice whispers in my ear again: brace yourself, you silly girl!

⁂

That all actually happened, although maybe not exactly like that. That's just how I’ve pictured it, or how my perceptual filters -which have a soft spot for all things dramatic- absorbed it. If I’m honest, my sense of drama has been dismissed by rolling eyes and flips of the hand before, and eventually I always end up dismissing it, too. Only this time things turned out to be a little trickier.

While having a bit of a tendency to over-dramatize certain life events is something I recognise as a personality trait of mine, the performer who actually breathed life into that unusually prominent dramatisation was not someone I was prepared to recognise as part of my own self at all -mostly because I had stumbled upon her on my thirtieth year of life, and I had no idea who she was. As I was perplexed to find, on that occasion this stranger wouldn’t get off the stage. Instead, she would swan in and out of the spotlight, bowing smugly to the only person in attendance, like I cared in the slightest for her high-flown notions of what a good rendition of a dramatic role should look like. Even then I sat, facing the stage, staring blankly at a plain fact: that stupid performance held complete sway over my life.

If you haven’t guessed by now, the deep dark sea was not out there in the real world of tangible things, but within, in the world of things I couldn’t grasp. We all have to face the creature sometime (our shadow, our Mr Hyde, the less dignified face of our ego, what we sweep under the carpet, whatever you may call it). It always finds its way up to the surface and I'm sure some people face it valiantly (if you're one of them, please do make yourself known!), but then there's the rest of us, who hold on to the edges of the raft as tight as we can in the hope that, if we close our eyes and squeeze hard enough, it'll all pass and we'll be able to go back to normal -at least until we realise it doesn't work that way. To cut a long story short, let's just say that once the creature stirred from its slumber, navigating those waters was not going to be the same again. At that time, as I tried to make sense of what had emerged from within, I was thrown into a state of utter confusion. Bewilderment gnawed at my good judgement like a rat: was this really happening to me after thirty years of being in (what I thought had been) full command of my emotional world? This crisis caught up with me as I was swinging my bag on by back and had one foot out the door somewhere north of the equator. Four months later, when I got a bit weary of backpacking my way through Europe and some parts of Southeast Asia -a period when I saw the inside of a plane more often than any other time in my life-, I thought it best to go back to Australia. I knew being back there would mean relaxing into a routine free from imponderables. It was late November and I was on the final stretch of the trip, seated in a portico at dusk, boasting my best tan ever and taking advantage of a good WIFI day in a solitary island of the Philippines when I booked the flight. The certainty that I was definitely going back eased my mind, I always get a sense of freedom and self-determination when I book flights. So I went back to Melbourne a year after my first arrival in Down Under, this time a belittled version of myself -almost literally-, I had shed seven kilos, as I was mildly shocked to discover. Where had all that weight gone? possibly, it now lay strewn somewhere between Dublin, Madrid, Paris, Bangkok, the ruins of Angkor Wat in Cambodia and the heavenly lagoons of El Nido in the Philippines. When I was finally back, I felt unsure as to what to do about the whole issue, but I'm a talker by nature and sooner or later it all comes gushing out, so I ended up deciding I had to bring up the subject. After all, it had been picking on my peace of mind like a proper bully for months, I had to comfront this other oddly unfamiliar self, and that's exactly what I did: -I'd like us to talk about it. -Oh here we go, Ms Drama. As it turned out, she could barely bring herself to smile at me in the mirror to keep up the appearances after I had refused to celebrate her dubious castaway-in-the-sea-of-her-own-mind performance. As would be expected, she couldn't bring herself to behave candidly, either. Not surprisingly then, my entreaties were put aside with the already familiar flips of the hand and derisive little laughs, and that was it. This was why, there being no contenders, confusion would remain king, taking up a hell of a lot of mental space. By then I was at my wits end. Who was this and why did she decide to make an appearance now, after thirty years? And most importantly, why was she so intent on taking centre stage? how dared she? This being the state of affairs in the first few days after my arrival in Melbourne, I was quick to take refuge in places and activities that made me feel like I had found my bearings: the hostel I had previously stayed in, the job I had left a year before and the gym I was still a member of.

Melbourne, February 2018

Trying to make sense of it all. Whatever did life make me so dramatic for? My head feels under water, my body is sad, it only asks for food and sleep, a lot of sleep lol. A couple of years later, that period of my life was confined to the back of my mind when I walked into a different gym in a rather less exciting part of the world, the place where I got caught in a particularly annoying chapter of this dystopian novel we all call our infamous quarantine. It was my first day back at the gym in months and while I was waiting around for the instructor to tell me where to start, I had a few phone-deprived minutes to kill, which I used to survey the place. There was a flight of stairs leading up to the cardio section and it seemed as if someone had quite rightly guessed people needed a bit of a nudge to climb up and face the most tedious part of a workout, which explained the cliché motivational quotes in black, strong lettering stretching across the vertical face of each of the steps. I idly skimmed through them, just for something to do while I stood around. One of them read "Make space if you want new things to come into your life". This triggered an unexpected memory: Eyes. I was amused by the fact that my mind made that connection as a way of making sense of a motivational quote I came across in a gym, of all places. Eyes was, of course, not his name. That was just how my friend C. had called him because he had a pair of enticing green eyes. For that story to make sense, I'll have to tell it in a roundabout way, so stay with me.

While in Melbourne, I had tried to force a learning experience out of a strange couple of months, and had failed miserably. All I had been able to force out of those brooding rain clouds huddling above my head had been pouring rain, while I worked an average of 25 to 30 hours a week and worked out 10 to 12 at the gym. The gym routine has always made me feel better and I had joined one not far from my hostel. It was open 24 hours, it was as big as a shoebox and it was recurrently deserted on my usual time, except for the occasional other gym goer. The machine free space was reduced to the point that, whenever there was someone else, you would often be in their way. Even then, engrossed in my musings as I was most the time, I rarely looked up and wouldn't have recognised those same faces in the street.

December 2017.
The smallest gym I've seen, all to my skinny self.

That was my surly self in the south, although unlike me, life did seem to have a plan, because before late March, I packed my bag again and started moving north. The first stop was Sydney. My Chilean friend C. was going back there after her travels, and we were both quite happy to be roommates a second time (even if one of us snored like a freight train, that's how well we got on). True to the efficiency of her methodical ways, when I flew in, C. had already sorted accommodation for us, a place with a balcony and a sea view -a peek of the sea over the skyline, anyway, enough to make us happy, with the beach a stone throw away. When she showed me around the two bedroom flat, it was as if a cold mist started lifting, or like cupping a mug of hot tea with cold winter hands: comforting and replenishing, hand and heart-warming. The city of Sydney and my friend C. would inadvertently do a great deal for me in the few months that followed. It must have been on my second week in the city that I took up the job in the cafe. It was a coffee shop owned by good humoured Greeks strategically placed at the foot of an office building and at the heart of the business district. The shop opened nice and early every weekday to supply an incoming herd of sleepy office workers with their morning coffee, and it stayed open throughout the day. People flocked back here on their lunch break and then hurried past the door again in the evening after vacating their desks, on the way to the gym or back home. I was there all day, every weekday for a total of 50 hours, and I soon started getting acquainted with the regulars. This was not in the job description, but it was my duty to remember people's orders by heart, as it became self-evident after the second "Good morning, my usual" thrown at me together with expectant looks and no extra details (let's see, do you look like a large skim latte or a regular, double shot flat white?) My weekdays were thus packed with 10-hour shifts and my weekends were spent lazing about the beach, going for leasury walks in the nearby trails and parks, drinking freshly ground coffee (because the Australians love their coffee and I learnt to appreciate it), wolfing down açai bowls and avo on toast breakfasts with a sea view in cute little coffee places, and chatting with C. all the way down to the bottom of wine bottles and cheese boards in the evenings. It was also the first time in five years I was free on the weekends. In this context it didn't take me long to start resembling my old, pre- sea creature self. It was in those days that I met Eyes. I was behind the counter, waiting around for the accasional mid-morning customer and watching late risers stride past the door into the building, when a tall, suited man walked into my range of vision and into the shop under my watchful eye. It was his first time here, I knew this for a fact, those eyes would've been hard to miss. He looked smart, dressed for success with a crisp white shirt underneath a navy blue suit that complimented the frame of his body, hanging handsomely from the broad, square shoulders all the way down the long, lean arms and legs. The thick auburn hair was neatly combed back, framing his cleanly shaved face nicely. It was like he'd climbed down from a Paco Rabanne billboard ad to come get himself a coffee. My friend D. used to say I liked pretty boys and I would protest it wans't true, but that morning I couldn't have contradicted her. - Hey, uhm, an iced long black, please. - Sure, an iced long black. - An iced long black. - Yup. - Oh, sorry. My day's just started, you can tell I need coffee. He tilted his head down chuckling apologetically, and ran his fingers through the slicked-back hair looking gracefully coy, like he was posing in a photoshoot, except he was not doing it on purpose, which made him look even more attractive, I thought, somewhat swooning. But he was no model, he worked upstairs for a financial consultancy firm, as I would later learn, because he started dropping by for coffee every day. The second time, his coffee order happened to be under our card limit, so I offered him a biscuit for the difference, as I would normally do with other customers. He chuckled again. -That's cheeky... Nah, I'm trying to watch what I eat. Do you want one? It went on like this for a couple of days in which he'd come in to get his morning coffee, make small talk and chuckle at my remarks before turning on his heels and disappearing down the entrance hall for the rest of the day. One morning, he ordered his coffee in a mug and sat down at a table. By now it was clear, even to my then battered ego, why he lingered and, when he looked up with intent eyes as if he'd found something relevant to say, I came around from behind the counter for a chat. He always came in when everybody was in the middle of their working morning, which meant the shop was deserted and I had some minutes to spare. That day I found out he and I had moved from Melbourne to Sydney within three days of each other and had started work in this building the same week. So much for coincidences, he was a broker at the top of the building and I served coffee at the bottom.
-You go to the gym after work? I had been eyeing the gym bag he had brought with him and now pointed out the obvious just to keep the conversation going. It was when I mentioned the name of my gym that I finally knew about the greater coincidence in the whole matter.

- Oh yeah, I was a member of that one in Melbourne, too. - Oh, really? Which branch? I used to go to the one in Southbank. - Yeah, me too. David was the guy at reception, right? Always up for a bit of banter, nice guy. - Mmm, I thought he was rather curt, actually. What time did you go? - Midday, usually... - Nah, not possible. I was there every day at midday... I never saw you. - Yeah... I think I saw you. I used to wear headphones like threse ones. - No, it doesn't ring a bell. You could be confusing me with someone else, it was usually just me and one or two others there, I would've noticed you. - You normally wore black gym wear, like black tights and black tops and you always did abs in the corner. I almost went over to talk to you once, but you were talking to this other guy, I thought he could be your boyfriend. The rest of the time you always seemed to be in the middle of a super set and you didn't look like you'd appreciate interruptions, so... - Oh wow, it was me... I was amused by the discovery, what were the chances? How come I hadn't seen this guy in that gym where it was practically impossible for anyone to miss a needle? Also, Melbourne and Sydney had millions of inhabitants and we crossed each other's paths twice? I wasn't joking with what I said here about the universe unequivocally weaving every thread of life. Not that we always know what the universe is getting at. Things with Eyes didn't develop much further than a few entertaining dates in which he asked me what a low key person did to kill time (he had never met a backpacker in his life before, you see) and took me for a ride down the coast in his sports motorcycle -the kind that purs in low, enticing rumbles when you go easy on it, like I asked him to if he expected me to go anywhere near the bike. There was also an unanticipated last episode in which he walked into the shop on my last day before I packed up again to move further north, and gave me a pricey charm for a bracelet he had seen me wearing. It was wrapped in a pretty bag with pink lace, and he again had that coy look about him (except now it had lost its initial charm) when he took it out from his gym bag, saying it was a parting gift, ''something to remember me by''. It was true that he had alluring eyes, looked like a gift from the gods when he was in a suit, was driven and knew exactly how to make his way in life, buy he was also flaky and altogether not a character of weight in the bigger picture of my life. In spite of this, having known him, having actually seen him in Sydney, taught me something by the time I was waiting for that gym instructor to turn his attention to me, far away from Sydney, half way across the world in my own continent, a good while later. "Make space if you want new things to come into your life". I had arrived in Melbourne with a cluttered mind and wouldn't have seen a pair of alluring green eyes looking at me even if I had bumped into them, like I actually did. In a ridiculously small space. Every day. For months. Ever since I last saw Eyes, I've heard from him a couple of times, but my thoughts never linger with him. I still have his charm in my bracelet, it's pretty and it is a reference to a joke we laughed at together, although it rarely reminds me of him. Some people don't come into your life to stay, or even mean much to you in the greater scheme of things but still appear as triggers for your own evolution, which is just as important. Back in Melbourne, around the time when I didn't see him, I kept thinking life was trying to teach me a lesson but I failed to understand what it was. Later, I understood through him: life's full of opportunities every step of the way, but you'll only spot them if and when you're ready, otherwise you'll just walk blindly past them again and again.

Concordia, Argentina, November 2019

When your head space starts looking crowded, take decluttering action ASAP, unnecesary junk gets in the way of all the good things coming in your direction.