This is a story of a man so strange in manner and occupation, unlike the masses.
My father the spy.
As we watch the sun laze on the horizon, stretched out in ascending colour, the story of dodging compulsory military service. Dodging bullets.
My father the womanizer.
The man who, if he had been a sailor, would have had a girl in every port. As it is, he never left the one northern port, and never strayed too far in his travels. He was always home in time to bring back tall tales and hotel sewing kits.
This is the story of a man who will still use two glasses to cool my tea, blowing intermittently, at 6, 18 or 26.
The man who makes me freshly squeezed orange juice in the tiny dark kitchen, the electric machine singing arummm rum rum as each half moon is squashed to pulp.
We dance in front of the full length hallway mirror, him clicking his fingers and scatting an unidentifiable tune. Cackling into his reflection and asking opinions on hats as we try on garments and silly faces.
The man who answers the phone as a Frenchman, despite the simmering resentment that remains in the blood of all colonized peoples.
This is the story of a man who still visits his departed mother’s house for lunch every day. A man who doesn’t seem to realize he is in his sixties except for, perhaps, in his morning tea when he drops little white tablets quickly scurried out from their hiding place in an inside jacket pocket into the milky brew.
Huddled under the whitewashed low roof of a Berber cottage, I ask my father to tell me tales in the candlelight.
Pieces of my candlelight mythology.
This is the man who would tell us tales at bedtime of Helen of Troy, and take us in summer to the caves of Hercules, pointing to where his impressive strength, the same strength that strangled snakes in his crib, also left holes in the walls of the Mediterranean. My mother would read us classic English storybooks at bedtime, but my father would paint a world of adventure with his story telling, a world to which I would run off into in my dreams.

This is a man who takes strangers through hillsides freckled with olive trees or patch worked with hope of harvest. Hillsides that have taken ancient cobbled steps into their bosom and, as you wander up in the sunshine, an ancient Roman town appears. This is where my father the guide likes to take strangers, building the ruins back up into full buildings before their eyes. And this is where my father the joker presents his favourite trick, lowering unsuspecting women and men alike onto the phallus carved into the stone, an ancient street sign pointing to the local brothel.

I remember meeting you on days like these. Searching for you under the barking bronze statue dog. Days of sweat and feeling hot under the collar, even though I never wore one. The air so thick, it’s hard to take in.
The air so thick with intent.
Us shuffling around each other for hours, me with all the things I wanted to say to you but knew you didn’t want to hear weighing heavy on my heart.

Declarations and hopes and regrets or questions.

And you with just one word shamefully trapped in your throat.
Sex.

6 stops on a tram from Richmond
I indulge in Vodka and tears
As day falls away into the street lamp orange sunset
The silvered fish stand tall on hidden tails.
See, the Melbourne eye is blinded
Cataracts are being removed one by one

The shock of winter has fallen away to surprise at warm days and freezing nights that betray the fact this city is masquerading as a coastal one.
Yet another implied assumption that is buried in the dust of reality.

It is a desert here, although it shouldn’t be.
Moving through structures made of sand,
Life stalls on ribbons of road cutting off communities
There, under freeways and train lines and roads filled with endless golden arches, they can hide away, boom gates ensuring we are all stopped from crossing over.

The famed laneways offer up a mixed bag
Fearless rats scuttling about and snakes hibernating in bins
Or in bars, sardonic, hobo-chic cocktails, glass held in paper bags, where it’s all suddenly chic and unaffordable.
On the Upfield line, beer in paper bags is plentiful and on Little Bourke Street a cocktail in a paper bag will cost a cool lobster.

At Bourke Street I am at a crossroads watching long plumed birds take off in the cooling breeze and horses gallop in the setting sun, all mocking me in their limitless freedom.

I am so envious of the birds, dropping down roof tiles as if they were positioned pieces in a Tetris game. They get to frolic in the cooling evening against a backdrop of clouds carrying the pink of the sunset on their backs. They have the freedom of a home, resting away in ever jiggling trees.

The sky here seems endless and curved, cupping the rows of suburbia. The dirty cheeked sky laid against the flat land, the miles of horizontal chains of gentrification.
The great plane of the Melbourne steppe.

Here is a toothless grimace passed off as a smile, for how could you smile through decades of being told you are worthless?

Even I once started to believe the hype.

En las espinas de la madrugada estamos ella y yo, yo y la monja.
Mientras alrederor una esfuerzada fiesta sube de volumen.

Desfiles de semi modelas con ratones en la mano.
Cerveza escondida y luego pasada en vasos de plastico.
Un casino sin dinero, pero la misma mirada de cansansio;
Cartas pegajosas agaradas entre dedos variosos.

Ojala todas estas faccciones separadas podrian unificarse, un union de hermanos atrapados por los vuelos.

Todos somos islas aisladas.

Un triangulo de amor con la celosa Italiana.
Un clase de baile Africano, el ritmo atrapado en mi cuerpo, un movimiento silencioso.

Y lo puedo sentir, hay una parte de mi que es Africana.
Es el ritmo de la vida que atraviesa mi cuerpo, contenido en mi sangre.

*translation in comments*

I never had the chance to feel quite complete, like I would be forever trapped between two cultures.
But this isn’t a tug of war.
I don’t feel torn between them anymore, more like a rubber band gone slack. I am just one among the pushing spitting yelling crowds.

I can’t even write it out now, these grandiose feelings while flying, feeling like perhaps my language had come back.
I was soaring atop waves of clouds, my hope up there pressed up to the horizon of the infinite blue.
Above atmosphere.
The feeling of take off is such a thrill that I cannot sit by and not watch.

This is a feeling only matched by falling in love.
Then too I want, need my eyes open. Watching as my brain floats out clear of my head; where I am disembodied but simultaneously feeling every cell. It is so heavy there sitting, as I fly.
My stomach lurches and drops through the seat. I can see it plummet thousands of feet, picking up icicles on the way. That gut hurtling to the ground could have been the same one that dropped so suddenly at the right glance, that fleeting instant of connection where you know there is no turning back- you might as well be committed.

And this all happens on a loop: excitement, elation, commitment, love you have given so freely you could never expect it back.
Exhaustion.

And dread.
Because it all comes back to that. Any sort of love makes a home with dread.

I was sick yet again and missed my anniversary. This blog turned 3 on the 1st of April. A quick browse through the back posts and you can see a lot has changed emotionally, geographically, artistically and spiritually.

However did I survive without it?

I am hungrily breathing in the liberty that comes from a more primitive existence.
The rushing of the unseen river after intermittent showers.
It seems that all I need is to be immersed.

To bathe in the full-moon light and the silence of the cold.

It is so bright that I can see it all, perhaps even better than at high noon.
And the silence is so complete that I can almost hear my heart beating, the rush of blood in my ears.
Only when the clouds come up to tuck in the shinning face of the moon is it time to retreat into my jibli cave of low ceilings and white-washed walls.

The first few crouched steps awaken in me a sense of coming home that I have never felt in any home of mine given on loan.

A simplicity of vibrant carpets adorning every curve of chalked white that offers total calm.

And the silence.

Even by day when traversing over Romanesque roads of hand laid stone all that dominates is the breath in my chest and the taste of eggs freshly lain by roaming hens of puffed plumage.

I begin to forget words of my mother tongue while searching for those of so many others. A mixture that becomes a language all of my own that even I have only just begun to comprehend.
Nothing is shared except the language of winning at parchis, not even the pipe of peace so often stuffed full and smoked in a puff.
Nothing is shared yet everything is and nothing remains my own except for the squelch I make on muddy paths.

I can see Spain from my apartment, and on a clear day it looks like hope.
I can see why many are lured to drown, clutching dinghies, by her mermaid ways.
Even I am lured by the sparkle of blue laid at the feet of gleaming white and I am not even looking to escape.

I find paradise on nearly every corner.
Here one is lit in neon and there the paradise of the sea all fluorescent lights and cold smoke stained walls.
More like l'enfer de la mer.

Just daydreams to be had while rocking in ancient taxis in traffic rattling;

Chinks in heavy cloud paint slivers of silver on the ocean.

Momentary and resplendent.

Up looms the twin mountain, head in the clouds, severed from the rock.
Perhaps they still hold hands over seas irrevocably connecting continent to continent.

Not long after and the haze of suburbia makes the snow capped mountains an apparition floating in the skirt hems of the clouds.
I was that close to a white Christmas.
A cloud of white pigeons rises up through the auburn leaves filtering the tepid light of the afternoon.
The smell reminds me of Beechworth- damp leaves and peppered bark. Fitting as I have been idle in this town too long too.

Do you sing a song for Christmas or just for drunkeness?
Perhaps there is no difference.
Or maybe we will all strike it lucky in white packets with red thumb prints stamped on the face of things.

The Arabian Nights theme runs through this land and the last, a wish blown in whispers of spiced romance through the centuries and empires.

I'm eternally curious about people and sometimes the asphixiation of agoraphobia is not enough to disuade me from my voureistic impulse.
I'd like to think they are all huddled over with some existential concern, some romantic higher vibration.
The truth is they are more likely deliberating over some mathematical equation or a financial crisis.

The circular notion of life makes me laugh involuntarily.
On a road trip over newly laid paths to the 21st Century, I remarked that journeys make me want to sing "Hit the road Jack"- harping back to childhood days not so much filled with innocence as the need to sing through hardship and hunger.
And now, faced with no greater hardship than loneliness and an aching repulsion at the thought of going 'home', I hear it.
I haven't heard that song in well over a decade. I can't help but sing aloud and hope against all hope that something extraordinary occurs to hold me back when I am forced to return to the land of my birth, by no means home.

My return will cause my head to hang low in dissappointment.