(warning: emo post ahead)
One of canadianboy’s housemates is a girl from Brazil. She’s eighteen years old, about a head taller than me and speaks kick-ass Chinese. I seldom see her because she’s eighteen and eighteen year olds have busy lives. She’s sitting for the gao kao — the university entrance exams — and maybe it’s because I haven’t been around students that much but she seems to me to be studying hard.
Once in a while I’ll catch a glimpse of her through the open door, bent over her desk in a circle of lamplight, an indecipherable Chinese textbook in one hand, a highlighter in the other. Something so familiar about that tableau. And this faint sense of recognition triggers a sadness in me, and a longing. That was what my life used to be like, just a few short years ago.
The truth is, sometimes I just want it all back. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not wishing the past two years away. I wouldn’t trade coming to Beijing to study chinese, or getting to know canadianboy and falling in love, for anything. But once in a while, I just wish I could go back to those four years in Melbourne and live them all over again.
Not because I was particularly happy — it was not exactly a pain-free time of my life — but because things were simple, even when they were painful. And I didn’t know it. I didn’t know that they would pass so fast, or that I would still be missing it so long after I’ve left. I miss Melbourne Central and City Library and Flinders Lane and Bourke St Mall and the Union House and Baillieu and Lygon Court. I miss it from deep down inside, from a place that never stopped weeping at having to leave, I miss it with an intensity that even I don’t really understand. I miss it with all the weight of all my memories.
I’ve changed. My world has changed. My life has changed. Even the way I write has changed. And once in a while I would like it all back, those years, those feelings, those priorities, that life, that version of me.
I wish back a world before resumes and job applications and career choices. When blogging was still the domain of the geeks and I had never even heard of social media let alone listed it on my resume as an interest. I wish back a time when my life was filled with classes and library books and research papers. When my world was small and cosy and sheltered. When I moped around my tiny apartment, listening to Snow Patrol, scribbling in my notebook, nursing a broken heart.
Okay, I take the last one back. I don’t miss the broken heart. The broken heart was horrible.
But you know what I mean? Haven’t you ever thought of the past and wished it all back. Haven’t you ever listened to those songs, and dug out those photos and looked at yourself and wondered who is that stranger in that photo and where did she go?
