Someday I will stop packing.

Someday all the people that I love will be in one place and I will see them everyday and our lives will collide once again with easy familiarity. Someday I will be content in one place that will fulfill all my needs and make me happy. Someday I will not constantly and forever be wishing I was somewhere else. Someday I will not always be missing someone or something or some landscape of my memory. Someday I will wake up and each day will pass like the next, easily and peacefully and happily, with warmth and laughter and love. Someday my bestfriend and I will not have to update each other on our lives because we will simply be there to see it.

Someday my heart will not be so divided.

There is a reason I said I’d be happy alone. It wasnt because I thought I would be happy alone. It was because I thought if I loved someone and then it fell apart, I might not make it. It’s easier to be alone. Because what if you learn that you need love? And then you don’t have it. What if you like it? And lean on it? What if you shape your life around it? And then it falls apart? Can you even survive that kind of pain? Losing love is like organ damage. It’s like dying. The only difference is, death ends. This? It could go on forever. – Meredith Grey

Yeah. And suddenly it was 2007 again.

Our fear of the future stems from the knowledge that a lot of things can happen within a short period of time and it is not always within our power to determine if they will be good or bad.

I am twelve years old.

It is sometime in 1999 and my sister and I are in a hotel room in Melbourne city, somewhere south of the Yarra. Outside our windows, the city of Melbourne spreads out in a grey, moody sprawl. Our parents are in the living room of the hotel suite, making dinner reservations. We are visiting my sister in her first year at college.

I am twelve years old. On the hotel TV, Dawson’s Creek is playing and my sister is trying to explain to me the premises of the show. It seems very complicated. My pre-teen brain doesn’t get it, but I do grasp the song, this song.

Kiss me, beneath the milky twilight.

It will be years before I kiss someone. Years before I become this person I am now.

I am twelve years old and its chilly in this city that I love, this city that I have already determined I will live in someday. The air is filled with possibility and the hotel is owned by my father’s friend, an idea that takes my breath away. Hitherto it had not occurred to me that people could own hotels. Hotels were monuments of majesty that smelled like fresh running water  and white sheets. At night we walk across the bridge and I am impressed by how grown up my sister looks in her trenchcoat. Back at home I am horribly lonely, unaware that I am surrounded by the people who will become my best friends.

Here in this city I dimly grasp that the future awaits me. The future is exciting and so very far away. I can’t wait for it to arrive.

My mother comes in and hands us a bowl of strawberries and chestnuts and I am filled with that holiday feeling, that feeling like everything is so special and out of the ordinary and I am so happy. It is one moment of crystallized happiness, my sister, the big white bed, Dawson’s Creek, the song, the strawberries and chestnuts and the city.

Oh, the city.

And suddenly I am on the Beijing subway, shutting my eyes tight against the tears.

I have a boyfriend with a broken collarbone, two neglected blogs, hundreds of unread rss feeds and I have not yet wished my mother happy mother’s day.

What was it that a friend once said? ‘Why do people ask me if I get upset about wasting one whole day? Tomorrow will come and there will be more time.’

I wish I felt that way right now, as if I had an abundance of time, a whole limpid sea of it, to scoop up and throw to the winds in pleasure, rather than time to be measured out by the teaspoonful, consumed carefully and usefully.

I desire time to waste. I wish to live not within the confines of a monday to sunday. I wish to say like my friend: who cares if I did not do anything today? Tomorrow will come and there will be more time.

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?

Anyway, long story short, I have discovered the upside of having housemates: it’s actually rather comforting. Like when you come home from a bad day and you don’t really want to talk about it but then you do and you realise there’s nothing really to hide about a bad day or a disappointing failure because everyone has had one of those and then later when everyone is home you cook instant noodles with them and instant noodles is always comforting.

And…and…well I don’t really know what the point of this post is. But that’s what this blog is for, a digital snapshot of my brain as of right now, which means you guys don’t always get to read things that make sense.

BUT.

For posts that actually do have a point, however, I’ve created a new blog! With my own domain! How grown-up is that! Please go tell all your friends!

Say hello to Flyleaf:

Okay, yeah, it only has one post so far. Hello, it’s new? I’m working on it! Go check it out.

courtesy of here

So this week:

Beans on rice + bacon rolls + a humongous piece of tender pork laced with melting fat = apparently, Brazilian cuisine.

Canadianboy refused to let me try out Instagram on him. So I took a picture of my handbag instead

Wangfujing! Where I tried (and failed) to buy a second-year anniversary present for canadianboy.

Beijing saw some sun this week. Albeit through a filter of smog. But still. Sun!

I did not take off my tights all week.

I made peanut butter pie. And in the process, discovered that the chinese cannot tell the difference between cream, yoghurt and cheese.

I lived in my Google Reader and rejoiced in my vpn.

Urm. My bedsheets.

And thus concludes today’s session of utterly gratuitous pictures.

2. Music boxes. Cos you know, you just know, that the tiny ballerina girl twirling in the middle is actually a real person who was shrunk by some creepy curse and is now trapped in that box, forever doomed to pirouette to Rachmaninoff.

3. Things that have numerous, tiny, standard sized holes in them. I realise that’s not a great description, so see below:

Yeah. That’s the back of my hairdryer. I try not to look at it.

4. Earthworms. Also maggots. But more so earthworms. Just to give you the heebie-jeebies, I present for your viewing pleasure:

Why on earth did evolution make a creature the colour of human intestines?

5. Open cuts where the skin surrounding the cut is clean and you can see where the flesh has split. Like so:

Okay, I was going to Google Image that last one and put a picture here but then when I did, I found some truly disturbing and horrifying pictures that have effectively ruined my day.