Going back...

Oh, and it’s not quite so easy, you know? Between here and there is three months of cold weather and stress, and a small crumpling – humiliation like a rubbished paper square – every time that I admit that it’s been hard.

I have a pre-dawn moment at my front door. It’s raining. The taxi isn’t here yet. Pete is still asleep. I’m a long way off late, but I consider it: hurtling back upstairs, hiding under my doona and pretending I didn’t hear the alarm. Turns out I owe a small piece of happiness to a man named Fred, who was early.

I went back to Alotau. It was a good time.

I find it difficult to write while travelling, and these past weeks were giddy and multi-coloured and reckless and emotional and constantly half-drunk – no pools of isolation, no distance or disconnected observation. It’s harder to mine aphorisms when you are busy at the heart of your own existence. I need more time to think.

But, meanwhile, a few moments of quiet:

a morning jetty, the distance between cloud and bay as blurred as the difference between warm water and moist air on my barely wakened face

and

a balcony in the trees, bare legs, browning, glossed with mozzie repellant, folk songs tinny with no speakers, and wine glasses (four), all filled at the same good source

and

a dusty office, hushed by a steaming urn

and

a swollen Moresby night, calm and sleepless in a twisted sheet, counting my goodbyes between the whir of the fan, arrhythmic clanging of the wakeful docks, and his breath, almost steady, in

and

out.