home

home. we've just arrived home from our holiday yesterday. home right now means London. home sometimes means Sydney, and always means Australia. home is where the heart is, and i've come to realise that home on a granular level to me was, and to an extent still is the Sydney innerwest suburb of Newtown.

i know it might seem ridiculous, i only lived there for 12 months, but whenever i think of Newtown and almost paralysingly so when I am in Newtown, i feel gut-wrenchingly homesick for everything about the place ~ the street, the people, the smells, the food, the shops, the eclectic mess of everything, and most of all the memories.

Newtown represented a period of my life when I was me. Not that i am not myself anymore but I live within the constraints of life, with rights and wrongs and expectations - which are all good things, for this stage of my life. But my year in Newtown was a time when I shunned my fair share of critics, who all with good intent I'm sure, advised me on how I should be living my life, and with whom.

It was a year when I was able to do whatever it was i wanted, literally. I know I did things which were proverbially stupid, things which were frowned upon by many around me. but as I went on living life the way I wanted, I learned more about myself than I ever did, and along the way I made some amazing new friends and cemented some old friendships.

Sometimes when I am in London and i feel homesick, all I want is to be back in Sydney. But then i realise that in my head I'm picturing Newtown but for 6 months before London, I wasn't in Newtown. I had moved in with Panu, onto the next phase of my life. But all i want is Newtown and to be back in my apartment on King Street. I try and stifle the thought.

But I've now learned that instead of stifling it, I should just embrace it as the year that was, and arguably the best year I have had so far. I love my life now, it's evolved and I'm happy. It's not the same, it is better. But that doesn't mean I have to give up the memories.