2015: Burn Everything and Start Again

2015 was the year I moved to America from Australia. Some things in my life back home had ended, quite abruptly, and so there was no reason for me to stay. Before I left I spent some time traveling around my home country to visit people close to me who I probably wouldn’t see for quite a while; to Alice Springs, Adelaide, Perth, Melbourne and Sydney. Then I gave all my possessions away, packed a suitcase of clothes and my laptop and booked a one way ticket with no real idea what I was doing.

First I went to Thailand where I found a cheap place to stay on a small, isolated beach and I didn’t really speak to anyone for a month, at least not to hold a conversation. I did not mind. I snorkeled with turtles and ran the length of the beach every day and copyedited a seemingly endless stream of extremely dry financial reports from Singapore for a client. I thought about you often but what I might have said to you, if I were able, I didn’t know.

In February I left for Los Angeles where I landed with a friend who showed me the kindest hospitality you could imagine and tried to see myself living there, wondering if I could be an Angelino. The city was fun but it was too enormous, whole days seemed to be lost to the inefficiencies of keeping any two appointments on the opposite side of town. So I bought an old SUV on Craiglist and I left to drive across the country.

I hit San Francisco and Yosemite, Vegas, the Grand Canyon, the Valley of Fire to Zion. Utah and Monument Valley, New Mexico and along Route 66 to Texas. Down to New Orleans, back up to Austin, across to Memphis, Nashville and Virginia. Through Pennsylvania and three and half months or so after I’d left, New York, to where I now live in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

In among all that some things happened. I wrote a short piece about how Mars One had neither money, nor rigor in assessing its candidates. I produced a reporting series in Australia on our country’s appalling treatment of asylum seekers. One of the pieces won a Walkley Award. A story I wrote for Matter last year was anthologized in the Best Australian Science Writing.

Those things were all pretty exciting and good. Then my cat of fifteen years, who I’d had to leave behind with friends in Melbourne, became suddenly super sick with cancer, so like an idiot, probably, I flew home for a week to be with her.

I wrote about the eventual home of a 10,000 year clock in the top of a mountain in Nevada and stopped off at the Clown Motel. I profiled the transhumanist presidential candidate as we drove from San Diego to Arizona via a cryonics facility and an immortality cult. I think, without reservation, that the apocalypse is bad for you and that all of these things are connected.

As I drove alone across America I was never lonely. The only time I was really afraid was a night I stopped in Paris, Texas and don’t ever do that on a whim inspired by Wim Wenders. I stayed often with people I knew, less often with people recently met, sometimes in motels and sometimes, in very beautiful scenery, in the back of the car with the boot open onto the desert.

I could work from wherever I was and so for as long as that was the way I was living that dictated the places I’d be. Mostly I had no plan, I just went wherever the road took me and Jesus Christ, America, if nothing else please do something about your insanely short freeway onramps; it’s like touching the void every single time you don’t die in an horrific accident, honestly.

When I was a kid in Sydney I used to climb up on the roof of my parent’s house and watch the planes taking off and landing over the city in the distance, little points of blinking light. Travel was not something that was part of my life growing up, it just wasn’t on the cards in my family. But I always hungered for it and watched those planes with something approaching unbearable envy and the place I always wanted to see more than any other was New York.

Why, I am not sure exactly, it was the books and movies and records I loved, I guess. As far back as I can remember having an awareness of “a place to be”, a place that would signify escape and some kind of ur version of myself I was desperate to somehow grow up to become, that place was New York.

I live here now, and many close friends from my life in Sydney are here, kind of like a cabal, which is so nice. And so many new people I have met through the shared trauma of deciding to start your life over again pretty much from scratch.

And there are the friends I miss back home whose tiny children grow apace and who I know won’t remember me because their little brains are like sieves for about seven years, which makes me periodically sad, so I just go on ‘like’ rampages of their Instagram and Facebook photos and try not to think too often about how that’s the life I had spent these last years thinking I’d be living now.

You never dreamed of this place, it was never where you wanted to be. I don’t know where you are now, or what you’re dreaming of, or if I will ever see you again in my life.

But I made it here, I did it alone. It was not what I had planned, it was just what happened — perhaps no more and no less.