Mentalechoes

I feel really fucking directionless today. Sort of like being a passenger on a boat that’s just drifting along on the ocean, going nowhere quickly. There isn’t any one reason why, but the reasons all basically boil down to a general lack of satisfaction in life, work and relationships. Actually the relationship thing is a bit tricky because I don’t really have one, and don’t really want one, but I sometimes think it would be good to be in one for a while because they do give life a special twist that is missing (if you manage to be in one that’s fun). Yeah well I’ve tried relationships with Dutch girls and they more or less end up in disaster. Cross-cultural difficulties invariably result in terminal relationship problems. It seems fun and interesting in the beginning, but after a while, those interesting quirks become chisels that chip away at the foundation of your relationship until it breaks. And then its only a matter of time till the whole thing crashes to the ground. If you’re lucky you land on top of the wreckage and walk away more or less intact. If you’re not, it all lands on top of you and basically, you’re fucked!

Well I didn’t start writing this with the intention of sounding like a bitter and cynical ex-boyfriend type, but that’s sure what that last part resembles.

Being honest though, I’m not really bitter, but I am wiser and I know that having another relationship with a Dutch girl isn’t something that I am going to get into. After all, this isn’t my home, I am just living here for the time being. In about a year and half I want to move back home. That’s how long it will take me to finish a journey that I started about 2 years ago. If I leave before then it will be premature and I won’t get the benefit out of some plans I made.

Back on the 2nd of August was my 7 year anniversary of being away from home. Amazing how time flies! I remember about a month before I left for London that my mum was crying and said she would miss me. I told her not to be sad, I’d be back in two years tops. The wise woman that she was looked at me and said, you might be back in two, or you might not be back at all, you just never know. Now looking back on 7 years away I can see how true that was. The time away has changed me too. Now I am not a real ‘true blue’ Australian; I don’t even know if I am an Australian at heart anymore. And I know I am not European either; I will never be Dutch, not even if I live here the rest of my life. In John Fowles book, The Magus, an Australian girl who is the one time love interest of the main character tells him - Nicholas Urfe - that when you live away from your home country for any length of time it invariably changes you. You lose your identity and you become lost because you no longer identify with any one culture. You become something else, you live an existence where your only home is that small space where you hang your clothes and sleep. The moment I read that conversation in the book between the two of them, I knew exactly what she was saying, because I keenly feel it myself. I think anyone who has lived for 7 years away from home would.

So I sit here today, on a day off from work, thinking blankly about the prospect of living like a ghost for the next 2 years, and if it’s going to be more or less like this; like being on a drifting boat with no land in sight.

Padwanna.