It is early on the 20th of February 2009. A lot of packing has been done in the two days previous, and a bit more will be done before we set off today. The ute (that’s utility vehicle, sort of like the Australian equivalent of the American pickup truck) is sitting on the drive outside the kitchen window, loaded to the hilt. My mother estimates that by the strain on the suspension my possessions must weigh close to a metric ton. I pick just about the only rainy day of the year so far, as my moving day. Everything has to be covered with a tarp. I am very nervous about my things getting soggy, especially the mattress. We stop at the mechanic on the way to pump up the tires. Only once on the highway do I seriously think about where we are going and what this means, mainly I just listen to the radio.
We arrive late, as usual. My grandmother thinks that we have finished unpacking after a just few boxes enter the house – as predicted. She nearly falls over backwards as we slowly fill my new room with boxes, and she can’t possibly think how it is all going to fit. My mother hangs around for a bit but is soon in the now starkly empty ute about to drive away. She looks like she is trying not to say something. It suddenly feels like she is about to leave me here in this uncomfortably foreign space forever and alone ruled over by someone I realise I hardly know. I begin to tear up even though I know it’s nothing like that. I’ll be back at home next week, but I can’t even comprehend what sort of events might precede that. She’s never left me anywhere like this before, I always go home with her; I remember exactly in sequential snapshots the streets we travel to get out of the city and back home. I will not see those streets today. Out of all the things that have happened so far in the saga of finishing school, nothing could have prepared me for the sight of my mother driving off without me. There is just something so perfectly poetically painful about it.
Tuesday 7 April 2009
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I really enjoy how you mixed music in the podcast this time. The music is maybe a bit loud in the mix when you speak, it can be a bit hard to concentrate on what you are saying with the lyrics almost as loud. But the atmosphere created is priceless.
ReplyDeleteThe overall atmosphere is already very dense. Very melancholic and still, so fickle. I liked your descriptions, I could almost smell dust being washed away by the rain on the road.
You seem to have a very close connexion to your mother, as desire or suffered it can have been. I remember how she would not even let you alone in the shopping center. The jump is that even bigger now, that you could never really be independant before. It's very brutal. I like how you espressed it.