Going Home

You know when I mused that people turn to drugs as a way of creating innocence in order to bring forth inspiration? And the little fleeting glimmers that sustain me? Well I’ve found something better than a hundred poignant song timings and rain glistened trees. It’s him. He’s my drug of choice. My muse. He’s the reason I get on this train and feel my artistic soul trying to burst through my skin. It’s not this gritty rattling long late night train. It’s where I’ve been. What I’ve been doing. There are reasons I will never come to hate this journey home. And this is one of them.

I’ve longed to tell you what this is like. The walk from start to finish. As long as I have this I will never feel like I have writer’s block. One day I’ll get to use it. One day I’ll get home to an empty house, fill myself full off coffee and alcohol, sing at the top of my lungs and blog until dawn. Sometimes I think that I can’t go home. It’s only a 20 minute grace period. 20 minutes of finding my way home in the dark without looking up. Just typing. Just feeling. Trudging onwards. Getting closer to my destination and further from my inspiration. And so I write, and I walk.

These streets whose names I do not know, but whose paths I automatically travel. Through the train station, up the hill along the empty shops, past the pizza place which always seems to be open, the one upmarket Korean restaurant which always seems to be full, and the couple walking there dog at 11:30 at night. Across the big road, and down the little dark side street past the school, opposite the house with an ill-designed wheelchair ramp which has a step at the end. Around the corner, near the house covered in football stickers and slogans, then down, down into the steepest valley which makes me lean forward in my heels and my knees jolt on the hard pavement.
Sometimes I have a party. I put the music on full blast. I strut and skip down the hill miming the words as loud as I can. Telling the world where it is at. Shakin’ it and watching my shadow follow along. Looking at my arms in the light and the shape of my waist. Pretending I am on a stage. In a music video. Or at least very drunk. I celebrate and dance and run. I think of all the things that are great about this life. What fun I have just had. Ignore the world almost completely, no-one attacks a crazy girl. No-one spoils my fun. Sometimes I even sing. Moving with the music, speeding up at the fast bit, doing the full on heavy metal hair flick, or stepping long-legged in my heels, creeping through the slow bit.
Past the perfect house with the fake grass lawn and the little paving stones, all freshly painted and picturesque. And in the front window sits a purely ornamental dining room, with antique dining chairs and table, complete with candelabra. But sometimes when the lights are on you can see past that into the kitchen, a big old white fridge covered in photos and a bench swamped in junk. I wonder if they even use the dining room? It is like a shop window on the front half of the house. Then up the hill, up the other side of the valley and around the corner, and down where they have no street lights.
Sometimes I have a melancholy walk. Pretend I am in a horror movie. Open my eyes to the world and the beauty and the sadness and every little detail. I let it fill me up, and overwhelm me and sadden me. I play it soft and I listen. I listen to my footsteps and my breathing and I feel small. I think about my long walk home and of running away. I look at the lights over the way. I imagine myself like a dandelion seed in the darkness, and let the night fill my eyes.
Then I turn around to the left again, up a hill. I saw a cat here once. I was just walking along, looking at that corner, and I blinked and there was a cat; sitting in the middle of the footpath, right on the corner, as calm as you like. And I walked up to the cat, and I said ‘hey there, hey mate,’ and I patted him or her, and it was lovely and soft and it liked me and rubbed on me. It was so amazing to see a cat, because I don’t see cats anymore. And then, it walked off and I turned the corner, and then I looked back around the corner and it was gone. A regular Professor McGonagall, my mother said. Then I go up this hill and cross another road, stepping under the small oak trees. Once I sat under them and tried to have a cigarette, but I was too scared someone in the neighbourhood would see me who might know my grandmother, and the silly thing wouldn’t light anyway. Then I go along this dead end street, and turn left again, up the last hill, facing the house with the picket fence.
I think about my man, how we get on so well. Six hours are gone in an instant. We just do all those perfect lovely human things. There’s a domesticity to it, which I know he shies away from but that I secretly relish in. “I was so excited to, do such normal things with you” as Amanda says. We talk and have dinner and drink wine and laugh at bad television. But then I have to race to the train, because I am bound by an elastic leash to my grandmother. I always have to call her and tell when I am coming back. She is never pleased. If I come back in the night it is too late to be walking home, and if I come back in the morning she always receives me with an air of him having taken my innocence in the night. Sometimes it hits me that now I am living the life, walking home at midnight from my boyfriend’s. I couldn’t have imagined that two years ago, if you had told me that’s where I would be, I would have thought I was the pinnacle of cool by then. It’s amazing how much can change and yet how little can change.
Then I turn rig then down the hill past a building site, and around the corner towards the music teacher. This corner has always taken my breath away. This is the corner of the rain glistened tree. Some time in spring it had just rained and I saw this tree, growing right under the street light, with its little red trumpet flowers and bright green fern like miniature leaves twinkling in the glow. It was absolutely dazzling. I was suddenly connected to the whole beauty and immensity in nature. I wanted to sit under that tree all night. I wanted to capture a piece of that beauty and take it with me, but alas it would not come. I stood there for 15 minutes taking pictures of this tree, but it was too dark.
I go past the music teacher’s place, which has a security light that always comes on when I go past. Then I cross the big 4 lane highway, which is usually bumper to bumper with speeding traffic, but there is hardly ever a single car on it when I cross, so I put my arms out and spin around, enjoying the freedom. Then I go up onto my street, and I cut diagonally across the park, which for a long time I did not have the confidence to do at night; thinking rapists and murders lurked in there (thanks Mum!). Up the hill at the other side of the park, to this view:

...of trees and street lights, glittery asphalt and porch lights. And at the end of the dog-leg portion of the street is my house. Those last few steps, I’m not even a part of it. A zephyr in heels. Eyes on a stalk. Skin like paper. I glide up the hill in the breeze. Put my key in the door, not too much like a drunkard – and as the door opens my fantasy is broken.


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