Goodbye to all that (homecoming queen)
or girl blog #4: nostalgia, the Melbourne summer, and contemporary acceleration
Sometime in April, then May
Early on Friday morning, I hauled my duffel bag into my car and drove the six hours and fifty-five minutes to Canberra. When asked what I was doing this weekend, I told people that I was going “to visit home for a little bit,” an inherently contradictory statement I did not realise was an oxymoron until I sat down to write this. My housemate messaged me yesterday night to ask me when I will be coming back, and I told her that I’ll be home on Tuesday. On Saturday, my mother told me it was good to have me home and that she does not want me to leave. Home. I am going home on Tuesday. I am leaving home on Tuesday.
Just before I started writing this, I sat on the grass outside of the National Library and stared intently at a chemtrail that had interrupted the otherwise clear horizon. Every time I drive into Canberra, I am always shocked by how much of the sky you can see, an endless expanse of blue that would roll on forever if not for the Brindabella Ranges, the mountains that characterise and ensnare the small city. Because Canberra is 578 metres above sea level, the clouds feel further within reach because they physically are, a disorienting topographical feature that is exacerbated by the city-mandated height restriction on any and all infrastructure. Designed to permit the uninterrupted research conducted by Mount Stromlo Observatory, this constraint culminates in a night sky that is free of smog and light pollution, the absence of skyscrapers permitting a thicket of stars to appear night after night, each as visible and bright as its neighbour. The street lights are dimmed for the same reason, and the height of the Brindabellas causes the twilight to be shorter, the explosive sunset dissipating instantly as it slinks behind the innumerable hills. After the sun sets, the city becomes a large void, a basin populated by nothing but a distinct and unshakable quiet. Every suburban shadow is a threat, something that should not be there, an interruption.
On my 18th birthday, I laid on the dead grass near my house and spent a long time looking into the blue-black abyss above me. I was not worried that it was going to rain, it was not windy, and my body was perfectly still. There, 25 kilometres from the city centre, the only sound I could hear was the dull drone of a lone cricket or the occasional broken muffler, a teenage hoon exceeding the speed limit by some twenty or thirty an hour. I cannot remember how long I was lying there, only that at some point I got very cold all over and had to go back inside, the result of early spring chill and the thinness of the cardigan I was wearing. This is a very romantic way of describing such a mundane act, but I remember feeling quieter than I ever had before, my heart rate slow and stable, my hands turned open, skyward. All of the everything was left to await, and all of the now was there to be said goodbye to. I counted the seven stars in the little dipper and stood up.
I feel a complicated sense of longing for this period of my life, a wistful yearning for my then-becoming and its omnipresent thrum of potential. There was a place that I belonged to, yes, but also the sense that I could go anywhere, and be anything, my existence an untarnished, underdeveloped thing that I could mould to fit the shape of my desires. Now, a few years on, going home tends to make me a bit sad. It feels a little further away each time, an unfocused image of someplace lying just behind your closed eyelids, an eidetic imprint of an intangible Before, existing only in certain smells and tastes (woodfire, L’air Du Temps, chicken pie). The peeling red picket fence of my childhood was pulled out and replaced with sage green colour-bond, a signifier of suburban success. Home takes a different form now (or maybe it is me who has changed. Plath says: “Where is the girl that I was last year? Two years ago? What would she think of me now?”).
I am leading somewhere here, I promise, but it feels necessary to wax lyrical about childhood and homecoming because it is what I resort to when I need to feel centred. Temporal and emotional inaccessibility spur a feeling of discontinuity that is often jarring, especially when one is dissatisfied with their current surroundings. Five months into the old New Year, and I am still finding it difficult to pinpoint exactly what is making me so unhappy, an unshakable despondency that has spurred a want to sleep through the day, to put on another movie and forget the place I now recognise as home. I used to love this city. I do love this city. In a quiet corner of my mind, a small voice pulls on my sleeve and whispers: I want to go home.
Summertime is often a cure-all for this sort of dissatisfaction, a sweat-slicked haze of fun and social activity that permits a distraction from broader personal conundrums. Technically, it begins in December, but the Melbourne summer is a fever dream inhabited by city players and odd behaviour, and it lasts anywhere from four to six months, depending on how much you believe in it. Some of my friends are still there, their faces tilted towards the sky in a perpetual lust for the New, their jackets creating imitations of warmth designed to keep the carousel spinning forever and ever (or for as long as they can stand to remain in motion). For the devotees, summer is a state of mind, a frenzied way of being that is completely disconnected from the sound of the first cicada, or the whirring of a cheap floor fan. They subscribe to the potential of new good times, with newer, good-er people, and remain just as hopeful as they were some months ago, when the future was no more than a promise contained within every new freckle.
When I was a teenager, I spent a lot of my summers alone in my bedroom penning long, angsty passages in my diary (ha!). I just don’t know why I even feel like this, one of them reads. I feel like I am the only person who feels like this all the time, and I don’t know how to make it better. I want to move somewhere new, maybe into an apartment with my best friend or even just by myself. Seriously, WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME!!!!! I FEEL SICK!!! This general propensity for the melodramatic did (not) fade with age and geographic relocation, but there is something about the summertime that saturates my sense of displacement, an environmental affect that triggers nostalgia for a temporal non-place wherein I felt wholly settled. I tend to position myself as a perpetual outsider because for so long that was how I felt, a gawky, thin-faced adolescent who gripped desperately to the hands of her new friends, begging (silently) for permission to tag along, to join in, to understand. Consequently, my second two summers in Melbourne remain beautiful, flickering hindsights because I finally felt like I belonged to something (or rather, some people) other than myself. Now, I find the act of recollection moderately debilitating, a dreamlike reminder of a time that was so sweet and earnest that it feels operatic, fictional. We have all changed, and the cadence of our voices occasionally fails to carry across the jagged divide that has begun to separate us, a rift caused by time and its bittersweet subversion of our relationships.
Nostalgia and memory are fickle because they inherently juxtapose the speed-driven culture of modernity. The experience of contemporaneity (and all of its related facets) can be, in part, understood in terms of acceleration, and thus, any act of past-dwelling can swiftly contort into a vehicle for resentment and self-fracturing. Every person experiencing a form of subjective modernity, whether that be today or centuries ago, will feel some semblance of confusion when contrasting the pace of their past with its innately faster, more current counterpart. Some attribute this to the linear nature of the lifespan, adopting the notion that time will “accelerate” the longer one has been alive simply because there is more of it available to compare (see Eleanor Roosevelt: “today is the oldest you have ever been, and the youngest you will ever be again”). I do understand this. However, I am still left struggling to rectify why I spent so much of this summer feeling like a limp figure in a sea of chorus dancers, a sentimental statue committed to my own memory-derived melancholy. Or: go back! Go back! I want to be like we were.
There is a 19th-century French diplomat named François-René de Chateaubriand who wrote, “Man does not have a single consistent life. He has several laid end to end and that is his misfortune… Friends leave us, others take their place. There is always a time when we possessed nothing of what we now possess, and a time when we have nothing of what we once had.” Or rather, such is life. Our pockets are filled with apparatuses that permit instantaneous access to all possible information. We participate in shift work that prioritises opening hours over routined sustainability, and our taxes are (sometimes) used to develop new infrastructure that endeavours to further increase commuter efficiency (see: get to work quicker! Repel structural inconvenience by fitting MORE into your inherently dwindling days). The already-extensive urban sprawl works to identify “underdeveloped” or “unutilised” land and then spreads itself like butter, a crop of McMansions and fast-food chains appearing like a cement mirage atop what was previously a very nice pocket of green on the highway. Even the corners of our universe are expanding, its growth rate accelerated by some mysterious force called “dark energy.” On an atomic level, things have never been faster.
Summer, in all of its increased social production and long, sunny days, seems to illuminate this kind of acceleration. Days blur into nights, that become weeks, then months, and you are spat out sometime in April as an old, blue-fingered baby that caterwauls and thrashes, begging to be let back in to the party. In its hazy rapidity, the year seems to be spent wishing for the summer, every surprise sunny day in JuneJulyAugust a blessing, a solace, a reminder of happiness still to come. The warmth means we get to do more, stay out for longer, and we can finally take up the acceleratory ballet that so often feels too fast or complicated to immediately jump in alongside. A circus of bodies laid bare against the hot bluestone, summer makes us forget how close to the sun we actually are.
I guess what I am really asking is when is it time to pack up and go? I love my friends and my little house. I even love my housemate’s cat, and I routinely pretend to hate him. I do not think I want to leave. And yet, every time I get a little blue, my feet grow cold and I return to the same juvenile angst that was so pertinent in my adolescence, the same feeling that spurred my decision to move in the first place. As Didion writes in her essay Goodbye to All That, “it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.” Perhaps nostalgia just stalls the question of when to call it.
