The things I miss

I spent most of the past month zipping between cities: Sydney and Melbourne.
Some reasons were good, like graduation and friend's parties.
Some were bad, like friends being sick...
zipping between two worlds - experiencing both cities in a state of flight and flux gave me a chance to have a lot of good coffee, and a lot of good takeaway, and to burn out my overdraft limit even more... as well as to see both places above and below, in moving between and within, finding new and old faces, to rediscover cities as spaces of chance encounters, new discoveries, new possibilities always emerging and subsiding.

Somewhere in the middle of this I discovered that another acquaintance/inspiration had been forced to abandon his mortal coil in an accident involving a bicycle and a stairwell.
Horrible.
How do begin to describe the loss of someone who was the centre of so many legends?
He's turned up to my first wedding in a Koala suit and overalls covered in red tyre tracks - giggling hysterically while claiming to be attending as "Road Kill"
He had been one half of the legendary duo "the 10,000 foot naked rock stars" who had done the first ever fully naked radio marathon on 2SER - inspiring my own Radio Stripathon with Daz Chandler for the 2SER fundraiser some years later....
I thought he'd done the street mural pictured above - below his house and next to the cafe where I'd see him serving coffee whenever I went for a dose of darlingithurts bohemia...

I asked where he was, and the guy serving me whispered "he died". The mural is a dedication, the ripped off heart sign regularly replaced.
So I sat, stunned, in front of a knitted cover for a sandstone wall, sipping my latte, passing my teddybear to a dear friend sobbing over the worst ever news about her partner, both of us feeling the cold shock of dread inching into our spaces of life and colour.....

So, flying back and forth, I've missed the opening of the biennale in Sydney, missed friends' shows in Melbourne, missed the cat, the wife, the calmness of weekends in the burbs....

but then so much life, light, stories and possibilities, and memories coiling themselves around new connections, movements and spaces, finding myself again, finding others, and finding at last that this new city has elements of familiarity and delight and feels like home again.