I suppose this title isn't 100% true, because it is still very much the summer holidays; we still have another month. (Well, except for poor Laura, who starts her academic year in a WEEK because it's her honours year.) But I am here, packing up my dorm, because I'm going on exchange this coming semester. If I weren't, I'd still probably be coming back now to work. But the important bit is that I am here, I have driven back to Canberra from Sydney, I walked out of my wooden crowded house after hugging Felix and the cat goodbye, and I got in my car and trickled through the M5, which eventually, mercifully, opened up to the blue-green-brown of country roads. I listened to podcasts the entire time, so that I'd be distracted from the situational sadness I currently feel.
(It's interesting when, instead of just feeling the ominous pressure of depression with no tangible basis, you finally have a contextual reason to be sad. I don't know whether I'm handling it well or not; I can't remember how I used to act; then again, I don't even know how much of my childhood was neurotypical.)
I stopped at Sutton Forest maccas, as is necessary tradition, and ate chicken nuggets, got back in the car and drove again. The second half of the drive was considerably worse, even though it was shorter and smoother - I don't know if the podcast episodes weren't as good, or I was just more distracted. I didn't think much about it anyway, because I was pretty hypnotised the whole time. The constant rhythm of the road is very soothing, and, as I have said before, puts me to sleep behind the wheel, but today I've learnt that when I'm not tired like I am 95% of the time, it has a hypnotic effect. It got hotter and hotter in the car as we went from overcast NSW to baking ACT, but I was too zoned out to really notice (I really feel like I'm on benzos. This is so weird.), and I reached Watson then the sims^TM-like apartment complexes of Dickson, then Turner down Northbourne with the bloody light-rail construction all down it, just to my right, threatening, and I turned in to ANU and there I was, and my carpark key didn't work, and it never does, so everything was just the same as it's always been.
And I got out of my car and it smelt like Canberra summer. It smelt like O-week of first year, with its desperation and fear and frantic socialising and almost compulsive fun-having. And it smelt like wearing sundresses to clubs, and ravioli for dinner in my little kitchen in my one-person dorm, and trekking to another building to eat dinner with my little group of friends. And it smelt like me writing those sentences, too, because I wrote those exact smell-images down in my diary when I returned to that dorm this time two years ago, after coming back from the first half of my summer course in Japan. And it smelt like the feather earrings I bought in Hiroshima that I'd wear with my hair up and my tank top knotted above the waist of my denim shorts as I packed all my things to move to the building over, in between the classes for the second half of that summer course, to a multi-room dorm with K and Lauren. This probably wasn't a smell, but more of a feeling, but I could feel K's fan stirring the hot air in my room, windows open, as K and I slept together in my bed (always my bed) for the first time, the night before we moved in together.
And then I walked from the carpark to that building we moved into, the one I still live in two years later, and the cold air of the air-conditioned lobby feels like, well, just that, walking in and out going to K-mart in Belconnen to decorate our dorm and Coles in Civic to re-stock our pantries. And I walked upstairs into our dorm and the aircon in the common area was on full blast, and it felt and sounded like those first few weeks in that dorm, the hot-cross-buns we'd buy from Coles and share amongst us (yes, hot cross buns this early), and that massive, extremely successful housewarming party we'd had the Thursday before O-week. We were called "The Love Shack", parallel to "The Pussy Palace" where Belle and Tash and Olivia lived, and "The Danger Zone", where Jack and Aidan and Simon and Jackson lived. We played that song at the party and I got very drunk with those feather earrings in and my friends from the Japan course came and Jon helped me take off my docs put me to bed with the earrings still in. K hated Jon, and K hated my new friends. And of course it still smells like the O-week drama that happened a few days later, centred around K, that made the air in the dorm grey and swirly, like looking through a really dirty washing machine
It doesn't really smell like the summer after that, because I suppose I was used to the smell by then. But I remember coming back in January then, too, K finally evicted, to work for a bit before uni started. I guess maybe it smells a little like sweating in my car with the air-conditioning broken on the way to Kambah Pools and Gibraltar Falls, and a little like smoking joints on the balcony and then going for dazed walks around the dead evening-city.
I walked through the blast of air con and unlocked the door to my room, where it was hot and still and cleaner than I remember having left it. I did nothing for a good 30 seconds - I just stood there, still clutching my bags, staring at the poster of the girl on my wardrobe, whose skin tone was fading but warming from the sun through the window, and my doona cover, and my posters, and my plans for the poems and stories I've yet to write. And it smelt like all those times I'd just written about, and not the narrative I'd left behind when I went back home to go to Italy. And then I put my bags down, got into bed, and started writing this.
(It's interesting when, instead of just feeling the ominous pressure of depression with no tangible basis, you finally have a contextual reason to be sad. I don't know whether I'm handling it well or not; I can't remember how I used to act; then again, I don't even know how much of my childhood was neurotypical.)
I stopped at Sutton Forest maccas, as is necessary tradition, and ate chicken nuggets, got back in the car and drove again. The second half of the drive was considerably worse, even though it was shorter and smoother - I don't know if the podcast episodes weren't as good, or I was just more distracted. I didn't think much about it anyway, because I was pretty hypnotised the whole time. The constant rhythm of the road is very soothing, and, as I have said before, puts me to sleep behind the wheel, but today I've learnt that when I'm not tired like I am 95% of the time, it has a hypnotic effect. It got hotter and hotter in the car as we went from overcast NSW to baking ACT, but I was too zoned out to really notice (I really feel like I'm on benzos. This is so weird.), and I reached Watson then the sims^TM-like apartment complexes of Dickson, then Turner down Northbourne with the bloody light-rail construction all down it, just to my right, threatening, and I turned in to ANU and there I was, and my carpark key didn't work, and it never does, so everything was just the same as it's always been.
And I got out of my car and it smelt like Canberra summer. It smelt like O-week of first year, with its desperation and fear and frantic socialising and almost compulsive fun-having. And it smelt like wearing sundresses to clubs, and ravioli for dinner in my little kitchen in my one-person dorm, and trekking to another building to eat dinner with my little group of friends. And it smelt like me writing those sentences, too, because I wrote those exact smell-images down in my diary when I returned to that dorm this time two years ago, after coming back from the first half of my summer course in Japan. And it smelt like the feather earrings I bought in Hiroshima that I'd wear with my hair up and my tank top knotted above the waist of my denim shorts as I packed all my things to move to the building over, in between the classes for the second half of that summer course, to a multi-room dorm with K and Lauren. This probably wasn't a smell, but more of a feeling, but I could feel K's fan stirring the hot air in my room, windows open, as K and I slept together in my bed (always my bed) for the first time, the night before we moved in together.
And then I walked from the carpark to that building we moved into, the one I still live in two years later, and the cold air of the air-conditioned lobby feels like, well, just that, walking in and out going to K-mart in Belconnen to decorate our dorm and Coles in Civic to re-stock our pantries. And I walked upstairs into our dorm and the aircon in the common area was on full blast, and it felt and sounded like those first few weeks in that dorm, the hot-cross-buns we'd buy from Coles and share amongst us (yes, hot cross buns this early), and that massive, extremely successful housewarming party we'd had the Thursday before O-week. We were called "The Love Shack", parallel to "The Pussy Palace" where Belle and Tash and Olivia lived, and "The Danger Zone", where Jack and Aidan and Simon and Jackson lived. We played that song at the party and I got very drunk with those feather earrings in and my friends from the Japan course came and Jon helped me take off my docs put me to bed with the earrings still in. K hated Jon, and K hated my new friends. And of course it still smells like the O-week drama that happened a few days later, centred around K, that made the air in the dorm grey and swirly, like looking through a really dirty washing machine
It doesn't really smell like the summer after that, because I suppose I was used to the smell by then. But I remember coming back in January then, too, K finally evicted, to work for a bit before uni started. I guess maybe it smells a little like sweating in my car with the air-conditioning broken on the way to Kambah Pools and Gibraltar Falls, and a little like smoking joints on the balcony and then going for dazed walks around the dead evening-city.
I walked through the blast of air con and unlocked the door to my room, where it was hot and still and cleaner than I remember having left it. I did nothing for a good 30 seconds - I just stood there, still clutching my bags, staring at the poster of the girl on my wardrobe, whose skin tone was fading but warming from the sun through the window, and my doona cover, and my posters, and my plans for the poems and stories I've yet to write. And it smelt like all those times I'd just written about, and not the narrative I'd left behind when I went back home to go to Italy. And then I put my bags down, got into bed, and started writing this.
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