I'm formed up in an orderly queue between the rows of seats with the backpack holding everything I needed to bring with me for a long weekend slung over my shoulder, thank the hostie on my way past, and with one foot still in the liminal space of the Airbus A320 which took off from Canberra Airport an hour ago and the other about to land in the place that's manifestly Melbourne, I feel the sudden urge to run.
The story of my life always comes down to: Wage War - Me Against Myself
I've been travelling regularly for as long as I can remember... until this decade arrived bringing lockdowns caused by covid, and ones after that were self-imposed. Growing up the eldest son of a Geologist-Mathematician who's career meant living in or near desperately remote parts of the country because there's not a lot of call for someone who specialises in the regional geological mapping of precambrian stratigraphy and tectonic structures anywhere civilised like Melbourne where he and my mother grew up, met, and got married, meant that we were flying back there to see family once or twice a year since before shitting my pants stopped being socially acceptable and "rock" became the first word I uttered.
I grew up around core samples and trilobite fossils, and beyond a lot of his work involving having the only personal computer within a 5km radius I had precisely zero interest in my father's work apart from it potentially having something to do with dinosaurs. I cared about two (2) things when I was 6: dinosaurs, space, and lego - the old man took me out to see Halley's Comet through bleary naked eyes early on a chilly night on the 11th of April of 1986, but it's my mother I have to thank for being the youngest ever member of the Alice Springs Astronomical Society; I saw the rings of Saturn and the conjunction of Jupiter and Mars through a telescope before I learned how to conjugate a verb. The fact that I now work in a building where the only Ph.D's that outnumber the geophysicists are the ones who spend their days calculating triangulation by trilateration corrected by the practical application of the Theory of Relativity and adjusted through celestial mechanics and where you can literally
Touch
the
Moon!
carries an irony I can't deny:
By the time I was 18 I stopped just travelling for obligation, and started travelling for the sake of it. Airports and connections and hotel transfers were second-nature, and if you scan scrouge together enough for a red-eye on a budget carrier, find a couch to crash on, and trade caffeine in lieu of sleep, the world is literally your TfL Card. Somewhere along the line the amount of time I wanted to spend and the amount I had contracted until they reached a ratio of 1 and started slipping into the negative, if I wanted to squeeze it all in I needed to move quickly. I've made desperate dashes to airports more times than I care to remember, and landed at he other end with plenty of time to make it onto the train that will get me to my appointment on time, but only if I was out of my seat before the seatbelt light turned off and didn't care who I shoulder-barged through on my sprint to the exit if I was going to slide across the finish line in time. This isn't one of those trips tho, I'm in no rush, I've got no reason demanding me to run.
But time needs to stop slipping back to then and slide back into now, because I'm about to slip into Melbourne like a second skin, and the second home that it's been for longer than I can remember. My feet know their way past the Boarding Gates and the Luggage Claim I won't need to stop at this time around to where I'll catch the SkyBus. By the time I've hit the footpath outside Southern Cross Station on Spencer St not one will be able to tell I'm not a tourist; in my black street shoes, structured black tactical cargo's, and black hoodie under my long black coat I look like any other inner-city professional in Friday-casual drag skiving off early to meet his once-client, now dear-friend Pete down in Port for a cheeky mid-afternoon pint.
I'm sure everyone has a once-client, now dear-friend called Pete, and if they don't the should get that shit sorted because they're missing out.
I've got plenty I want to do on my first trip back in over 2 years, but the Project Manager I used to be built plenty of slack into my schedule. I'll have a couple of pints with Pete which my company will pay for because he's still trying to make his venture work nearly 3 years later and he's fucking skint, but I need to stay vigilant because the man still has some pride and will try to get a round in we both know he can't afford. Boldilocks is set to pick me up, and there might even be enough time for him to squeeze in a pint of his own whilst he trounces both of us on the pool table before we head off for dinner and I finally get to meet his partner of nearly a decade, Azzy. I should even be able to squeeze in a tech-support call from Andrew the Shipwright or Occam's Canadian Amy. I'll be crashing on Boldilocks' couch for the next few nights.
Tomorrow I'm off to catch up with The Decoys who didn't have a daughter when I was Best Man at their wedding the last time I was here.
On Sunday I'll catch up with Mikee, who I bonded with in a whole new way after I told him that he'd accidentally delayed taking a knife to myself by a day. He's been going through some shit of his own, so it was only fair I block out some time to listen to him tell me about it.
That night Boldilocks and I will go see Wage War play at The Forum, which is what brought me here in the first place, because I impulse-bought tickets for us using Qantas Frequent Flyer Points at 2:06AM one Friday night in the middle of a YouTube binge. Seeing them play Magnetic will be up there with getting to see Pendulum play Cartagena, Hold Your Colour, and Colourfast when I saw them in Sydney earlier this year.
The story of this year really has gone by in a: Wage War - BLUR
Throughout I'll be putting on a show of my own on Instagram for a pretty blonde girl I call Helen, who's been going through some shit of her own, and isn't in this story:
But none of that has happened yet, and this is now, so I let my mind slide back into the present so I don't trip over the gap between the plane and the aerobridge.
My foot finishes its arc and lands in Melbourne.
And for no more reason than that I want to, I start running anyway.
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