Moving Forward, Moving On

This image is what moving forward and moving on has looked like in recent years.

When I was 12 and a half we moved from the home of my childhood to a bigger town further north, much closer to my new high school. I was so excited for the move, and had many grand plans about how I was going to be the most popular girl in my class, and how high school would be exciting, wonderful and fun. Full of naive enthusiasm, and totally, totally oblivious.

Looking back I think this had something to do with the fact that the farm I lived on wasn’t sold until many years later, so I had that lovely sense of moving forward without too much changing behind me.

As the movers filled their trucks I wandered around the property, saying goodbye to the familiar hills, the dams we swam in many times, the rickety old fences and reticulation piping I could be consistently relied upon to trip over. I thought of the geese we’d had before, and the rock I stood on to feed them, pretending I was a sailor at the bow of a ship. I used to leave a couple of handfuls of grain in the bucket for our one goose with a deformed beak, which meant he had to strategically scoop the seed into his mouth rather than peck. He was imaginatively named Beaky.

I wandered around, saying goodbye to trees and bushes because I was a child, and moreover a child who spent a considerable amount of time in a fantasy land of her own. A big property is fruitful land for many things, not least a child’s imagination.

If I was ever asked the day that my childhood ended I would say without doubt or rancour, that this was the day.

This post was written in response to the prompt ‘disappearing’ 

on heaven…

There’s no doubt in my mind, that could I force things to happen through sheer willing them into reality, that I would have pretty much everything my heart desired. I’m nothing if not doggedly determined (when I get around to it) and that delightful quality, mixed with a child-like (childish?) belief in magic, means that I’m more often than not, away with the fairies. But that’s not always useful. Sometimes it’s hard to know where the fantasy stops and the hardcore fuck-you-ness of the real world begins.

Sometimes I can’t discern if something is there, or whether I’ve thought about it so much, over and over and over again, that I am truly a master of my own brain and completely imagined it. Like your teenage fantasies about having a relationship with Taylor Hanson a celebrity. I can’t be the only person that imagined it so hard that if I ever actually meet Taylor one, I wont be able to speak, let a alone stop blushing.

I feel sometimes like I’m floating, like a leaf falling from a tree, but perversely going up instead of down. Resting for un moment, before off again, floating away, unconnected. Everything seems so real that I’m sure I can’t be imagining it. After all this time I’m still doubting my abilities of perception, and where I think there’s a flicker of recognition, of kindred spiritedness, did I just convince myself that there was? Can I really be that lonely? I don’t feel that way in my body, but then again, perhaps I’ve just shut the door. It’s possibly still there, but I don’t want to feel it.

It is easy to forget, and to let the false, the imaginary or even just the potential take over. Luckily, thankfully, praise-be-to-anything-that-is-out-there if anything, I have someone who has promised to catch me when the wind drops and poor leaf-me starts rocketing back to earth. I can come home, and climb into bed next to someone who wears the most cuddly pyjamas I have ever known, and nuzzle his sleeping beardy neck, and know that it’s real. That it never mattered in the first place if everything else was imaginary, that who I want to be is imaginary, because our bed, our sleeping warm cuddly pyjama love is real.