Cheap as you are

I lose him this weekend. He'll catch a flight early Sunday morning, and I'll stay here with my thoughts, memories and clouded ideas of the coming months.

So another platform is reached.

It would be better if this didn't have to happen. Then again, people always have to react to and reconfigure around one thing or another.

On the road to Hall's Gap I remembered that Australia is staggeringly old. Everything is rounded, hardened and worn down from the passage of time. Creatures have grown louder, stranger and more poisonous; plants more waxen, hardy and determined; the soil itself thinner and less nourishing.

Young mountains tower higher, but the Grampians are believed to be among the oldest in the world. 300 million years or more to settle into place, a cluster of strange angles and protuberances, ledges and shelves, faces of rock, and channels formed at the insistence of intermittent rains. It's easy to imagine spirits, or maybe even gods, residing in that place, together with the rare and endangered organisms that also take refuge there.

From Reed's Lookout I thought about my connection to this land, proud of the stunning forms that gathered around. But I was born a thousand or so kilometres northwest.

Among my favourite views was the serrated horizon seen from the Balconies Lookout. We posed for another photograph, clutching at what we recognise as 'now'.

Just as the unshakeable European capitals quietly regard their energetic offspring in newer worlds, these mountains are stately in their place. They too once towered, perhaps to rival peaks in Peru, New Zealand or other areas of seizmic unrest, but at some stage the earth here just settled down and stopped heaving.

In caves throughout the Grampians, pieces of rock art may just predate any European city.

Against such backdrops, any choices I must make seem so inconsequential.

The greenhouse transports me, in an odd way, to another time and another place where I've seen a similar greenhouse in a similar garden. Long and low-lying, with jade plants and aloes out of reach behind the glass (for the door is locked). You might be able to reach your fingers in through an open pane and break off a cutting to grow on your own windowsill, if you are nimble.

Sitting with our backs to the retaining wall, on the lawn, behind the greenhouse, eating baked potatoes.

A more stately conservatory stands across the pond on the other side of the garden, with larger specimens. It is open daily, damp and warm even in July. A little bubble of the equator down here in the south.

Finding a hardened fig on the path beside the lawn.

The greenhouse seems like one of those places wherein generational knowledge is passed on and applied. Proof of age-old techniques before your very eyes, bursting from the makeshift pots and trellises. A place where people go to find meaning, perhaps.

- Woke up this morning to find a row of mature palm trees in front of my apartment building. They've materialised sometime in the last two days. Seems they're shipping out the possums and the homeless, and resculpting the suburb to look like Venice Beach. The palms do complement our old building though, I guess.

- I also realised this morning that any flexibility gained in my 2007 yoga phase has almost entirely dissipated. General fitness may or may not be up. I climb the stairs at work quite often, and they're leaving me less breathless these days.

- Part of this 'big decision about whether to uproot my life' involves the disappointment surrounding the fact that I may not get to live in Footscray. Even though it's rough as guts, I've somehow come to simply adore that area, and all its weird and wonderful surrounds. Maybe I overinvested in that idea.

- Sometimes I feel like I'm really floundering about at work, but I like the feeling of gaining new strengths and skills. I wonder where it all may lead?

- It would be nice to be immersed in another language again. Perhaps I could focus on gaining competence in areas outside daily conversation. And hey, there's still a whole writing system to get my head around.

- I like the idea of being Boy International again, too.

Naturally everybody has a different view, a different take, a different idea. Bless my friends and loved ones for their listening ears!! I of course will talk about it to anybody who will listen.

I'm having trouble working out when it's okay to be selfish, when it's okay to put myself first and when it's okay to be resolute. Excited and worried. Stressed and calm. All sorts of competing, if not necessarily opposite, adjectives to give form and structure, each word carrying a range of meaning that joins with other words around it, superimposing and creating a vast wad that may be basically understood, but, like a CD, it’s an illusion of continuity, of wholeness, created by a succession of discrete entities.

There is no true communication tool; nothing that accurately transcribes one’s self to another person without editing, shaping, elaboration or lost data. I remember a bilingual girl I once lived with – she said that her languages created two whole worlds for her, even when describing the same things, and once you took the words away you were left with nothing but chaos.

Yearning for the absolute.

Everything I want coupled with everything I don't want.

Revision

Many things I want coupled with many things I don't want.

Revision

Many things I want, would want, and have always wanted, coupled with many things I don't want, wouldn't want, and never have wanted.

Revision

Still thinking things over.

Roll up, roll up, it's time to mobilise my next emotional saga. You see, the boy I'm rather taken with, oh yes indeed, has announced he shall return to his northern hemisphere home in, oh, three weeks, three weeks from tomorrow, in fact.

It's come not as a surprise, well not entirely, but things didn't run 100% according to expectations, yet let's face facts: they never do.

He has asked me to go with and I've spent the day explaining the compromises and the concerns. I've upped and left countries on whims before, but never for a place I've not actively sought, and never for another person.

At the same time I must recognise his importance, and all that he means, and the contribution he's made to my general life happiness over the months that I've known him.

So I shall think towards September.

I'm not moaning and I don't feel hard done by, but obviously could do without the upheaval.

How on earth does one make decisions like this? I've forgotten how to be adventurous.

Plus, I'm unfamiliar with things that come without expiry dates.