winter

canberra winters always end up shuddering over the top of me before i realise they are there. i am sitting waiting, waiting for the cold to end up taking me under.  at the moment, there are leaves up to my knees on the side of the road. i love that too; i walk through them, i wade and kick, and run, and have them crunch underfoot.  light filtering more and more through the trees as the leaves fall away, less and less, and yet the sun does less and less....

i find that one of the stranger things. the sun in brisbane is heavy and heady even in the middle of winter.  you will sweat, heavy and hot, wade through the humidity not leaves, the feeling of the heat on your arms, the smell of the air when i walk down brunswick street, treading water? treading over the cement on the sidewalk... near the cliff face, near the trees, oh you can stand on it and see the fucking world unfold in that river....

it's been since, november? october? since my last visit... my old haunts have shifted - my favourite cafe, a place i practically lived in for a few years, has shut its doors. my old friends have new lives in new places.  things change. it's the way it goes, over and over again. that comforts me, actually, i like that things are not static, and i go back, and it's all different. the place, my last year in brisbane which was glorious and wonderful and mad and fun, and silly, well, that world's as dead as the person i was then is. it's passed away, hand over hand, into a new placement of people. you can never go home again. it never is home again. 

and i am not settled here; the streets are sanitized, but i can feel a humanity, a warmth in them. i am still looking for an out, and i have found one - a job that fits all the necessary things i need to apply to an institution that's not mine - and maybe, well, i'll do it.  things are slowing, and it's time for a change. my feet itch, i am hungry, my palms are open, open open, and i want to drink the world up. of course there is potential here, but the quiet, the streets, the wideness of the streets have done me in. the lack of frottage on streets with strangers just trying to struggle to work, the smell of the air... i want a city to open me up and bleed me dry for a bit.  and not just little interludes. i want it to take me again, something new, somewhere new, anything, just shifting off again...