Today's piece is a more personal one, as you might have guessed from its subtitle. It’s a longer read, so feel free to pour yourself a coffee—or a glass of wine—depending on your time zone (and preference, of course—no judgment here!). If books are more your thing than boys, you might want to give this one a miss. It’s a follow-up to Pancake Day, which you'll probably want to read first if you haven’t already. You can find it here.
It would be something of an understatement to say that the day I landed in Australia did not go according to plan. My suitcase was lost. The suitcase I had spent hours meticulously packing. The one that held almost every single item I had deemed important enough to bring with me to the other side of the world. Clothes, a handful of my favourite books. The ridiculously expensive but barely-there underwear set I had planned to wear that night, when I was finally reunited with Ozzie. I waited at the luggage conveyer belt, ankles swollen, skin a sallow grey, and my heart pounded so quickly it felt like it was going to break through my bra. More and more people left until I was standing alone next to the empty conveyor belt, mesmerised by my own misfortune. At the airline help desk, I was told to fill out some forms, leave my contact details and they’d be in touch. That it was later found to have been diverted—to Mongolia, I kid you not—is another story for another time, as is the fact that both the airline and my insurance company had so carefully worded their lost-luggage policies that I was left, quite literally, with almost nothing but the clothes on my back.
In the moments and the months and the years that followed, I offered a very vague version of my first meeting with Ozzie after my plane had touched down. When anyone asked, I simply said that he picked me up. I didn’t specify where. And, given that most people assumed, and rightly so—that the man I had moved to the other side of the world for would be there to collect me from the airport—I chose not to contradict them. The truth was, just before I flew to Sydney—when I asked him what we’d be doing on the day I arrived—he had said he had to work, but that we could ‘hang out’ after he’d finished. I Ubered to the art-deco apartment in Bondi I had signed a six-month contract on, showered and hot-footed it to the nearby Westfield—a garish shopping centre that eight years on I still can’t find my way around. And I tried—and failed—to find something suitably seductive for that evening, while I waited for my suitcase to turn up.
By the time Ozzie picked me up from my apartment, I was feverish with nerves. I waited for the buzzer to go, pacing the floorboards of my new bedroom, triple-checking my face in the mirror, smoothing the sheets of the bed so it was ready for the mangled mess of our bodies later that night. Instead came a text telling me he was outside. And again, in the moments and the months and the years that followed, I convinced myself he had stopped in a no-parking zone outside my apartment. When I revisited the street years later, I realised I had simply spun the first strand of silk in the web of a story: there wasn’t a single no parking sign around.