Mapping the Gap

The moon smiled down on us the morning of our launch, a Cheshire Cat grin of bemused wisdom suspended above the gum trees of Woodhill Mountain.  There was an auspicious air to the dawn. With a planetary alignment forecast for that evening, the cosmos seemed to favour our departure. 

The amount of energy required to escape the gravitational pull of the Earth is far greater than the energy needed to stay aloft.  I certainly hope this is true for the escape of one’s life.  When launch day arrived, I was emotionally drained and physically strained.  The precipice at our feet had been hard earned.  While we had planned this trip to explore new landscapes, the first place we discovered was our own, and it took a lot of energy to release from it.  When you bid farewell to everything and everyone you know, you take stock of the many-tendrilled life that has grown around you.  The people, the places, the possessions, and the routines of living make up so much of one’s sense of reality, so much of one’s sense of self.  To see it all dissolve one goodbye at a time is an experience of increasing weightlessness- emancipating and unnerving at the same time.  

We weren’t going to have a gathering to say goodbye to the families of Berry, where our kids went to school.  We just had no room on the plate.  Last minute though, I decided it didn’t have to be hard. I threw together a Canva invite that said we’d be at a riverside pub between 4 and 7pm, come say goodbye if you like.  Easy enough.  I wince now to think I might not have made this slight effort.  It was a fantastic surprise to realise just how many beautiful connections we had made in four years and how many were quite keen to turn up to say goodbye.  Cherry picking all “your” people and bringing them together under the blue sky with beverages is quite revealing of one’s life in a community, of the interconnectedness we do not usually honour.  Our little family had a few fans.  What a nice realisation to leave on.

And this gathering of the kids’ world came after so many other beautiful goodbyes in mine- goodbyes that make your heart ache and make you second guess the sense in moving on.  I’d said sweet goodbyes to the cast of colourful characters at my nursing job, to the beautiful team of my first aid teaching gig, to the P&C (PTA) executive committee at the boys’ school, to the creatives at the potters co-op I was a member of, and to a few dear, dear friends- the kind who are dear enough to come and clean all the windows of your house with you because they want to be in your presence, the kind that hand-make you gifts and arrange intimate send-off gatherings, the kind that watch your wild kids for days as you pack.  In just four years, I found myself surrounded by an astonishing amount of beautiful humans, and I’d failed to fully clock this.  What an overwhelming revelation.   

I can do no more than mention the goodbye to our dog, Bronzie.  Tears blur the vision as I type.  She’s in good hands until we return. That’s a comfort.

Leaving our home was a goodbye I hadn’t anticipated to be hard.  Silly.  We’d been actively preparing our house to go on the market for months, a goodbye broken into a never-ending to-do list.  Amusingly, we ended up with a team of Nathans on the job.  Nathan the Builder renewed all our wear and tear.  Nathan the Painter disappeared the sins from our walls.  And finally, Nathan the Mover took all our possessions away and packed them into a disturbing 70sqm Tetris cave of our household comforts.  It gives me a weird feeling to picture our storage space.  I slept with a jar of snakes in my chest the night of our move.  It left me with the feeling of a funhouse mirror or a contortionist’s final act of zipping himself into a suitcase.  My grandmother’s painting doesn’t belong between the firepit and our deconstructed dining table.  The basketball goal shouldn’t be on top of the fridge. My stained-glass work doesn’t deserve to be threatened by the handlebars of my bike.  But, this is what we’re paying for, and there they will stay in their awkward confrontations until we find our next home… who knows when… or where.

Walking away from a home that holds memories is always hard though.  I should have known.  The walls washed of boyhood smudges, the pockmarked sections sanded to erase remnants of big feelings over the years, our story scrubbed clean for the next inhabitants to colour in.  Spider housemates left to rule the roost.  Drawers emptied of us.  Once-savoured spaces of relaxation reduced to hardwood floors.  The cleaning process was therapeutic.  I whispered gratitude to the rooms that witnessed this chapter of life unfold, remembering the family of American immigrants that were so grateful for a place to lay roots.  With some regret, we said goodbye to all the plants we had placed with such care in the garden, walking away just as many had reached fruition: pomegranates, figs, bananas, lemons, olives, kumquats, and even three mangoes hung heavy when we left. From the empty deck, all the sunrises of the past seemed to smile and say, “It’s okay.  It’s time to go.”  The goodbye of an empty house is an afterbirth silence.  Walking away is the only option.   

So, it was clearly time.  We hit the road at 8am, Saturday, January 25th, 2025, driving away in the Kia van that did not turn out to be a demented maraca of mad cravings for screens. There was some adjustment to our new normal, repeated gentle testing of my resolve. There were some tears and some blood, but that’s probably baseline road-tripping for our crew.  We had a 13-hour day on the road with only Spotify DJ-ing and Maps navigation on the devices. The iPads never left the backpack.  It was a big win that felt natural and good, a relief to all of us, I think.

About eight hours in, we hit some traveller’s luck in Bellbird Creek, Victoria. A sudden, perhaps divine, need to stretch the driver’s legs sent us literally screeching to a stop in front of a remote roadside pub that happened to be hosting a community event by The Snowy Lions- a fantastically hippy faction of The Lion’s Club. The kids were welcomed with grearious greetings and generous “show bags” filled with lollies and toys. The smiley, blue-haired owner of Spun Candy cranked up the fairy floss (cotton candy) machine in our honour.  We chatted in awe of this oasis of unexpected joy, everyone there just as awe-struck by the tale of our family endeavour. As we walked back to the van, fully sugar high and grinning, I said to the boys, “This is why we travel, guys: For the fun we don’t plan and the people we never would have met if we’d stayed home.”  They might have heard me.

That night, we arrived at our cottage AirB&B in Toora, Victoria at 9:30pm.  My partner brought in the gear.  I settled the boys.  As I slipped into bed, I heard the new chapter crack.  Wide open before us, reams of blank pages wait to be scribed.  Escape velocity achieved.  Now we cruise… right?