Briefly back in the UK in All Good Things

I’ve just got home from Singapore and Australia. I didn’t take my computer with me and didn’t have great internet access on my phone, so haven’t looked at this site at all while I was away for the past month - lots of catching up to do now!

It’s been quite a traumatic time, a lot more than I anticipated. Australia and I have a very unhappy history, and the good thing was that I laid to rest a lot (all) of the ghosts I have there, so now I just hate it on its own terms instead of for all the shit I have associated with it. I don’t know why we don’t get on, but we seriously don’t. Annette and I were together for a week in Singapore, then she went to her uncle’s ranch in Malaysia for a week before joining me in Melbourne, and she was shocked at the state I was in a mere seven days after she’d last seen me. My whole body reacts badly to that country. Whenever I’m there, it feels like every cell is screaming for me to get away from it to ‘safety’. I can’t function there at all. No wonder I went mad when I had to live there for a year and a half…

The other good thing was I got to know my brother’s daughters in Sydney, aged one and three. They are absolutely delightful and I adore them and really wish they lived nearby so I could babysit them often and be a regular part of their lives. But my sister-in-law and I don’t get on, and my relationship with my brother (very close as children) has been rocky for the past decade or so, and I experienced horrific panic attacks every time I had to see them, which culminated in migraines that lasted for days. Given that I saw them four times across the three weeks I was there, that meant I spent most of my time in a bad state in one way or another. And it’s so stupid and unnecessary, because it was FINE seeing them, not nearly as bad as it’s been in the past.

There’s also someone that I’m probably in love with and I don’t want to be and I never expected this and it can’t go anywhere and I’m not even sure if I want it to but I’m also terrified it won’t and I don’t know if I can cope with that but I’ll have to come the end of November and I have no idea how I’m going to. If it comes to that.

All summer when I thought about this trip, I never dreamed that this would happen. I thought I’d see him again and I’d be happy and enjoy it and maybe we’d talk more and get to know each other better, but that would be it. Friends. But then his reaction when he saw me in Singapore was so volatile - I hadn’t realised he was the only one who didn’t know I’d be there; he wasn’t expecting me until Australia - and everything just got more and more out of control and things happened that shouldn’t have happened (yes, like when he was on the way to the airport to pick up his bloody wife and son!) and talking only made it SO much worse and more intense, and it’s terrible to be in the arms of someone you have no right to and feel like you never want to be anywhere else ever again.

I could have kept ignoring my feelings (as I’ve done remarkably successfully all year) if only he’d done the same. But he didn’t. And I’d had no idea.

We have two weeks left. And then.....?

It’s kind of ironic, because my (soon-to-be-ex)husband thinks I’m in love with his best friend. Everyone knows how much I love his best friend. But we truly are friends, and that’s sufficient and perfect and I’m thrilled with that. It’s the way I wanted to feel about both of them. Except, apparently, I don’t.

So yeah, that was Singapore and Australia. Now I have a week’s grace back in my wonderful homeland (how extra fiercely I love this country after being reminded of how awful it was to be forced to live elsewhere), and then a week from today I head to Milan. For the end of everything.

(In Australia I also finally got to see the 12 Apostles on the Great Ocean Road, plus koalas in the wild and flesh-eating snails in a jungle, spent hours enjoying the crashing waves of the Pacific Ocean and got caught up in the storm of a century trying to get home on a ferry. In Singapore I mostly slept, because I was jetlagged and in emotional turmoil.)