Sydney

In Sydney I remember thinking I was so far away. I loved growing up in Sydney, I carved up hillsides and melted my ice cream. I travelled to the city center by train and stood up to give old people my seat. I spent my entire life in Sydney going from one part to the next, one party to the next, looking for friends and girls and activity. There were mornings I woke up in bed looking for anywhere else to go, and there were other mornings I would wake up on Tamarama Beach wrapped in a towel, goosebumped from nightswimming. If you ever go there, get into the cold water just before the sun comes up on the horizon and watch the waves roll towards you, their faces shadowed, their backs lit, just like me.

Summer moves really slowly in Sydney, there were barbecues everywhere, you could smell the beef burning and the beer cans slowly piled up in the recycling bins out the front of every suburban home. Summers went driving round with friends getting into any or all of the limited amount of trouble possible and talking to other people who were doing the same. There were cliffs in Sydney, known by teenagers as places to jump off, into a deep ocean that never seemed to cool. You could sit out there all day, getting sunshine, rubbing suntan lotion on girls and jumping off these cliffs. There were also other cliffs that were known for different kinds of jumping off, and you could hear helicopters hovering down there sometimes, collecting I don't know what.

I remember one time I was climbing over the rocks at North Bondi Beach when I turned around and saw a mother and her two daughters, probably six and eight years old, playing on the rocks, chasing crabs and splashing each other. I saw the wave come only a second before. It crashed down a few meters behind the little girls, sweeping their feet up in the air, their small bodies tumbling under the waves. I also saw them emerge from the water. I remember them covered in that strange web-like pigment that's created when blood and salt water mix.

Where I grew up, you're taught that there's a danger in nature not in people. There are still outlaws in Australia, true outlaws that ride trains and steal your sheep. When we say "cross the country," it's not a small-town joy tour of 7-11's and souvenir shops, it's mile after mile of bare desert and if you want to make the journey, you call ahead to the closest town and you tell them that if you haven't arrived by sundown, they should send someone out looking for you. There are no weekend wonder worries, just a million sad-eyed grain buildings, sandstone machinery.

But that's all just myth or magic to me now. I grew up on the coast and I've still never travelled the lengths of the country. I remember feeling so far away in Sydney but not remembering what I was far away from. I'm missing home. I'm waiting for someone to wake me up and tell me I'm okay.