SaraEileen.com

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with a story. It feels like a caffeine headache, things wound too tightly to function. Once this happened and I went back to sleep, thinking I would write it down in the morning. Now I know better.

It’s 4am. I have been awake for almost 20 hours, at this point, but I’m not sleepy. My bones feel jittery. Meitar is asleep in the next room, and I keep trying to stroke my keyboard instead of pounding it, as thought the tiny clicks will tug him out of his dreams. It’s very dark. I didn’t turn the lights on. I can hear crickets, an aspect of the Sydney soundscape that I still find surreal after 10 months here.

This story I’m trying to write at the moment is fairly miserable. It started because I was thinking about Rome. I want to go there so badly; I want to go so many places so badly.

When I was a freshman in college I met one of my best friends. We were taking art classes together. Now he’s married. I was supposed to be his best man this summer, but I couldn’t afford the airfare, so instead I just look at the wedding photos. The year I met him, one Saturday, we went to the village and looked for art supplies, pastries, and records. I listed for him every place in the world I want to go, a very long list. I asked him where he wanted to go, and he was surprised, as though he had never thought of it that way before. He said he knew I’d go to each and every place on my list someday. He said it like a prophet. Now he and his wife live in London, and I am simultaneously jealous and proud.

I came to Sydney for the writing degree and the adventure. I have the degree now, but I feel like the adventure never materialized. I know this is my fault, my attitude. I want that to change. I should be having an adventure, damn it. I have all the ingredients.

I have been having trouble writing, so in some ways this 4am blast is a blessing. Sometimes my brain just needs a jump start. The blast doesn’t make much sense, though. The first line is “Postcards from an abandoned home. I’m going back to America.”

I don’t want my time in Sydney to be a blip. I wanted it to be another chapter in my ongoing life adventure. But I have not been writing the chapter down, and that is a serious problem. I have not been writing about Bondi and the famous sand that gets stuck in my teeth, my hair, the cracks of my body; or the way the waves die out on Manly beach; or the flood of a thousand bats across the evening sky. I have not been writing down the big breakfasts (with mushrooms? Really?), the iced coffee with actual ice cream, the way Australians seem to drink all the time, and the beer tastes better and the girls wear shorter skirts. When I moved into my building in Redfern eleven months ago, my apartment didn’t come with a refrigerator. How weird is that? Where I’m from, fucking weird.

In two and a half months I am back in America. Shortly after that, we are San Francisco-bound.

In the meantime, I need to wake up.