Wandering through the city at night sent my thoughts wandering too, to other places, other times. I thought about what I would call home, where I might say I’d belong. And that got me thinking about what I recognised, and didn’t, about the space in which I’ve found myself. Is this home? Perhaps, perhaps not, but there are ripples to be found.

Like the warped panes of glass in old dark buildings, which have a depth like water, with a surface that distorts and refracts, ripples from time masking our view within, and then the layers behind, sometimes visible, sometimes reflecting, sometimes revealing.

Thinking like this led me to a new kind of wandering, more of a searching, for the ocean of home. Back to the water. This time, from the other side of the Strait – St Kilda.

But this water is not the same. It took me some time to figure it out. There’s still the blue, and beyond and beneath that another blue, and another, and another, sky and water merging and shifting. But it wasn’t my blue. Not my water. It was too calm. Too fixed. And what was really different was looking out – here, I could see the shapes of the city beyond, all lines and edges, harsh against the softness of the tide. I could see the other side.

Thinking back, my ocean has no ending. There are no landmarks on the horizon, nothing to break that blue. It is unfixed, unbounded. It’s in between the known and the possible. The real and the imagined.

So maybe being drawn to the in-betweens I find here in my new home isn’t actually so new after all. Maybe I’ve been in between all along. Maybe we’re all just comfortably adrift in between here and there, now and then. Maybe it’s just the reflections and the contours of that search that change…

 

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