normal: day one

Today, for the first time, I feel like I live in Melbourne.

We moved into our place last Thursday. Had a night to ourselves with only a bed for furniture. Then our mate Glenn stayed with us for the weekend while we scurried around like busy little mice buying and fetching and sorting. Last night we were on our own again. I cooked up some bolognaise with lamb mince. Bartlebee ran out for a bottle of wine. We ate at our hand-me-down table (white wood, two leaves, six chairs) and watched an episode of Grey’s Anatomy. The first-part of the one where some guy gets an unexploded bazooka shell stuck in his chest. Opiate of the masses and all.

This morning, Bartlebee woke up early and took the tram down to her month-long temp gig at Fosters (yes, the beer co.) I woke up a bit later and had the house to myself. Our house. To myself.

I live here. My stuff is unpacked. We have dishes and cutlery and an ironing board. My wife has a job. We’ve got four phone numbers and dsl is on the way. There is a key, to the door, in my pocket. Our handyman’s name is Ron. Our green grocer is Nasser. Our neighbors are Kaylene and Peter and their son, Jeff. They brought us lemons and flowers and bottle of sweet white wine.

All these people. All these things. They’re in Australia, just like me. Sometimes that isn’t so dramatically noticeable but those times are rare. I feel it when I’m trying to figure out how to make a phone call. I feel it when the woman at the café asks me where I’m sitting and I need to ask her to repeat the question because I don’t understand her version of English. I feel it when we’re driving up to visit grandma and we miss slamming into a mid-sized roo by about four millimeters. A kangaroo. In the road. Whipping it’s tail out of the way of our headlights at the last second and looking over its shoulder at me in full marsupial meltdown. I feel foreign crossing the street and looking in my wallet and shopping in the market.

What is that feeling like you ask?

Today it presents as; “oh shit.”

It’s the “oh shit” of waiting for the elevator to open on your first day of work; knowing that when it does there will be an office full of people you’ve committed to joining on the other side, smiling expectantly. Are they smiling because you're going to fit in or because you've made a ghastly mistake? Or maybe because by the time you figure out which it is you'll be close enough to forty to hit it spitting.

I'm thinking I'm going to like it here. I'm also thinking it's going to take me a while to get used to having foreign feel normal. Because I think trying to feel Australian is as smart as trying to feel ceramic, or intangible. Aint gonna happen.

Ding. I guess this is my floor.