Over Coffee, Elsewhere.
My bones ache, my skin feels cold, and I'm getting so tired and so old. - Snow Patrol, Open Your Eyes
Today, over coffee, we talked about how we would never go home again.
How the living, the living here, has changed us, made us into people we were not.
It has taken the people we were, uncomplicated and naive; and adding age, created tangles from previously unaddled stetches of being and process.
Talk of children, sex and life and Philip Larkin and his Importance of Elsewhere.
Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home,
Strangeness made sense. The salt rebuff of speech,
Insisting so on difference, made me welcome:
Once that was recognised, we were in touch
Their draughty streets, end-on to hills, the faint
Archaic smell of dockland, like a stable,
The herring-hawker's cry, dwindling, went
To prove me separate, not unworkable.
Living in England has no such excuse:
These are my customs and establishments
It would be much more serious to refuse.
Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.
Where is your elsewhere?
Oh, South Africa will always be my elsewhere. Always and forever.
Thanks for the mention, by the way, in your last post. I'm being a bit shoddy with my commenting recently. Will try harder.
It's funny when I think back to how I was when I first moved to Holland. It has changed me for the better. It's taken that shy and uncertain young man and given him confidence and direction.
On day I can maybe see myself leaving Holland but I find it hard to imagine myself moving back to England. I'd rather try another european city and see where it can take me.
Charlotte, thanks for commenting :) I know this new commenting thing is a bit unintuitive. Been trying to change it but it's not as simple as it could be!
Stu, moving countries is great for confidence. Like Larkin mentions in his poem, we're more able to refuse to follow customs and establishments when we're somewhere else. You're definitely confident now :)
My elsewhere will always be the good old US of A. I don't see us ever going back, but perhaps we will move on to some place else someday.
I don't know if I'm a better person for moving here, but it was the right decision to have made at the time.
Patrick, I think that travelling makes us better. It opens our eyes.