Day 19 - April 28th

Day 19 - April 28th
Drank cos I felt like it
GOOD NIGHT
Need a new plan now that Mélanie's gone
Sam's going to Darwin!?

        Part of my thinking when I broke up with Mélanie – and ultimately it was me who broke up with her – was that if she was going to leave eventually, if there was an inevitable expiry date on our relationship, then what was the point of doing it at all?
        Ridiculous really, but on reflection I was clearly just looking for an 'out' because I wasn't as excited about it as she was and didn't know how to admit it to her, or to myself even.
        When we got back to my place in Adelaide after the disastrous trip to Claire that weekend I remember a long conversation on the couch in my parents' back room where she pleaded with me to just cut Grace out of my life. She wanted us to stay together, and she thought Grace was the only thing in the way of that. I told her that I was willing to try, but after another week of that trying I caved, and told her what I thought she needed to hear, which was that I didn't love her any more. I wasn't convinced myself that I didn't, but I felt like I couldn't be in a relationship with her and I knew that was the only way I could end it. She was devastated, I wished she'd never come to Australia and we could have left it with just the happy memories in Bolivia. It was my fault for not telling her that when she was still back in France... eugh... I really fucked up on this one.

        She didn't stay in Adelaide after we broke up, she finished the short English course she was doing and then went off to travel around Australia by herself. There is a beautiful freedom that comes with having the future you imagined taken away from you; suddenly anything is possible, you're no longer trapped by your own expectations.
        Around the time Mélanie left my friend Sam (not the drug dealer one, a different guy. I should change his name really, but this one I'm talking about right now isn't in any of the rest of the stories. I only realised this mistake late on in editing – I'm sitting in Schönefeld Airport in Berlin and just spent $150 on a new flight after I missed my first one because I didn't set my alarm at the right time, and regardless of whether it was my fault or not, I'm not in the mood to go changing people's names right now, okay? What would I change it to anyway? 'Dam'? 'Ham'? Bullshit. It's a common name, okay? I've had to tell them apart my whole life or ten years or however long I've known them both – not to mention the fucking thousands of other Sams who are always pinballing around running into you and introducing themselves – so you can tell them apart for two fucking minutes, yeah? Shit.) told me he was moving to Darwin.
        Sam was a friend of mine from high school and remains to this day the kind of close friend who I speak to maybe once or twice a year. Him moving to Darwin had no impact whatsoever on my day-to-day life – even when we lived in the same city we still only hung out once every few months – but it opened my mind up to the idea that you are allowed to just... move to Darwin... or anywhere you like really. You can just leave.
        There's an old meme called Brotips, which was just a picture of a plain coloured background with “Brotip #whatever”, and then some piece of life advice ranging from sublime and profound, all the way down to stupid shit about dating. My favourite was always Brotip #105: “stop for a second and consider this: you can literally do whatever the fuck you want.”

Click here to read the next part - Day 20 - May 11th