Returning to Sydney
Coming back to Sydney felt quieter than I expected. A return to a life I thought I’d left behind, and the softness that met me when the noise of New York finally fell away. A story about coming home changed.
Sydney looked the same but sharper, almost too bright, like it had been waiting with the lights on. The supermarket aisles felt louder than New York ever did, the white tiles shining back at me like they were checking if I had changed. I kept thinking the city would feel familiar, but everything had been rearranged in my absence. Even the air felt cleaner, almost suspiciously so, as if it wasn’t sure I deserved a soft landing.
I walked through the city with the sense that something had been moved an inch to the left.
The colours too bright, the shadows unfamiliar, the air almost indifferent.
Sydney didn’t feel like a place I had returned to.
It felt like a version of itself built in my absence, a duplicate with rounder edges.
I kept waiting for something to click into place.
It never did.
Morning Noise
Mornings are never as quiet as they seem. There’s the noise outside, and then there’s the noise inside. The thoughts, the echoes, the memories that rise before the day even starts. This is a moment caught in that space.
At four this morning I heard a siren that sounded exactly like Myrtle Avenue. For a second I forgot where I lived.
Wazza
Wazza moves through the house like someone who’s lived a hundred lives and learned to carry them gently. This is a small portrait of the man who became family in the quietest, most ordinary moments.
Wazza moves around the house like a war general who never fully retired. Every time he sits down, he sighs like the government personally betrayed him. Every time he stands up, he groans like he’s being drafted again. I don’t even look up anymore. It’s just part of the ambiance. Like birds. Or traffic.
He loves telling me stories that start with, “In Vietnam…” and then absolutely never finish in Vietnam. He’ll take a left turn into some bullshit about a dodgy mechanic, or a mate named Kev who once tried to barbeque roadkill. I don’t think he’s avoiding talking about the war. I think he’s just committed to the bit.
He calls me “kiddo” like he’s the wise mentor in a coming-of-age movie, even though half the time he’s the one asking me how to update the apps on his phone. He’ll pour me wine with that smug dad-energy like he retired at 46 because he’s a genius and I’m just now catching up.
When he dies, I’m going to fight God.
Not because I’ll miss him, but because he’d think it was funny.
The Early Wine Days (excerpt)
Back then the wine was cheap and the nights were soft. Wazza, Lee, the quiet rituals we fell into without trying. These were the early wine days. Small, ordinary moments that ended up feeling like home.
He looked at me for a long moment.
Then he poured wine into two glasses that did not match.
This was the start of the early wine days.
A season with its own climate.
A small pocket of time where nothing felt entirely real.
The kitchen light sometimes took on a muted blue, as if filtered through deep water. The air would still itself and we both fell silent at the same second, the way animals pause when the world shifts.
He told me the pieces of his early life.
Not the war.
Never directly.
Only small mentions.
A night in the jungle that never ended.
The taste of canned fruit in the heat.
A sound he still hears sometimes when he wakes.
The kind of memories that arrive already stripped down, already pared to the bone.
I learned to listen the way he spoke.
Indirect.
Careful.
Half inside another world.
I told fragments of my own.
Ending after ending.
Loss in the shape of a country.
He never asked for the missing parts.
After each night he went to his room.
I went to mine.
The distance between us held.
The silence felt ritual.
Two people returning to their separate camps after sharing the same fire.