Through The Looking Glass

Sunday 18th April 2010, 6.10am, Coral Coast Beach - Vitu Levu

I was caught off guard just now by an overwhelming sense of deja vu. I can't sleep, I've somehow managed to damage my neck or reawaken an old injury in it so that I've been walking around for the last 48 hours as stiff as Frankenstein's monster and in quite a lot of pain. So I instead gave up on finding a comfortable position to lie in and made the 1 minute walk from my bed to the beach.

There's something in the air this morning, a tangible feeling of forthcoming discontent. Writers in the 19th century might have called it a 'sense of foreboding', Ibsen and Strindberg would have played it through the erratic and increasingly hysterical behaviour of a female character, Steven King would be all walks down silent corridors with closed doors, Dickens would have had it in the depths of a snowy and smoggy London night, Steinbeck amongst the suffocating heat and eerie tumbleweeds of the Southern plains, Hardy would have gone to the Moors, in the rain, and a young girl in a white dress would be lost and weather beaten, Shakespeare placed three witches on a hill, prophesying imminent doom around a cauldron. It's a morning like that, a morning with terrible promise, one that imitates how its central character is feeling, and seeing as no one else is here, well then today that must be me.

And then I was hit by deja vu, when I sat down here on an empty stretch of endless sand, the sky grey and violet with the broken newborn sun failing to fill her potential behind thick clouds heaving with the hint of warm rain. The Machiavellian sandflies are silently twitching and darting over my sandy legs, there's a fresh blood spot on my ankle where one of them has bitten in to my goose-bumped flesh. Coconut trees behind me are rustling their palms in the gathering breeze and sound like water falling on timber. A hundred or so metres out to sea, aubergine waves find a surf break that strips their dusty hues like turpentine and sees them crashing towards their death on the shore, newly aquamarine. Broken coral, shell husks and seaweed strands lie scattered around me, discarded and unwanted by the retreating tide, cane toads hide in murky pools from last night's rain, thunder is raising his voice in the distance, he'll be here soon. I am alone in every direction.

I know why I have deja vu, why I feel like some other me in some other dimension has sat here with her pen and paper before me. It's because everything this morning, the landscape, the atmosphere, the weather, the clouds, the emotion, resembles exactly a morning I had back in Koh Phangan in December, the 4th I think it was. I couldn't sleep that morning either, so I took myself melancholic and despondently to the beach and wrote Carry It With You (http://gallivantingandgoodness.blogspot.com/2009/12/carry-it-with-you.html). Everything now feels identical to then. I was dismal on that morning because I'd had to say goodbye to some friends from home who were travelling a few months ahead of me. I had been so looking forward to seeing them for that first week in Thailand that I had neglected to spend any considerable amount of time contemplating the months of travelling that lay stretched out for me behind their farewell. Their departure made me nervous, I missed them too quickly, and the absence of their backpacks slung in the corner of the room saw me fleeing for the beach with my notebook to lament the loss of moments in time that are unimitable.

In some kind of perfect symmetry that life has designed for me, I now sit on sand once more with those same nervous fears crawling along my veins, 2 weeks before I will see those friends again that I waved off in Phangan. Seeing them again will mean that I'm in Australia, and Australia will mean that I have reached the last stage of the 7 month trip that I originally intended. The beginning and the end; I feel like I'm looking back at myself through a mirror.

Australia is the real world, a place where I have to make big decisions about the next year of my life. The happy, nomadic existence I have come to know and love will need to be put on temporary standstill whilst I deliberate whether or not I can afford to miss my flight back to Heathrow in June. And if I do not go to the airport on that day, where will I go instead? I don't know yet if I can make Australia a home, the size of it scares me, the impersonality of such vast and uninhabitable terrain seems isolating, the culture of working and drinking, drinking and working too resemblant of what I ran away from in London, the beaches are beautiful but bettered elsewhere, the cities are vibrant and amenable, but cities are everywhere, and I don't like snakes, or sharks, or spiders that can kill me.

The thing that frightens me the most about any kind of prolonged stay in Australia (because prolonged is what it will have to be if I hope to earn some money there) is that there is nobody in Australia who wants me or needs me, and I am a person who needs and wants to be wanted and needed. I guess we all feel like this to some extent, no one wants to be dispensable or too easily replaced. I can hear my friends and family yelling at their computer screens as they read this, 'Come home then Grace!', but I do not know if I'm ready for that either, I'm terrified that when I return it will feel like I've never been away, that this will all seem like some hazy dream. Maybe I need to keep moving until I find somewhere or someone to whom I feel useful.

Many people thrive on this kind of uncertainty, on the sense of being directionless, but it just makes me feel like I'm wasting time I won't get back, ever panicked and aware of my own infinite mortality! I don't want to know the future, I'm not asking for a crystal ball or a fortune teller or a magazine horoscope, but a little bit of guidance would be nice, a bit of clear sight. It feels like that's what deja vu is for; life repeating moments for us so that we may see the important things more clearly through their reiteration. What does this repetition tell me? That I still get scared by life, that I will run to the beach with my notebook rather than talk about it, that I have tendencies towards loneliness, that I still can't see the path in front of my feet. I've stepped through glass, and am trying not to despair that I look exactly the same, attempting not to align my feelings with the weather, arguing that I am probably not the protagonist of my own unwritten tragic novel!

I need to know that it's alright to be sat alone on the beach at 6 in the morning, missing everything that's gone, in trepidation of what's to come, wondering what on earth I'm doing here, and hoping that someone, anyone, will give me a place and a reason to unpack my bag and feel worthwhile. Hubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble.