To those dirt roads,
Why do we want to escape the familiar? I know I moved to the city so fast, I know I did not hesitate. Of course I love my family, but I did not realize how much I love my home. When I left I was searching for people and a career to take me to cities across the sea. In my dreams I saw skyscrapers in New York, and yellow lights in Paris. Sometimes I still get that feeling of possibility and awe, when my train carriage passes through the central business district.
In the city there are pigeons and seagulls. They are pests. People kick at them and ride skateboards through their flocks. In the city gardens, the earth is rolled and mounded into flat squares and perfect hills. Ducks and rosellas are admired for their sweet faces and flashes of green feathers. I scrolled through my camera roll and found twenty two photos of multicolored birds. Crows go unnoticed, but they remember every face that forgets them, like those dirt roads remember me.
Those dirt roads, where I skinned my knees. There is so much space to run, chasing tumbleweed or escaping a bullants nest. I learned about wounds and how to wash out the dust and gravel. Even after all these years I feel my mother’s hand pull my picking fingers away from a healing scab. It is difficult, but better, to let the gashes scar and fade.
Those dirt roads lead to a farm. With horses and chickens by a red wheelbarrow, just like William Carlos Williams wrote. The wind sounds like poetry, hissing and lilting through gum leaves. I want to lay down in a paddock and let my hair tangle with green grass. I want to hum folk tunes to the empty, wide space, so far from this city. Here I am just a joker in a deck of cards that is being shuffled for eternity.
Those dirt roads, when they crunch under my tires, I know I am home. Every time I pass over the crest and see sunlight flooding a rural land it makes me want to cry. A friend once told me the wind turbines look like they are dancing. I think they are waving, we are still here. White sails against the bluest of skies.
Even now, having returned to these dirt roads, I cannot stand upright. How can you miss something that is right in front of you? I leave my screens, music, and books. I look up for the first time in months to stretch an ache in my neck. Hello clouds. I could sprint so fast my cheeks turn red and I have to skid to a stop. I could yell and shriek because I am finally alone, with no cameras watching. But I don’t do either of those things.
I’ve brought a fear of passing time with me. I’m not sure how to exist here anymore. Something in my stomach squirms and I admit it like a sob; my home, now uncanny.
From, a crow in recovery,
having clipped her own wings.
Flâneuse from aus 