The best idea I ever had

This is a text I wrote one year after I returned from Australia, in one of those occasions I felt the extreme need to communicate somehow. I read it again, 2 and half years later, and I still find myself in these words, even though some things have changed. I’m no longer melancholic nor do I feel empty anymore. I do miss the people I left behind, the places I lived in and the wonderful sensation of being a “free spirit”, with all the good and bad it brings. Many things happened since then but I still feel that going to Australia was the best thing I ever made, because it showed me, among other things, how to handle and live with myself.

9th March 2006. I’m sitting in front of the computer trying to put in words all the feelings that invade me. I listen to the voice of Paul Greene, the Australian singer that has been my company in the melancholic hours. Australia was an adventure that satisfied me in every sense and it was a place where I really felt at home.
It’s been a year today that I returned to Portugal, to the world I have always known and that I trade for another one, a distant one. I feel melancholic, as in many other days since I returned. In the first months, I felt the need to touch in things I brought from Australia, to see the faces of the people, to remind myself of what I have done there. The sensation of emptiness still haunts me, because the memories hide in my brain and I desperately try to bring them back to the surface. I know I won’t loose them, we don’t loose what we learn, but to come back to a different world like this I’m living now makes me diverge from what I found out to be in Australia: a bit hippie, a successful communicator, a liberated person and a free soul. An incorrigible dreamer with a huge willpower to change the world and the conviction I could really do it. I feel limited here, as if the wings have separated from the body when I returned to the nest. Here I tend to be more of what the others think I am, to be more normal. I haven’t been wearing the hippie pants Mary gave me for a long time, even being the ones I like the most. I look normal, but I feel very different. One thing is for sure: going to Australia was the best idea I ever had, and hopefully it won’t be the last. The world - and what we can learn from it - is just too big.

3 and half years have passed since I returned. The wings are growing again.