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essays | places


Australia

god-size sandbox in the ocean


 

   
   T
wo months were never gonna be enough time for this behemoth of a country, but it was what we had and we did what we had to do with what we had. Most of all, I will always remember Australia as the place where my first love first cracked. Back then, back there, my torment dwarfed the grand land and could not be explained by a 23-year-old child, but the notion has sobered up by now to be dry fact, and no bitter or sour aftertaste lingers. That love was killed by the indifferent tides of time and change, so how could I hold it against you Australia, if I can’t even hold it against the universe? Speaking of which, I wonder if there are others like you in the universe – too big to be an island, but too islandish not to be one. Then again, I guess Africa, Eurasia and the Americas are also just a bunch of humongous, weirdly shaped islands. Anyways, I’m digressing mate. Back to Australia, a continent full of deadly animals that is just a continent when you are there, and where those fluffy Koalas sound a lot more ursine than a stranger would expect. My emotional narrative of that god-size sandbox in the ocean remained untainted, as it does with the benefit of abandoning the bad in that fog of memories and rescuing the good from it. What stayed with me is what the eyes shared so generously with the heart – those freehand landscape-designs Wind had willed with his erratic path, and those cityscape-designs man had annexed. What is left behind is what the heart projected onto the mind’s eyes when they were shut during long, wake nights of lying side by side with an unsurmountable distance squeezed between us: the sight of thrown up love.




 

a glimpse
 


So much nature in that country, they had to cram some of it into the cities.
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urban waterfall
Queensland / Australia · 2009




 


Animals too.

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urban kangaroo
Sydney / Australia · 2009