I'm currently listening to Jenny-8675309 by Tommy Tutone. I still remember the very first time I heard this song, it was in Honolulu in April 2006. No idea why it had slipped my notice completely for the last 2 decades before then. Maybe it was never a hit in Australia, and never given any airtime on the 'Classic Rock/Pop' stations.
Anyhow moving on. One thing that still astonishes me about my Australian hometown, Brisbane, is the 3 degrees of separation that I always knew and that seemingly still exists. For a city with over 1 million people, it was always known as Australia's Oversized Country Town due to it's bizarre ability to somehow still be one large social circle.
Honestly, I couldn't go anywhere, or do anything in Brisbane, without someone knowing me, or me knowing someone. It was the most strange phenomenon. Maybe everybody just had really good memories for faces and people. But everybody just seemed to be somehow linked. I'm not the only one who found this, it almost became a running joke between myself and my friends.
What made me think of it today, was the fact that I found a friend named Mitch, who I went to college back in 2001 with on Facebook and added him. Anyhow, I was reading through his profile, and flipping through his photos, and in a couple of photos- there's my friend Melli's sister, Cathryn. I sat and contemplated for a moment. Did Melli & Cath know Mitch? Not when I knew Mitch. And not when I knew Melli & Cathryn. And I started flipping through a few more photos, recognizing even more faces. But not faces from College. People I knew after college, from different social circles. But evidently the circles have collided and are one happy family as often times happens.
In retrospect, the phenomenon was both a blessing and a curse. It was a blessing in that you never really had to make new friends anywhere you went, because chances were, after a few lines of conversation you knew people in common, and this automatically either made you friends or enemies. It was a curse, predominantly because you could never escape your past, no matter how hard you tried. I'd get random people asking me "Hey weren't you that girl who...?" "Hey, oh my gosh, Amber? Oh wow remember me? I remember you- I remember when you..." "OH no... Amber? Wow- you did such and such in such and such... right?" When you were somebody who got up to as much mischief in their adolescent years as I did, constant reminders constantly following you is never a good thing.
Maybe it's the Geographic make-up of Brisbane that makes it's people behave in such a way. For instance, here in Missouri, I live in a town approximately 25-30 miles out of downtown St. Louis. Even though I commuted to St. Louis every day when I was working, in discussion with a lot of people in my town, it seemed many didn't ever leave my town, or travel far, if they didn't have to. In all honesty, now that I'm not working, I don't leave my town much either come to think of it. But of course if every town in the county has the same attitude to a certain degree, it's possibly the reason I never observed the same phenomenon in this city.
In Brisbane however, to do almost anything, you had to go downtown. The outlying suburbs failed in being entirely self-sufficient and were for residence only. Consequently everybody divulged on the center of the city, the downtown/financial area every day, creating traffic chaos about 10 times worse than I've ever seen in America (I lived about 7 miles from downtown for most of my life, it took me over an hour by car to travel the 8 miles to my workplace during peak hour). Anyhow, everything happened in 'The City' (in America you go 'Downtown' in Australia you go to 'The City'), it's where you worked, it's where you socialized, it's where you went to Concerts (well until Festival Hall closed its doors), it's where you went to the Cinema, it's where you went Shopping. And somehow this made a city of 1 million + people, seem a lot smaller.
I know that a lot of American's commute to their 'downtown' for work, but they don't seem to stay downtown for everything else as well. Just an observation, speaking from a St. Louis perspective anyhow. It's possibly different in other cities.
Of course, now I'm getting set to move to a city of approximately 65,000 people. And it was one of those entropic chain of events which have landed me there as well. A friend asked me last night how my husband and I met. And in all honesty the story is so far fetched and still so bizarre to me that I just fall into the habit of saying "We met through a mutual friend" which is the truth, but it actually goes much further than that.
First of all, it must be understood that even before I moved to the United States, I had spent a lot of time over here, predominantly for one person in my life, who without, I probably wouldn't be quite who I am today.
Rewind to April, 2006, Jacksonville, North Carolina. I'd been traveling the East Coast for a while, and my ex-fiancee who we'll call W asked if I was going to be visiting him in Camp Lejeune. We'd broken up shortly after he came back from Iraq the previous year. His choice. Not mine. He still owned my heart, and when he said jump, I jumped. So I caught a flight from Boston-Logan Airport to Raleigh-Durham, picked up a rental car and drove to Jacksonville.
After a few days it was still far too painful, when we were together everything was good again, but it wasn't to last, he wanted me in his life, but not the way I wanted to be in it. So after breaking down in tears in an Arby's parking lot. (Not my proudest moment) I got in my rental car and drove back to Raleigh.
I remember staring at the departing flights wondering where looked good. I decided that Phoenix, Arizona sounded fun, and just like that, got me a flight to Phoenix. After a few days in Phoenix I was bored again and decided to move west again. I was leaning toward San Francisco but decided I hadn't been to Sacramento, so that was a good idea.
Then after a horrible course of events in Sacramento which I don't want to discuss, I found myself frazzled and at the airport again, determined to get even further away, emotionally and physically. Honolulu it was... and while on the beach in Waikiki that evening, I met a US Marine named Ryan who to this day I'm extremely good friends with. Anyhow, he was based at K-Bay but had just been moved from Okinawa in Japan. I'd heard of Okinawa. And Ryan had nothing but good things to say about Japan.
I had 2 weeks left of vacation time from work (I'd taken 6 weeks) and decided that Japan might cheer me up, I hadn't been to Japan in years. So the next morning, back at Honolulu International Airport, and managed to get me a flight to Tokyo-Narita. (For the record, this isn't all as expensive as it sounds, if there are available seats on the flight, and it's the last minute, and you don't have a reservation, you can usually negotiate the prices down tremendously at the airport ticket counter in person). After some time in Tokyo I thought I'd go and check out this Okinawa place. I needed an island paradise after all.
And it was even more than I thought it would be. Rocky Shores, Palm Trees, The Bluest Ocean I've ever seen in my life. It was the most gorgeous place I'd ever ended up and I was in love with it. I was still communicating with W via phone every now and again, and he was of course highly disapproving that I'd ended up in Okinawa. What in the world was I doing there, of all places?
Long story short, in a parking lot of a convenience store, I met a Marine from Louisiana named Eric. In fact, in the time I was there I met a lot of wonderful guys who I'm still friends with to this day. Eric and I though especially became good friends and kept in contact after I decided to go back to Honolulu, and then back to Australia.
Back in Australia I realized how utterly bored I was with my job, with the people, with my life. So I applied for jobs overseas, in Japan, in the UK, and in the USA. Astonishingly enough, I got every job I applied for, and it became a question of where did I want to move to most of all? The options most appealing were Japan and the US. After a bit of deliberation, I decided to go for the US as the job seemed more interesting (I was going to be teaching English in Japan, working in a hotel in America). So in September of 2006 I made the move to St. Louis.
W and I had remained friends, and he was now out of the Marine Corps and living in Florida. I visited him a couple of times. Eric part way through 2007 had been relocated to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina from Okinawa, and I promised to visit him.
In December 2007, I'd just got back from a month in Europe and W had asked me to come visit him. Things hadn't been going well for him. He was suffering from major Post Traumatic Stress Disorder due to his experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. He'd been institutionalized while I was in Europe as he'd been considered a threat to himself and others due to his erratic behaviour and homicidal tendencies. Of course my heart went out to him and I visited. But as usual, any chance of a reconcile of our relationship was an absolutely lost cause on my behalf.
It was that weekend that I finally accepted, 2 years from the time we'd originally broken up, that it really was over. For the first time, I actually felt I could move on. Strangely enough, W has not been in a relationship with anyone since we broke up. Like he's told me, he needs to get his own life straight first. And although I vowed always to be there for him if he needed me, all romantic notions of everything all coming up ribbons and roses, finally disappeared.
I was standing on my balcony enjoying the Florida sunshine and 85 degree heat in December (compared to the freezing temperatures I'd left in Missouri) when Eric called me to ask if I was back from Europe yet. I said I was, and said I was down in Florida. We agreed that it had been too long since we'd hung out and that at my next available opportunity, I'd have to visit in North Carolina.
Eric had kind of become like a brother to me. You know how it is when you just click with some people? Consequently we had always offered eachother advice on the opposite sex and dating advice and this and that and the other. It was a purely platonic friendship, yet remains to be a lovely one.
On the airplane back to St. Louis on Monday I felt a great weight lifted off my shoulders, given that I'd finally let go of something, someone that through no fault of his own, had always somehow been holding me back from being happy with anybody else.
A couple of weeks later I was all set to go to Jacksonville, North Carolina. Eric, his friends and I had planned to then travel to Myrtle Beach, SC for the weekend. The night before my flight left though, Eric called me, there was an unfortunate tragedy in his family and the Marine Corps had given him special permission to return to Louisiana that weekend. I gave him my deepest sympathy and my heart truly went out to him. Then he told me that all of his friends had heard about me crazy Australian girl he met in Japan and would be disappointed if I didn't come down. He told me to still go to Jacksonville, that his friends would look after me. I was honestly tempted to just cancel my flight and pray for Eric's family and reschedule to when Eric was back in town, but something told me to just go down to North Carolina, if worst came to worst, I still knew some of W's friends who were still in Jacksonville so I wouldn't be entirely abandoned.
That first Friday that I arrived in Jacksonville, I met Chris, one of Eric's friends, who obviously is now my husband. I'm not even positive when we decided for sure to get married. But I found myself back in North Carolina, whether flying or driving, almost every week from there on in. One weekend I even took my best friend, Katrina, another Australian girl living in St. Louis to meet him and get her opinion. Everything was met with approval. Chris and I were different, came from very different backgrounds, but somehow our personalities complimented eachothers, and our outlook on life, our aims and goals and dreams for the future were the same. And all of a sudden, everything made sense.
I had always questioned God's motives, and why he felt fit to take W away from me, I never understood why. But from that first weekend back in North Carolina, it suddenly made sense. I strongly believe that Chris and I's relationship was in God's plan for me all along. I had a lot of growing up to do in the last 2 years, I had a lot of living to do in the last 2 years, I had a lot of people to meet, I had to truly come to know and understand myself. Then as if by magic, the love of my life just fell into my existance.
And although I sometimes complain, although I sometimes get scared, I wouldn't trade any of it for anything. This was all part of the greater plan, after all.
So, there you have it, the story that starts and ends in Jacksonville, North Carolina. It's almost so far fetched I sometimes don't believe it myself. But if it wasn't for W making me cry in that Arby's parking lot, I never would have kept drifting west, and if it wasn't for the people I met along the way, I would never have ended up in Japan, and if I hadn't ever met Eric in Japan, I would never have met my husband. The full circle is now complete. And I've found acceptance and contentment. Finally.
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