In a row of houses, dark as the night, still as the ones in slumber, a room remains alight.

---

🎕

(escapril, day 6)

We all take one last look before walking away. This was true for me the night I was in Brisbane last. I had a morning left of being there ahead of me still, but already I was taking in everything around me the way I would a memory: each look a lingering one; feeling nostalgic for all that was for all that I knew they would soon become.

It had to do with a particular stall in Southbank and my making a memory locket of my time in Brisbane. Four years I had spent dreaming up my last trip, making it up in my mind as one to be remembered. But the moment I came to the end of it, I found myself there, an empty locket in one hand and a selection of charms displayed on the table before me, feeling hesitant. Each charm I turned over in my hand, I did so while thinking deeply of what they would mean in the making of my memory locket - what story they would tell; what story did I want them to? Because in all my dreaming of what the perfect last trip would look like, I hadn’t spared a moment to think of what the last four years I had already spent in Brisbane was like to me. What, at the end of the entirety of my time in Brisbane, did I want to remember?

And it’s funny because the truth is that there has always been a goodbye saved in me for Brisbane. That when I think of the times I was there, I think of my constant want to have been back in Brunei instead; I think of my looking forward to the end of them. To this - almost down to the very moment.

But this is what it’s like to take one last look before you walk away.

In that last look - that sweeping glance, the gaze that lingers - everything becomes a part of a memory you would one day come back to. Everything that, in its finality, you would want to make count.

And at a Southbank stall on my last night in Brisbane, this was a way I could make it count.

With the weight of the locket in my hands, and what was left of my last night in Brisbane yet awaiting me still, I finally found myself sparing a moment to think back to the last four years. To what it was I had remembered. To what it was that I then knew that I wanted to. And it all comes down to this: the dream I had pursued, the risk it had entailed; the falls I had taken; the growth that had come of it; the home I had left, the home I had found.

And when I finally walked away from the stall, carrying my memory locket with me, the flashes of four years’ worth of memories had left me feeling like I had had my fill of Brisbane. That I had made the most of my one last look at it.

But then again, here I am, two months later, writing this, thinking that in this way, I am finally ready for it to truly be my one last look at it all.

Here I am, being met with a Circumstance. And though it isn't my own to personally bear, I feel the weight of it all the same. My first thought is that this is a worrying thing; that I should ready myself with at least some semblance of strength - one where I would hold myself firm, and tough, and steady. But I walk behind the person who bears the Circumstance, and he cracks a joke. The next person whose eyes I meet, who knows the Circumstance for what it was, too, cracks another. Her face lights up with the very hint of a smile and it is telling. I see you, it says. Everything is going to be okay. And it is in this simple exchange, that what was once seemingly serious and a thing to draw out a tough exterior for, I find myself beginning to consider what it really was: a circumstance, rightfully of significance at its own, but one which had not so big a weight attached to it as I had first thought.

So I returned the smile, feeling lighter for all that had been made so and with it thinking to myself how we could all use a little bit more light here.   

In looking back to what I've learned from 2019, I find that it means to sift through memories from a kaleidoscope of days - days that look like this: cups of tea taken in second’s to begin each day anew; frantic scribbles of notes on paper in pen, tucking them in between the pages of a growing journaling book; making heart-song the words to gilmore girl’s and lessons and memories of nora ephron films; trading wednesday nauseas for weekend plans and fear for courageous bursts; learning to unlearn the certainties of expectations and to embrace what has become the end of a four-years hum I have so long leaned on to - and to come out of it finding, unspooling in their midst, the realisation that often, it’s the imperfect days that I love the most. Days I find myself stumbling into out of best laid plans; days I could never have dreamed up in the way they have so perfectly come around. 

It all comes back to this: that what I am searching for is not a thing in and of itself, but a feeling.