familiarity, futures and the burden of stuff
After dining alone for two weeks, I am doing my final load of washing and preparing to travel to Italy.
In truth, the first week here was challenging. It was not so much my aloneness – for solitude is what I reach for when life is a little tough – but with unfamiliarity. When I access solitude at home, I curl into the comforts of what I know and love: my books, my pantry, my basket of unfinished knitting projects. Even if I drive five hours west and pitch my tent by a river, the car is full of activities I enjoy, and the eucalyptus trees and dusty red landscape feel like home. Slowly I have carved out pockets of familiarity in Ikaria and this has helped me enjoy the stretching days: my favourite cove to swim in, my favourite appetiser to order at the local restaurants (saginaki), the supermarket that stocks the yellow flesh peaches and nectarines. I have also become familiar with the faces of the older folk who spend their days lying on the sand in the nude. I see them splayed out under the glare of the sun and then later, clothed at the restaurant. We nod in an acknowledgement that loosely translates to ‘We’ve all seen a bit of each other, hey?’ and go about our evenings.
When there is a shift in life, it often inspires a reassessment of things that you have let slip in the comforts of routine. For me, it has been very much a literal reassessment of things. Sharing a three-bedroom apartment with a double garage (one of the last affordable rentals for my suburb I suspect) as a maximalist and serial hobbyist means I have accumulated stuff. A lot of stuff. The more stuff, the more mess. And the more mess, the more I feel like a slave to the sheer number of things I own.
My new space on the south coast is a few hundred metres from my best friend and is surrounded by a wider community I was very much enmeshed in during the first COVID lockdowns. The cottage has a kitchen/living room which flows into a bedroom and is much smaller than the place I lived in up north last year. I will need to be very intentional with what I choose to take with me because space is limited. Almost everything I own has been purchased from Marketplace, thrifted from Salvos or mined from council clean up due to the allure of ‘free’ or ‘cheap’, and now it will be put back in rotation, for the next person.
Along with the inevitable cleaning up and cleaning out that comes with a break-up, I am staring down the barrel of a future without plans. When you are building a future with another person, everything feels more obtainable. A house with a yard, year-long cycling adventures, children. With a partnership comes the courage to dream, and the support to make that dream a reality.
Unfortunately, in the way the society I was born into operates, a lot of this dream fulfilment is limited to romantic relationships. Rarely do we co-dream with friends, beyond the annual weekend away or month-long holiday in a new country. In the last couple of years, I have been challenged to think differently and to come together with friends and co-create a future that aligns with our values, irrespective of the presence of romantic partners. This is a liberating approach because the question of singleness is no longer important. You have your community, and they can provide much of the same support, love and care as a romantic partner would. It offers hope for a different type of future than the one I was raised with (and yes, it does kind of sound like the homesteading communes you see on YouTube – minus the conspiracy theories and/or conservative evangelical Christianity). As a result, I am not entering this period of singleness with the doom and gloom I once had, reacting by furiously swiping on dating apps with the hopes that I’d meet a like-minded person. I am nesting into the people who love me, and who are present in my life every day.
As I cull my possessions and slip into the familiarity of community, I will slowly reimagine my future. At the moment it looks like vegetable gardens and beeswax candles and hand-knitted jumpers for winter, but tomorrow it could very well look different.