Part II
If you’re new OR you missed part I, click here!
I returned home from Australia five months after arriving, torn, broken, and a mess. I don’t even mean an emotional mess. I mean I stepped off the plane and I looked like I had army crawled through a scene from Call of Duty.
That’s right, COD reference. I had a lot of guy friends in college, especially when I lived in the dorms. I was always the only girl playing COD. More importantly, everyone fought to go after me, because I was so bad at it, that my turn always ended the fastest.
I’m more of an original Nintendo, Paperboy and Mario kind of girl.
Oh, right. Back to the story.
I was a mess. That’s what a 24 hour flight will do to you, folks. I couldn’t wait to shower, and eat Reese’speanut butter cups. THAT’S RIGHT! They don’t have Reese’s in Australia! WHAAAT? When I realized that…instant catastrophe. It was the ONLY thing I didn’t like about Australia, but I was willing to look past it. Australia had other candy alternatives that I quickly became addicted to.
The first month home was more than difficult. I nearly had a mental break down in the cereal aisle at the supermarket. In Australia, they have five or six popular brands to choose from. This had slipped my mind upon returning, and the seven mile long cereal aisle was a bit overwhelming on my first day home. Reverse culture shock is nothing to play around with.
Mostly, I just felt like I didn’t belong in America anymore. It felt like I hopped on a plane and traveled 10,000 miles in the wrong direction. Beside the fact that I was used to being fourteen hours ahead in my sleeping schedule, America didn’t feel like home anymore. My first two months back at my New Hampshire college were a struggle. I alienated myself from my friends, I worked Monday through Saturday to avoid social gatherings, and my grades suffered. I couldn’t understand the depression I was going through, but something deep down was tugging at my heart strings, telling me every day that I had to go back to Australia.
I had to go home.
On October 12, 2009, I received a strange Facebook notification on a photo that was taken of me while still in Australia, holding an Australian drink.
"Blake has commented on one of your pictures..."
Not only was this type of backtalk completely random, but it was also beer-blaspheme. I quickly and wittily responded. Sure enough moments later, I had another cheeky comment from Blake on my photo. Our exchanges continued to ricochet through cyberspace, boomeranging between hemispheres, until we gave in and had an actual conversation on MSN.
You would think our conversation would be awkward, considering our first conversation, but it was like we’d known each other for years. We joked about beer preferences and discussed leaving Australia, and life back in America. He tried earnestly to convince me that Newcastle wasn’t a fun place to live, and I tried to equitably convince him that New Hampshire was a black hole, sucking me into a life of misery and isolation, until the inevitable would take place: I would become a self proclaimed bird lady.
Two hours later, Blake was telling me that it was past my bedtime. As a fellow traveler of the world, he was aware of the extreme time difference. I didn’t care. It was the first time in four months that I had honestly laughed. It was the first time in four months that I wanted to have a conversation with somebody. Talking to Blake made me feel closer to where I belonged.
For two hours, talking to Blake made me feel home.
Our conversations happened every night, and a wonderful friendship developed for the next eight months. On one side of the world, he was waking up and turning on his computer to see if I’d be online, and on the other side of the world, I was fidgeting at my computer hoping the boy with the blue eyes hadn’t slept through his alarm. The topics ranged anywhere from family and school to relationships and personal stories. Our favorite conversations seemed to revolve around music. Music always prevailed. To make things more interesting, we came up with the idea to go through the alphabet and send each other a few songs every day.
I’m even going to do you all a favor, and share some of our alphabet music with you. (I actually backtracked through our archived messages to find these, so you should all consider yourselves to be rock stars. It was quite time consuming.)
Carley: Day 1 A’s and B’s
The Almost – Awful Direction
Angus and Julia Stone – Bella
Backseat Goodbye – Technicolor Eyes
Sara Bareilles – Gravity
Belle and Sebastian – If She wants Me
Bernard Fanning – Songbird (I’m sure you have this)
Bloc Party – I still Remember
Blake: Day 1 A’s and B’s
Augustana – Boston & Twenty Years.
Athlete – black swan song.
Shane Alexander – feels like home.
William Fitzsimmons and Priscilla Ahn – i dont feel it anymore.
Aqualung – easier to lie.
Lou Barlow – Legendary
Bjorn Baille – Menace
Sarah Blasko – Perfect Now
*This was copied straight from our first conversations*
We trucked through the entire alphabet, rediscovering songs we’d forgotten about, and finding a whole new plethora of songs we’d never heard of. I hadn’t listened to the original Dashboard Confessional album in years, but I’d loved it since the age of 15. Blake and I spent an entire night reliving that album together across oceans, sharing stories relating to the songs. I remembered, almost too vividly, my first high school break up, and locking myself in my room with a Dashboard CD.
*Fun Flash Forward Fact: When Blake and I moved into our first apartment together, and I unpacked my old boom box, this CD was still sitting in the CD player.*
If I look back in the journal I kept during this time, I can actually find pages and notes about music that I wanted to share with Blake.
In January 2010, a new show aired. The Buried Life took to television sets around the country, and upon the first viewing of the show’s trailer, I sent the link to Blake. For those who haven’t seen it, TBL was a show about four guys traveling around the world, crossing off items on their bucket lists. A few of THEIR list items included, fall in love, learn to fly, and play basketball with Obama. We followed the show together, watching and discussing every episode. Usually, our discussions took place a few days after the actual episodes aired in the US, and I wasn’t allowed to spoil it for Blake. The Buried Life was an American show, so Blake had to stream the episodes days later.
After watching a few episodes together, we decided to create a combined list together. We each had a week to come up with fifty items, and after the week was over, we would reveal the lists to each other, and then combine them. Blake and I are both competitive by nature, so we also decided that the first person to finish the whole list of 100 items would be declared the winner.
I’m not going to post the bucket list, because it’s personal, and very special. Not to mention, it’s not a blog about bucket listing. Three years later, and Blake and I are still crossing things off and smack talking about who will be the true winner. However, a few relevant items will undoubtedly come up as the story unravels.
The week of February 25th, 2010, I received an E-mail notification from the mail department of my university. This was not at all surprising, because everybody gives me presents on my birthday. That’s not true at all, but I knew both of my parents planned on sending me birthday packages. I left my apartment and trotted down to the mail room to claim whatever prize the mail-lords would bestow upon me. After showing my student ID to the woman at the mail room, she handed me a package.
Something was different.
Very different.
The handwriting was unfamiliar, and there were about 10 stamps on the package, enough stamps to get it across the world. I looked in the top left corner and noticed the return address read Newcastle, Australia. At the very top of the address sat Blake’s name, staring me in the face. I moved from the mail area to the building’s lounge room to look for a place to sit. Once I was out of the way of the morning university bagel shop traffic, I made myself comfortable on a bench, and tore the package open.
This is what the package held:
But this is.
