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It dawned at the departure gate how bad the time difference is. It’s not an easy difference the time gap from Sydney. It’s tomorrow, 5 hours in the past for me and yesterday, 5 hours in the future for her. I saw mum last, the day before. She was a week out of surgery and couldn’t speak. We hadn’t seen each other in 2 years, but we were both leaving. We needed a goodbye. We went down to Coogee, her favourite beach; I bought her a milkshake and we sat in silence. She asked me questions about the trip, how I had been, and whether I’d packed, but none of my answers had any heart. I couldn’t muster it, though I was looking at her dying body, a mouth sewn half-shut dribbling some caramel mess down her face I could only turn to the sea and smell the salt blow off the back of the waves by ear of the seagulls’ barks. I hugged her frail body and she took a picture of me in front of my car. I told her I’d be back in June but I didn’t believe it and I don’t think she did either. That’s how I came to America. Only just having turned from home. I couldn’t take my eyes off Sydney harbour as we flew out of and over the clouds, past the bluest of any horizon. I watched until it fully disappeared into fog. I tried so desperately to hold it in pictures or words but the turbulence shook my hand – I couldn’t hold a pen. There was no way ridding this feeling of total departure. San Francisco swallowed me up. Opened its bright guzzling choppers and nuzzled me right by the back molars. Stepping off the plane in America for the first time… shook me. I felt exhilarated. There’s real angst. There’s real trouble. San Francisco is not a city cast in black and white. It’s on a different spectrum. Bright greens brush burnt orange. Cream caresses brown in cowboy boots, tree trunks and executive couches. Grey pink rolls deep. I don’t feel safe at night. I clutch my bag by me tight and everyone in my office works late without pay for fear of loosing it. There’s every kind of milk, but Starbucks does whole or non-fat. All or nothing. And nothing is done by halves. I found a place online to live, a little artists’ collective in the old hippie Haight. We’ve got real characters. Pirates, and drag queens, and Poison Ivy’d graduates and I’m lost in this mess of communal cooking and endless cuddles, wondering hands and deep interest, teetering on something more. The touching tease of closeness… Warmth opens me up – America holds me in shining embrace. A weeklong haze totally blazed. I don’t think I moved. Somewhere in the middle of the movement of light, fabric, weed and Taco Bell I was elated with the warmth of that sun and its power to forget some past I can’t remember. I wake in a tiny room on the top floor of our converted convent at the top of the hill. Orange light burns in. Alone and afraid, Saturday morning silence breaks me more than any string of words. In this dawn something sets – some click in another universe – and in this wave of pleasure my pain finds its way. The friends I made last night are gone. No grumble fills the air. I breathe through choked coughs and wander through the halls while the radiators whistle. Without her space this air runs me dry. It moves fast. San Francisco’s walls press on me. Fog rolls over and it rains for weeks on end. Where’d my love go? The city holds me along pink roofs and bay windows. But fault line spills and a new home calls out, not yet lived, not yet breathed. So I keep running to the home I’ve never known. My rocky California. My house of contradictions. They run while the earth shakes and my tears leak, cause I left my heart in San Francisco on a shelf too high to reach.