Closure

by Dominic Wilson (United Kingdom (Great Britain))

I didn't expect to find Australia

My thinning tires came to a halt a few feet away from a row of four weather-beaten picnic benches, and I exited the car onto the grassy headland beyond. The breeze was light and permeated with a salty tang from the ocean spray. I remembered it tasting bitter, but today it was sweet and auspiciously therapeutic. I hadn’t come back here looking for redemption. I wasn’t even sure I needed it. I was happy now, more so than ever actually. But as I looked across the golden sands stretching away into the southern distance, each wave that broke upon them seemed to wash new memories into my mind of the time we’d spent on this coastline a decade ago. Heading north out of Sydney, I’d truly believed it was the start of our greatest adventure together. But the excitement slowly receded. Sitting side by side in my rusting Ford Falcon Wagon, each mile seemed to push us further apart, a distance that became the cruellest duality; she craved it, I longed to bridge it. By the time we hit the Central Coast, the atmosphere felt ominous, and it culminated on this very headland one blustery afternoon. Now, ten years after these tangled events and halfway around the world once more, I had driven back up to this fateful headland just outside Sawtell, more out of curiosity than anything else. I hadn’t recollected those days for some time, but confronted with a vista ten years buried, I remembered starkly how they were the most intense of my life. I was young and lost as the finality of the situation set in. The day her bus turned north out of Coffs Harbour station nearby had felt like an earthquake, but I managed a smile and a wave, and she was out of sight before the tears started to fall. I spent the months thereafter travelling across this great continent unabated and alone. Adelaide, Uluru, Darwin, Broome, Hobart. I was clearly running, hoping to escape the dull pain in my guts, and trying to ignore the ring in my backpack that she’d never had a chance to see. Once free from Australia’s grasp, and with well-trodden naivety, I assumed my role as the victim and used this as an excuse to sabotage other areas of my life. I slipped into dark times without discerning it and in the end, as it always had previously, travel came to the rescue. Once my tattered bag returned to my soldiers and new countries came and went, I began to see that what happened on this headland in 2009 wasn’t momentous, just another bend in the road. I became reluctantly grateful that this bend had led me to experience the world in ways I could never have imagined, and yet the lingering memory of this headland still felt like an extra weight in my backpack. But sitting now on the same blades of grass from a decade ago, on the edge of the rugged headland and facing south, I was surprised to discover that perhaps I was free from its grasp completely. There was something in the atmosphere that felt different, even equanimous. The headland seemed less windswept, the ocean less ragged, and the blue-domed sky a far cry from the quilt of grey that had swathed the coastline a decade ago. I looked down to the beach as a couple walked along the waters edge arm in arm, a small black dog running excitedly around them; the only figures on the otherwise desolate sweep of Bonville Beach laid out before me. At this moment I realised, with genuine relief, that I’d found closure where I least expected to, in a wonderful land that I’d long associated with sadness. As if on cue, I heard the soft padding of footsteps behind me, followed by a warm hand on my arm and then ocean-blue eyes looking deeply into mine. “Shall we move on?” said my current partner, Liz, blissfully unaware of the significance this obscure headland held. I hadn’t the courage or the cause to confide in her. “Yes,” I replied, with one last glance down the coast, “I think it’s time.”