all the longing and the dreaming

I feel…very strange, lately. Very strange.

I’m starting to feel very much like Bilbo in the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring…”I want to see mountains again, Gandalf! Mountains! Then find somewhere quiet I can finish my book.” Because that’s what I want, as well. A little cottage in the mountains where I can spend my days writing away. Finish some books! And growing a little garden. Preferably where the weather is cool, the winters are sharp and beautiful, the trees are many, and it’s quiet, except for the birdsong.

If you’d have told me last year at this point that I actually would want to leave Brisbane in the very near future, I would have scoffed at you. I’ve been rooted here in the September City for so long, and I still love it; I think I always will. But…this girl is no longer this girl. It’s like the ghost of who I was belongs to Brisbane, always, but who I am now belongs…well, nowhere, yet. And I’m looking for that place so hard it makes my heart hurt, and every time I think of it, I think of the mountains.

Maybe it’s not surprising — I was born in the Dandenongs, after all. The misty mountains and the little rivers and the green valleys are in my blood.

I never thought my heart would let go of Brisbane, and my former dreams. But I think of them now, and there’s nothing there. Just a pale memory of love and hope. It’s not unpleasant, not really — just very, very odd. What I want now is so simple: a one bedroom cottage-studio-hobbit hole where I can create beauty, wonder, and comfort, somewhere where the mornings are misty and I can walk to a river, and run into town maybe once a week for groceries, coffee, and checking the post office box. I might even meet a friend there! (Or…someone more than a friend…)

So much has changed…I have changed. Or, rather, I’ve changed back, perhaps. I really do think…my sixteen-year-old self, underneath the mental illness and the unrecognised trauma, who she really was…I think she would recognise me as I am now. After all, she wanted to run away to the land of her ancestors — to be hidden somewhere in the highlands, live on Laird’s land and just write, as well! But she didn’t know that the beauty she was seeking could be found in her own country, too…

Do I dare to dream? My Elvish name, Olorindë, means ‘she who dreams’. But do I dare, now?

I’m hanging on tight to a very slender thread of maybes that looks as if it will break at a sigh. I wonder if it does break, if I’ll change again…everything, everything in my life is currently dancing on the edge of a knife…it seems so crazy that the simplification of my dreams has just made them even harder to fulfil. Such is life, I suppose…