Photography by Devansh Aerry

There is a film I rewatch when the weather becomes hotter (thirty-five degrees, sometimes thirty-eight) and it becomes a chore to state the new year’s name without stumbling over the old one. It is sticky, the heat of this January-February Summer, but I like to imagine that it is raining outside and this film plays like a distraction to some gnawing frost. I like to imagine that the whirring in the background is the pitter-patter of rain against the roof and not white noise created by a bumbling air con. My friend once told me that I probably get something bordering seasonal depression during the Summertime. Heat is debilitating, so you stay inside and imagine it isn’t there at all. She might be right. 

The girl in the film says, I miss the roads. Not verbatim; when I recall her monologue throughout the years it always sounds different, always contains a similarity to my twin despondency. I miss the roads of Sacramento (Sawtell) (Royal Parade). I miss the twists and turns I’ve known my whole life (the roundabout of Hogbin drive) (‘after the next stop, this tram will turn right’). She talks of driving, but I cannot drive, so I cut that part out of my memory and instead paste in some buzzwords about the places I have lived. This January brings a new one. I add it to my mental pamphlet of addresses and postcodes.  

When I was seventeen in the Summertime I lived in a house I was desperately excited to escape from. That year was characterised by anticipation. It was so severe I could feel it chew me up and spit me back out in that same small town I wanted so despairingly for it to lift me out of. It mastered in desaturating the present, but at seventeen in a regional town it was difficult to see why that was a bad thing. People talk of yearning and they talk of something tender; mine was villainous. I felt sick with desire for the future, for Melbourne—for the yellow trees in Autumn and the single-digit degrees in Winter. I wanted more than a beach-side ice cream store and a dog park down the road.  

(Now, I want less. My roommate asks me to join her in the CBD and all I can picture is overstimulation and aching soles. Two years ago, I would have dropped everything to cram myself into the five-p.m. tram heading to Flinders Street Station.) 

When I was eighteen in the Summertime it didn’t take long for my excitement to melt into grief at this brand new prospect of relocating. It is a very strange thing, watching your personhood self-edit; I sometimes think that I was fully not conscious until I was forced to live without my parents. My roommate and I resided, two creative writing students that were quickly discovering how much we despised English literature, in a shoebox for two semesters, one that came equipped with a PA system and tall windows but lacked a living room, an oven, or any air-conditioning. Fuck, it’s hot, my roommate would mumble on the days where even the air felt hazardous to touch. You sound like a bogan,I’d reply, sprawled beneath the lazy drilling of the fan hooked to the wall above me. Both my roommate and my bedroom witnessed my quick progression into reclusiveness.  

The Winter following that slimy Summer was hard. I did not want to go outside – and I knew the criticisms my seventeen-year-old self would have used to lecture me with. You have everything there. You go outside and tram stop fifteen is waiting for you. It takes you to the city. It takes you to shopping centres and thrift stores and places serving more cuisines than you could ever hope to imagine. What are you doing lying on your stomach? 

But everything was not what I wanted right now. It pained me that I could not explain that to her.  

When I was nineteen in the Summertime I had things to do and could not waste an ounce of my time on these ponderings. There was a lease that required my digital signature and a workplace that required their customer servant and an extracurricular application that required my endearments detailing how very fond I am of what it is that you do here. There was a plane to catch and a bag to pack and a hometown to say a sweet yet distanced farewell to. Leaving so soon? It cooed. Well, I have a house to move into. I have boxes to pack and then unpack again. I have a new neighbourhood to wander and weigh against my mental pamphlet of past homes. Wish you were here, says Sawtell when I am untethered to it and flying interstate with my belongings stashed in overhead luggage. Melbourne says nothing but I know what it thinks. In this new neighbourhood just east of the city containing our very first home, I search for the balance between domesticity and metropolis. Between town and city. Between what is home and what can never be. 

There is a film I rewatch when I realise I have no recollection of the calendar flipping to the second month of the new year. When I’m sticky with sweat and there is no fan in my room to snuff it. When I’m missing my mother and the beach of my hometown and missing the trees and the parkland of the first suburb in Victoria I loved. When my belongings are still in boxes and my new living room doesn’t yet have a couch. When I wake up in this new house, far more spacious than the shoebox I resided in last year but far more cramped than the house my dad owns and have to blink the sleep from my eyes a few times to realise I am no longer living on Royal Parade. I hang my posters up in a different order with each house I live in. I’m unsure if there’s some type of catharsis in it, but it makes me feel independent every time. And perhaps watching this film is a ritual from which I derive some pseudo-religious, annual comfort. My prayer is ninety minutes long and has a credits scene to conclude it. There are tears on my cheeks and I decide to call my mother again. And by the end of it, the Summertime does feel colder.