20 Years

Last weekend, I travelled back to my home town for my 20-year high school reunion. Let's hear that again - my 20-year high school reunion.

It's ludicrous.

It was only a few years ago that I finished that final exam, flounced my way through the graduation ball, then headed off with my high marks and high hopes to university.

It was only a few years ago that I left university - with a creative arts degree instead of the law degree I'd set out for - and fumbled through a few useless auditions while polishing my waitressing skills in the big smoke.

It was only a few years since I filled a backpack and headed north, landing on an island in the bluest of seas, to further enhance those waitressing talents and fill my bank account with travelling cash.

A few years, only a few, since, weeping and jittery, I farewelled my mum and sisters at Sydney airport and boarded a plane for Europe where I would spend the next two years working and travelling, working and travelling, and wondering what to do with my life.

Only a few years since the awful phone call from the other side of the world telling me my brother had died.

A few years since returning home, a little lost, to discover two years in Europe might sound good over a few beers at the pub, but didn't look all that impressive on a CV.

It was only a couple of years ago, I'm sure it was, that I was stumbling around doing film courses, journalism courses, writing plays, producing plays, trying to tell stories that people wanted to hear. And still waitressing.

A couple of years ago living alone in tiny inner-city apartments, scrounging to pay rent, making day-before-pay-day decisions between 'loaf of bread' and 'packet of ciggies'.

A couple of years since falling into a great job, one that I loved, and paid well, and let me have sick days and holidays and finally release the word nerd that had been trying to get out.

Only a couple of years - surely only a couple - since being introduced to a handsome Greek bloke at work one morning. Only a couple of years since we got it together to go out, start a relationship, move in together, go overseas together.

A couple of years since he made some poetic association between lighthouses and right directions when he proposed to me at dusk looking over the water at Santorini. 

And I said yes.

And I'm sure it was just the other day that my mother walked me down the aisle of a Greek church in Sydney, stepping on the bay leaves that remained from the Easter just past, and a crown was placed on my head, joined with a ribbon to the one on his head, and we circled three times behind the priest.

Only just last year, I'm sure, that we got married, mortgaged and pregnant, all in the space of a few months.

And only last year, I know it was, that our Lola arrived to make us a family, a few months ago, it couldn't be more, that we went from one to three kids in a single leap, just last week that we followed our hearts out of the city to this tiny village in the hills.

It's just not possible that 20 years have passed since that first, enormous leap into the world.