We were never going to live in Malaysia. This had been said over and over and not by me, by him. Fiji was to be a quick pitstop and then back to oz to make a life, a family.
With our time in Fiji running out his parents convinced him there were great opportunities back home and that if I had ‘coped’ in Fiji it wasn’t a stretch that I’d be ‘fine’ in KK.
I loved Suva, I wasn’t fine in Sabah.
If I want to write about my life, one day I’ll have to type the words out and see them staring at me. The sunny pacific days swallowed by the damp and clinging asian jungle. Borneo not some mystical adventure but a nightmare of isolation, deprivation, and disdain.
Even thirty years later the memories darken today’s mood and the stories will have to wait. This whitie (as my inlaws so eloquently referred to me) will take a chair out into the weak winter sun and listen to the birds instead.
Spring is coming for you. I can feel fall in the air here this morning.
Tropical beaches are one world, inland another altogether.