Sex mixed with insecurity. Jim Beam mixed with Coke syrup. The weekends of 2003. A comfort cycle broken as the calendar struck 21. A birthday celebrated with an impromptu drunken love proposition and hastily chased by a graduation from a tertiary education facility. Any considerations of celebration immediately diluted by the harsh realisation that my delayed entry to adulthood was now unavoidable.
Meanwhile, my mother was hell-bent on drinking herself to death. And yet, I remained far from judgmental immunity, tracing a similar genetically flawed path, simply substituting daytime television re-runs with suburban nightclubs and bourbon-guzzling competitiveness.
Faced with a need to disrupt such a detrimental destiny — as well as further delay the monotonous loop of an office drone existence — I did what us of the Nintendo Thumb Generation have consistently turned to as a solution for such predicament; I bought a long woollen coat from an army disposal store in Hurstville, packed a suitcase and purchased a one-way ticket to Heathrow.
With a bank account incapable of affording even a single night of refuge in the capital, I immediately headed north. Past countless acres of patchworked paddocks, all imaginable shades of green hue. The Flying Scotsman rattling along royal-confiscated veins of prime farming land, disrupting the inbred colonies of my heritage and their whiskey-nosed custodians. Polite tilts of their tweed caps all they could now manage for this daily ritual.
Following a short transition at Newcastle-Upon-Tyne's monolithically oversized train stadium, I arrived at my final destination: Wylam, a small village 10 miles outside of the city. Four pubs, a corner store, a post office, buckets of salt on every corner — and the attic of my Auntie's house.
Within the week, winter formally introduced itself, settling into its well-worn position and pulling a grey blanket over the rest of us. Temperatures dropped down to somewhere alongside my post-teenage self-esteem. An outlook that was delivered a further blow two days into my relocation, as it became clear my recently awarded education accreditation counted for as little on this side of the world as — I would later discover — it did at home. A temp agency prestigiously labeled me a bot with above-average typing abilities — and without any confidence to refute I earned a four-days-a-week position entering data at a small loan office in the neighbouring city of Gateshead.
To be clear, "small" is hardly an understatement. For eight hours a day, I punched penny values into my terminal. Two pounds and 18 pence. Six pounds and 45 pence. Eighteen pounds and 2 pence. Alongside these debts were the punishing interest rates, insufficient shovels for an inescapable scenario. I rarely saw the actual owners of these burdens, but co-workers explained they were often triggered by rudimentary requirements. A pint of milk. Bread. Birth control. Simple tools of survival, hardly signals of luxury yearning.
Meanwhile, I scraped together segments of my salary, routinely fleeing for long weekends. Denmark, Liverpool, Amsterdam, anywhere. Backpacking abodes, tourist-trapping monuments and tables for one. They offered little more than that of my latest trigger of escape — that bleak, mould-stained office in Gateshead.
By April, just as flirts of sunshine began to occasionally sneak past that consistent grey ceiling, I'd had enough. I missed my girlfriend and the exciting and self-esteem-empowering qualities of young lust. Equally, I missed the numbing bliss of socially-accepted, drunken nights with my accomplices of such rituals.
Broke — again — I sheepishly returned to the family home in Illawong. A failure, not only for unsuccessfully finding any new life for myself, but also failing to escape whatever had anchored me with such beliefs to begin with. A wasted six months, as little had changed here. All that was worth seeking refuge from initially, remained. And some. As, only hours after my return, I was briefed on the news that my dad was heading into hospital the following week for the surgical removal of a recently discovered slab of cancer. He hadn't mentioned in the handful emails we'd exchanged while I was away, simply saying he "didn't want to ruin my holiday".