Somebody Somewhere Read Free

anymore. I needed Donna. I said goodbye to the characters who had sustained me for so long and welcomed the me I wanted to know better.
    —
    Stuffed to the brim with second-hand clothes, my cardboard suitcase was heavy and ready to fall apart. One and a half years ago it had left Australia and traveled ten thousand miles with a me who wasn’t yet me. It was about to do another round. I said goodbye to my tea chest and walked to the bus stop. I was lopsided with the weight. I got off the bus at the train station with my suitcase and guitar, and caught the train that I hoped would take me to Heathrow airport. The plane was due to leave at eleven A . M . and it wasn’t going to wait for me.
    —
    My hand on the smooth, cool surface of the train window, I tapped the glass as the scenery sped by.
Tinkle
, said the sound of the glass in its own special way. I smiled, among familiar friends, thoughts of the thirty-hour trip to Australia ten thousand miles from both my body and my mind.
    It was time to go back. It was just too easy to hide in a foreigncountry, a person detached from the past. Europe had been my present and the turning point, freeing me to have a future as myself, but I could not hide in the womb of anonymity. I needed to return in order to have faith in my own strength. I could not fully trust in me until I saw that I could hold on to me in the face of entrenched expectation to be otherwise. Like the Indian who goes off into the wilderness to find out who he is and will be, to know his own strength of self, I would go back and face those who had tried to know me and those who had exploited the characters. I would go back to face and own the closeness I had run from, the anger I couldn’t accept, the fear I had hidden behind laughter, and the sadness I had felt too vulnerable to acknowledge.
    —
    The guitar and I boarded the plane together. It had been a good friend and right now a friend was what I needed.
    The plane took off and I wondered if I’d be there when Tim met me at the other end of this journey.
    It had been four years since Tim and I had stumbled upon each other. He had fought harsh criticism during the four years he had spent trying to unbury the me he had only seen hints of. He hadn’t known Carol and Willie by name—nobody had—but he had seen them sure enough. Tim had walked the boundaries between “my world” and “the world,” not quite “one of them” but also not quite like me, either. He knew what it was to live as a mirror, to become other people. He had known there were different “Donnas” but, most important, he had known there was only one real one…the one he could not hold on to…the one he had been able to touch, if only briefly, through music.
    —
    I was in the residential version of what the unemployed sometimes call “being between jobs.” I had no particular place to go. I was at home within myself now but still feeling no external place of belonging.
    I had only been back in Australia for two months, but already my book and its prospective publication seemed as far away from me as the United Kingdom itself. I had come back because I needed to goforward, and before fear and compulsion would let me walk free, I had to pick up the pieces of my twenty-five-year war. Those pieces were scattered everywhere at the feet of so-called friends, in the faces of so-called family, and in the bedrooms of so-called lovers. I had a “the world” dictionary of control disguised as caring, of lust disguised as love, of uselessness disguised as charitable martyrdom, and of cheap entertainment disguised as acceptance. I couldn’t go forward with the old definitions. But to build new ones—
my
definitions—I would have to face the old ones and tell it like it was. I had to shatter the myths that had me tied in knots upon knots until my selfhood was immobile within a mental, emotional, physical, and social straitjacket.
    Homelessness had always been a Carol mode. It was Carol who