The two things

I lived in Australia, once. For a long time. All the time that I was small, and a properly fat slice of being a small grown-up, too.

Now I live in England. For many years now, really, although it doesn't seem like that.

These two things are terribly important -- they're The Two Things, the stories of everything that has ever happened to me. I keep trying to make them fit together, like a magic ring trick or a tessellation of two piles of coloured tiles. But it is not like that. It is like reaching for lens flare. The things I know about England aren't the same things that I knew about in Australia and when I think of the English things, I feel like I don't know anything about Australia at all. Perhaps I really don't. Perhaps I lived there when I didn't know anything about anything. I was small.

Maybe I am still small.