The temperature here in the Midlands has gone from about 14 degrees to 28 degrees literally overnight. There’s something about “nice” weather that is kind of triggering for me; it just takes me back to sunny Australia where you can see as far as the horizon, with its American boulevard/Wild West vibes. Driving down Takalvan Street in Bundaberg is still the memory I envisage in moods like this – windows down, radio on, sunnies on, ready for a day of exploring.

I like where I am now, but it’s not the same. It’s emotionally safe, which was highly lacking in Aus, but it feels less adventurous. The roads are smaller, filled with cars as far as the eye can see. Some days, it’s infuriating. One day in the outback, I drove for 10 hours and only saw 3 cars. Much better.

12 months ago, I was still at Mum and Dad’s. I didn’t know I had anxiety or depression. In two days’ time, I would move 100 miles away to the Midlands to start a new job. Tomorrow, 12 months ago, I would send a lengthy message to my ex Claire expressing how we never talked about the breakup, we never decompressed from Aus (we lived there together for two years). I gave her the “thank you for this and thank you for that” message, but it was an expression of care and gratitude for the last 4 years together that would go unanswered. Previously, she would message me when she needed some emotional support after she’d broken up with me, but when it came to “thanks for our time together”, she couldn’t do it. For weeks, I was expecting a reply. I told a phone counsellor that “She had to respond eventually” and when he said that she might not I was incredulous: of course she would! Just blanking someone after 4 years together after they’ve sent you a nice “trying to get closure” message is not an acceptable way to treat someone. I needed and deserved that closure. The day I left her parents’ to surprise my mum for Mother’s Day, she was crying and I said I’d come back ASAP if she needed me. Two and a half weeks later I received a voice note from the missus informing me that she “had decided to end our relationship” – a new friend burst out laughing when I told them this a year later and said it was as if she was cancelling a phone contract for a service she isn’t using as much as she’d expected!

It’s nice that I can laugh about it now and for the most part, accept that I “dodged a bullet”, as people tell me. With one of the reasons for the break up being that she hadn’t been single for ten years and needed some time to herself, only to fall back into a convenient relationship with an old college boyfriend, who had been around helping her parents, within weeks and then get herself pregnant. What a mess! What’s even more unbelievable is that I was one of the first people to find out she was pregnant because she posted it on a Google review, which I saw in April, a couple of months before it was “announced”! Such a strange life I’ve been living.

And of course the only communication I did get from her, when I emailed asking for my dive stuff (I have literally just found out that the dive boat, Hurricane, I was going on has set alight and three people are missing), was for her to perhaps look to me for support again by saying that her life is a bit up in the air at the minute. This was when she was already with someone else and pregnant but I didn’t know at the time and so I, kindly but perhaps stupidly, replied with my support that she can get through anything. She was appreciative and, knowing how she thinks, she perhaps thinks that this now absolves her of any guilt she was feeling about her actions. Which, obviously, it doesn’t.

Which takes us back to today’s sunny day and its juxtaposition to Aus. To be honest, now I’ve heard about the dive boat fire and three people missing, my mind is very much back in the present and, having got some things off my chest and into the open, I am done dwelling for the day.

I hope you all enjoy the day, rain or shine.

Kirsty x