Like Magic

On day ten of the NSW bushfire crisis I worked my last day in Sydney for the indefinite future. It was a typical Sydney day, pleasantly warm after reaching the 8am threshold, and the entire sky was blue save for one small, streaky fluff of white like a birdshit on a just-washed windscreen. I strolled through green parklands to the train and headed to North Sydney.

Working in Sydney has been a demanding and rewarding experience, given the benefit of hindsight and my upcoming holiday. It was to working what moving out of home was like to being responsible for myself. I learned a lot (sometimes unwillingly), developed a lot, became a whole new worky person and began to form my own identity. I also got to catch trains like this to views like this, and, occasionally, this.

I had a farewell lunch today with some current and former colleagues where people said some nice things about me. That I was a magician, that I was honest. That I could probably fix Obamacare website. It was definitely nice to hear such positive feedback when, knowing that I was leaving the state, the opportunity to hang shit on me was wide open. Which I guess makes me proud of what I managed to do and keen to find a new opportunity not in NSW to do it all again.

After lunch, once I'd set my Out of Office message to expire in 2014 and said my goodbyes, there was nothing left for me to do. I departed, waited on North Sydney platform for maybe the last time and drafted this journal entry in my head as the train took me back to my soon-to-be-not home. The sky had gone gray by this point, as winds changed and brought the smoke from the improving yet still burning Blue Mountains fires to Western Sydney skies. "A Magician," I thought. For my final trick, once the smoke clears, I will have disappeared.