Towns like this make me feel weird. There is nothing here, nothing going on. It just makes me feel depressed. 

She’s not the only one of our city friends who has said something like that to me. And it wasn’t the only time she had said it.  It was the first real warm day of the year. I know because there is something in my body that just rejoices when the weather turns really warm. My muscles relax and the energy charges through me. It feels like excitement but really it’s probably just gratitude. I was wearing nothing but a T-shirt dress. No jacket. Sandals. I was not shivering.

I like (town name), but I like it when the shops are open and there are people around, you know? Otherwise at night all deserted it just makes me …depressed.

We’d spent the day at a market and an outdoor art event. The kids were playing, I was with family and friends. I was drinking a beer. I have felt depressed before in my life but I was definitely not feeling it then. Even though there was not a soul on the main strip at 6pm on a Saturday. We were about to drive back 30kms away to our town, and there would be no reason to brake once on the road, unless a Kangaroo jumped out. No traffic lights. Just grey-green bush landscapes and sloping pine forests. At our house the only sounds we hear are birds and kids playing in the street. In the actual street.

I chose this life, for now, and there is no doubt in my mind that it is what I need. Yet I understood what she meant.

A week later and we are on a tram in the city with an old friend, on our way to watch some live music. We have free tickets for the show, and the babies come in with us, after a couple of raised eyebrows from the ushers. When we walk in I realise how long it has been since I went a show that wasn’t our own. Coco begins to ask where our band members are. Where’s Frank?? Yonder? Eva?? 

No, someone else is playing tonight. They are from New Orleans, which is where I must have lived in a past life because everything about the place stirs me right up, the music above all else.

I stand in the space and watch the band. Ravi drifts off to sleep easily in the carrier but Coco, usually happy to sleep when she’s tired, resists the stroller. They are the only kids in the room.

I can only see the musicians from the shoulders up but that’s enough. They are beautiful, and they sound amazing. The energy in the room is electric. People are dressed up. A girl next to me is sipping on a beer in an amazing long-sleeved, floor-length 70’s dress. There are suits, scarves in hair, lipstick, chunky high heels. There is a circle of girls next to us, swing dancing. They are moving with conscious, carefully learned steps and in that moment I see their whole lives. The fluro-lit space where they go each week after work to dance and forget about everything else that they need to deal with in the real world. Their wardrobes as they chose their outfits for tonight (beautiful vintage dresses, sensible flat shoes for dancing). The bottle of wine they shared before the show, and the talk about uni, work, men, women. The excitement about having the time and space to just do nothing but dance and feel like they are doing it right. I stand there and watch, swaying with Ravi, looking across at my friend Andy, with whom I’d have been dancing wildly if this night had taken place 7 years ago.

The city lets you live a thousand lives, as you stand there and watch and let a little bit of everybody soak in. Which is why I still love it. Of course I do.