The Girl on the Balcony by Olivia Hussey

Author:Olivia Hussey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2018-05-16T16:00:00+00:00

You Have to Go There to Come Back

Change. All my life it has been the one constant. Like a powerful wind unexpectedly picking up and blowing in across my life, more than anything else: Change has been the force that has shaped me. My sweet mum first introduced me to it by walking me up a gangway and then across an ocean. Then a mad Italian film director looked at me and made a decision.

Having known change for so long, I have never been afraid of it; indeed, there are times when I have craved it for its own sake. All of this explains why, by the end of 1975, I recognized I needed to make a change and that it needed to be dramatic.

Meeting Baba had given me so much. As well as more patience and a calmer inner voice, he’d shown me how to be kinder to myself, and of course he had given me the gift of meditation. But it was his unerring message of love that had come to mean the most, and it was to that message that I found my heart turning by the end of the year. I missed my mum, I missed my brother, I missed family.

I’d been in Los Angeles for over five years. I had come at nineteen on no one’s counsel but my own, and I had made a life. I loved a boy and he had loved me. I had married. I had a baby. Now that boy was gone. That marriage was over. LA is a strange place: a city you come to for the promise it makes you, and now that promise was broken.

Waking up one morning, Alex still snoring in his pillow fort next to me, I looked at him and then I looked around. The light was that crazy clean light that LA has some mornings. It’s a cinematic light, all soft blue and sharp white. It made me feel foreign somehow. I felt so English, even if I’m not—not really—lying there looking at the light. I found I missed the gray of a typical London morning.

Why not move? I thought. Back home.

And just like that the decision was made. Once I make up my mind there is nothing that can get me to change it. Whether that’s a fault or a virtue I’m not really sure, and, to be honest, I don’t really care.

Dino was upset and argued that it wasn’t fair; Alex would not be able to see Jeanne and was too young to travel so far. I understood, but I told him that we needed a change and I needed my family and that they needed to meet Alex.

Leaving was simple in the end. I was shocked to find how little I had after five years. A leased house, a closet full of clothes—mostly blacks—and a few random pieces of furniture were my only footprint. I got out of the lease, packed the clothes, and sold the furniture, and that was it; I was standing at the airport stunned at how fast it all had happened.

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