Part 4. Change. The hardest blog post I've ever written.

Deciding to be together forever was the easy part.

Deciding to change my life was the hard part.

At its heart this is a blog about change. I've delayed posting it for a fair few days now. Change is hard. Very hard. It's even harder when you've done it and then you decide to think about it and write about it. Writing about stuff is supposed to be cathartic. It's not really. It's just hard.

So, this might just be the hardest blog 'thingy' I've ever written. Some of the people 'involved' will read it. O well. What can ya do? It's all water under the bridge now. It seems like only yesterday, but really it was years ago. We are where we are. We're all mates again. Kind of. Facebook mates at least. Most of us are anyway. We weren't for a while. But there was no other way. That's change for ya. When you decide to do 'it', you may as well do 'it' properly.

I left Istanbul & I left Picky. But we both knew. We both knew that we were going to be together. But it was crystal clear to both of us that it was going to be a long hard slog. Picky was at Uni just outside Munich and I was in Sydney. She had a four-year sentence at Uni. I would just have to wait. For four years. We were on a path. We were in one of those dreaded 'long-distance relationship' thingies.

For four years.

At first I carried on like nothing had changed. But the reality was that everything had changed. Most of all,  I'd changed. In Istanbul. I really had. When I got back to Sydney I didn't want to go out and party anymore. I was in a great group of friends. Great. Awesome. All of them. & single. I stuck with it for a fair old while. Going out. Doing 'single' stuff. Partying. But my heart wasn't really in it. My heart was a few kilometres outside Munich. In Passau. With Picky.

Picky.

She flew to Sydney every vacation. Every single one. For three and a bit years. She managed to cut her degree short by cramming in extra subjects. How she did it I honestly don't know. At the end of every term she hopped on a plane and flew Down Under. Her mates at Uni were awesome. They were true friends. They supported her through the pain, through the loneliness, through everything. They read this blog too. We love them and we're totally indebted to them. They know who they are.

Back in Sydney things were tough. I was doing stuff I didn't want to do. I blame no-one. Except myself, of course. When you're doing stuff you don't want to do you really have to sit down in the cold light of day and take full responsibility for your actions. I did. And I decided to stop. That meant changing my life. So I did.

Deciding to change really is easy. Actually changing is a wee bit harder. I went cold turkey. I gave up everything. My friends. Going out. Going to the gym. Smoking. All the other stuff. It was the hardest, loneliest, most difficult time of my life. It felt like I was all at sea. Like I was flopping around on the ocean miles from land. I almost drowned a few times. At those times I was saved by Emma, Gen, Caro, Gina, Nigel, Helen, Dale and Tony - and of course by Picky. We were thousands of miles apart, but really we were together.

I was also saved by running. I often think about why I love to run so much and I know the answer; when things were really dark ... I ran. I would wake up really early and just go out for a run. Or I'd run in the evenings because there was nothing else to do and it helped me to get to sleep. It became a bit of an addiction. Or an escape. It wasn't a bad one mind you. If you start running to keep loneliness at bay and you've got 4 years to kill, you end up feeling (and looking) quite good thank you very much!

Here's a tip; if you want to lose weight, fall in love with someone who's a million miles away from you for 4 years. Admittedly, it's a bit extreme, but you'll get results. Guaranteed. It certainly beats the Atkins Diet hands down.

& then one morning I woke up even earlier than usual, gave myself a shake, got dressed, made myself a coffee, grabbed my car keys and drove to the airport. It was D-day. Picky was arriving from Germany. And this time she wasn't leaving. This time she was coming to Sydney for good. She'd finished Uni and four days later she was on a flight. Home. Her home. It was 20th April 2008.

She walked through the automatic doors into the Arrivals area of the International Airport. I was standing right there. When we saw each other we both just smiled. We both knew. We knew we'd done it. We'd met on a beach on Koh Samui on 4th February 2004. We'd been together for just a year and then apart for more than 3 years. And now? Well, we both knew that 'now' was the just the beginning ...

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