Dear Phillip Island,

It was in your ten thousand, eight hundred and eleven miles away from home that I learnt how to love for the first time. It took me three seas and an ocean to learn that it is worthwhile. I must have been lonely.

You were a small place – a few towns, fourteen thousand residents. There were likely more tourists than locals, most days. Those penguins you shelter on the Ouest side certainly did work their charm. It was not home, far from it; the roads were too straight, the flies too pesterous and the birds too adamant to be on the next roadkill headline; nonetheless, I built my little life. I had my routine and my favourite spots. I worked and tried to integrate with the locals; the later rather unsuccessfully. I was always a shy kid; I always kept my wall up, holding my acquaintances at just enough distance to avoid the pain of goodbye.

Yet, it was on your white sandy beaches that I fell into his eyes, on your barren cliffs that I craved for his love and on your clear sky mornings and rainy afternoons that I yearned for his touch. It was like the movies say, perhaps it is worth indulging in the pleasures of the heart without fearing the pain that may follow. You might have caught glimpses of us chasing those fleeting moments of warmth. Was I crazy to let in a stranger, on a strange Island, knowing full well my departure date was set? Soon enough there I was again, travelling halfway around the world, but in the opposite direction.

Although I am now left with fragments of a memory, you have taught me the value of opening my heart. It was confusing, it was painful and most of all, it was beautiful.

With all my love,

Rhea.