Beginning, For the Second Time.

University College, Melbourne University

I first moved to Melbourne in February 2001 as a wide-eyed country girl ready to take on the big city. I had just celebrated my 18th birthday the month before.

I lived on campus at Melbourne University (just to the north of the city centre) for two years and then in the four years that followed I mostly lived within a couple of kilometres of that first site. That was until the bright lights of bigger cities called my name.

A couple of weeks ago I moved into my very own pad in Brunswick and I now drive/walk/tram past my old college stomping ground on a daily basis. In oh-so-many ways it feels like yesterday, as if the past ten years hadn't even occurred. But then, of course, at the same time it feels like forever ago. As, indeed, it was.

Although so many of my biggest and most cherished memories of these past (hugely important) years have been set in Sydney and L.A., Melbourne's streets still remember my stories.

It's always funny isn't it when you move house and then you realise you used to party at the bar around the corner, or once parked down the road or shopped at the bakery across the street? At the time you'd never imagined that you could be living just around the bend one day. In my new-old neighbourhood memories are evident on every corner.

I see a muddy, mouthy girl traipsing through the park after a college sporting match; an overexcited teen, bouncing at the gate of a college across the road for her leggy best friend to claim her birthday present; a desperately sad early-twenty-something lugging bags into a friend's sharehouse after a messy breakup (twice); and - in the depths of my memory bank - a very small child peering out the windows of the car that wound its way through the northern streets for special city weekends.

And so, here I go again. I'm back in Melbourne. I'm back at the beginning. Ready to make some new memories.

It's so darn exciting.