dear diary, is this trauma?

eleven

Dear diary,
    
My grandparents moved to Australia and had invited my father and I to come for a few weeks for a Birthday. I hadn't really seen or cared for them much in the last six years before hand, other than one day where my father and I had gone to collect stuff they wouldn't take to Australia, my old play things, even though I was about 15 or 16 at the time, some 'meaningless' things such as a weighted cat called Marmalade that I had known since I first started going to my grandparents. Some things I'd made out in their garden. Their garden was always great to play in, there was a little bit of lawn, although it was sloped and had curved flowerbeds in multiple places, a greenhouse which I would hide things in, three different levels of walkways covered in many trees and flowers, there was a hidden area under a massive leafed tree that I would hide under when I wanted space, and a very unsafe path on the outside of the garden to be able to trim the high bushes, it was a bungalow house but it's garden was even higher. The top of the house was about the same height as the highest land point of the garden.  And this house was built on a hill with a busy-ish road on the outside of the garden. There was a massive drop if you were to fall from the path to the road.

The one day in six years that I had gone back to my grandparents, it was mainly to say goodbye to the house and garden. I was still hated by my grandparents for being autistic and becoming emo.
At this point I had the typical emo side fringe and one side of my head shaved. I may have even had my hair dyed dark. 
I still wanted to piss these people off one last time before they left so I had been wearing an Andy Biersack, Black Veil Brides, top, ripped jeans and a sweater to cover it until I want to be petty. My wrists were covered in rubberbands and bracelets. By this point I had 5 or 6 piercings. Double lobes on each side, a nose ring and a naval one. I've had numerous since along with tattoos. The last time I had been with them I only had single lobes, and they had closed up at that point.

It was the end of my high school year, I was on holiday during study leave as I had no exams until after it was over, and to be fair, I only really had a couple of them through school as I had already had my Phycology through college one and my travel and tourism one.

It was around May and it was my grandfather's 80th.

For seventeen years I never knew that my grandfather was colour blind, specifically to blue. I rocked up at the airport with bleach blond and pastel blue hair, blue sun glasses and some navy clothing. If you couldn't tell, my favourite colour at the time was blue.

I'd had Spotify premium bought before I went, because I knew that they would start something about my autism or that I was taken more medicine or that all my photos from the last year's I'd dyed my hair and chopped it drastically many times, even fully shaving it out of boredom once.
So I'd had premium so that I could blast my music to drown them out even out in the middle of the city in Adelaide. I wouldn't have internet most of the time due to not wanting to have roaming charges, so premium was my saviour at the time.
I always had headphones on me, wired were the only affordable ones at the time.

Before I had travelled to Australia, stopping in London, Shanghai, Sydney and then finally Adelaide, I had to tell my grandparents I was vegan, since we would be living with them for the duration of the 'holiday'. They had asked me to send a list of things that I could and liked to eat.
I sort of expected it would be so they could make sure to have some in for at least a few days when we arrived, jet lagged and having to deal with the temperature change from the British Spring to the Australian Autumn. South Australia is still much hotter, even in Autumn.

Getting to my grandparents home in a small wine village, ofcourse, looking back I had always seen them drinking wine in the afternoon when I lived with them as a child for one week a year. Their house was much smaller than the old one, even though it was also a bungalow, and the garden was basically just bricks, it looked ugly. The room I was put in was actually a converted part of the garage. The coolest area in the house. Thankfully the furthest from the rest of the bedrooms but annoyingly furthest from the bathroom.