When I first landed onto this site for Detour, I didn’t know who Stephen Dyer was. He’s been Steve to me for over a year now. I arrived in Sydney, sprightly and excited to be an American young currency broker relocating from Los Angeles… excited to bask on the sand of the rocky beaches and roll in the famous waves along the coast… excited to meet stereotypical surfing Aussie men (I do pronounce it correctly now as Auzzie) and explore a land of vast varying terrain. I moved without the intention to stay for any definite space of time and just to see where Oz might inspire to take me. Deep down I suppose something nagged to remind me that I’m a wanderer at heart, but I longed to be persuaded to perhaps live here for the rest of my time here on earth.
I touched down in Darlo, fresh for city living after staying in Venice Beach, California for most of 2007. I shared a flat with two girls I found on Domain and loved the location mostly because I worked in the Citigroup building on Park in CBD. It took me 25 minutes door to door to make it to the office on the 39th floor until I met Steve at Detour, and then it took 30 minutes. Every day he seemed genuinely happy to see me and as if he waited every day for my arrival, often with a frangipani in my ear. He soon remembered my preference for coffee. I’m a pretty tough chick in terms of the ability to land anywhere and survive. I always just do what I think I should do and don’t look back. I’ve lived overseas before in harder, colder cities where the sun doesn’t shine as brightly. Being in Sydney seemed like floating down a river of easy living with a warm humid breeze causing perspiration beads to matte my hair line, and I liked it.
Yet, living abroad without family, forced to make completely new friends, often several times over until you find a closer group that fits you as you grow and change, dating different men and moving through their circles, few constants in life remain. So detour became a constant. I couldn’t count on the weather, erratic as I am fickle, though excited by the subtropical ups and downs that moved seemingly as fast as the currency market fluctuations I watched for clients on an hourly basis.
My first couple of suitors I dared not bring to my new home away from home for you had to be special to meet Steve, who was MY coffee guy by March. “Aw yeah, meet me at Detour on William”… “you know, my coffee shop,” I would say to my neighbor Brad. “Ok, let’s meet there.” I became a known regular and met others like me. I bumped into Wes, a fellow American ex-pat in the mornings and we always said our hellos. I dated a guy finally long enough to bring him to meet Steve. “You know, I’d like you to meet Steve and see my coffee shop. When I introduced him to Darren, I knew our relationship might be doomed. He didn’t mention much, which reminded me somewhat of a fatherly reaction. You knew if he raved about him it was good, and like a good dad, if he didn’t say much, then that much you knew it was just ‘ok.’ At that point, we didn’t know each other well enough though to make too much of an imprint on my life decisions, but soon enough that relationship faded naturally.
As my relationships would pass, so too, did my coffee preferences. “You know Steve, I think I am going to start drinking soy every day instead of milk latte’s.” And so without asking every day after a few days, Steve automatically served up soy. My change in coffee choice mirrored my experimentation with my choice in diet that I began to play around with at this point. In some ways, Australia, whether I knew it or not, was a massive undertaking of spiritual exploration, though I just began delving into philosophies and awakening to metaphysical knowns and unknowns. “Kirra,” Steve would say when I confessed to switching to a vegetarian, “you are on a spiritual journey. You know, some people pick it up, put it down again, but you are right in the middle of the flows of your journey.” We often joked about my fascination with India, and he would check into my ear phones to sometimes hear mantras I played on the way to work to calm me in the mornings and prepare for phone jockying all day in the 9 to 5 rat race of a sales job I preformed daily. I guess I knew it was a spiritual journey, but I really disliked calling it that at the time especially having to call anything by a name, which only cheapened the meaning in my heart. Of course, as things progressed for me personally, I retrospectively peered back into these times eyes wide and more illuminated than when I experienced the phenomena from moment to moment, moment to moment. Steve was right, I knew, that this has been the very beginning of this journey I now realize.
Our relationship stayed very friendly, but we never socialized much outside work. In the neighborhood though, sometimes I would run into Steve and his wife Lizzy at the Greenpark, or on the street. Here and there when I didn’t make the detour down William street to Detour. Lizzy and I at one point kept the same walking schedules so that we passed each other on the sidewalk each morning and she also became a park of my routine.
When the season changed, I found a new constant suitor and the cold of winter set in. Nathan became my heater to keep me warm as the cold of Sydney creeps to the bone for lack of central heating. It’s not cold enough to warrant it, but cold enough to miss. I never brought him to Steve and came to the cafe less on the weekends, preferring to stay a little more local with roommates and friends. I learned that Sydney-siders flourish in the summer. Or should I say, if they flourish in the lingering summer to barely existent fall, they wither and crawl away in the winter, much like the cockroaches and little bugs do in winter, no longer crawling in and out of the woodwork in my kitchen of our flat like they did in summer. Bug infestation is typical to Oz, especially Eastern Suburbian living in these old brownstones. Certain friends we used to invite round for dinner parties would no longer make the list. “Oh you know Charlotte,” my flatmate Lu would say, “she hibernates in winter.” In the rain, who wanted to walk even if just to Darlinghurst.
Winter passed slowly, and I reveled in the beauty of the occasional rain storms hailing down. When I planned a sailing trip up the coast in the Indian winter to the Whitsunday Islands, I tried to recruit Steve and Lizzy to no avail. Yet he always knew when I was leaving. “We’ll miss you,” he’d smile cheekily and laugh at me. Something about his demeanor often paradoxically carried a simple twist of Aussie sarcasm that made me smile in kind. “Yeah. Yeah,” I would roll my eyes. “We will!” he exclaimed. I knew that and winked back at him teasingly. Back from my vacation, things continued to change, and I switched to decaf around this time, reflective of the still changing proportions within. I became much more healthy in general, drinking less, and around this time realized that I no longer smoked rolled cigarettes, a nasty habit I picked up at one point in my life.
One day closer to spring, Steve suggested we meet at the cafe for drinks after work. It was a night that changed the course of my life forever. Not only was it a night full of epic conversation with Steve, Lizzy, Nick, one of the crew that we later all jokingly named “existentialist club,” it was the night I met Joel who joined us. Joel worked upstairs, the boys having a mutual respect for each other as fellow entrepreneurs as he runs an integrated marketing company and the artist of this kick-ass website. As he left the office this one Friday night, he bumped into us four drinking beers just on the steps of the cafe together. “Hey, wanna sit down for a few beers?” Steve suggested, and he did. We fell intensely and rather instantly in love and through our relationship, my life continued on a curious path because he introduced me to Ghazelah Lowe, intuitive reader. Around this same time, I was headhunted by a competitor from the company I worked with for the past 4 years. I never loved working as a currency exchange broker, but for visa purposes and to stay in the country, I grasped at the opportunity to expand my field of knowledge in the industry and earn more money. They handed me everything I could have wanted from the position. I spent time off during my garden leave at the beach with Joel’s dog, Dobe, and started my yoga teacher training certification at Byron Yoga Centre.
Then there are the epic Detour parties. A couple times this year Steve threw quite the ragers inviting more than just the regulars around and I began to know so many more of them these days, Matt the kiwi, Philip the philosopher, Ian and his dog Bruno spending their lazy days around the cafe, too. I formed relationships more than with just Steve, but the rest of the crew, Brigita, Nick and Jo. He would make sure I had a good time, and not rub in my face that I had been probably a bit messier due to a tad bit of over-consumption. Spending more and more time around the cafe during my time off, and time at Joel’s office, just above the cafe, Steve and the crew became more than just my coffee people, but my pals. I no longer drink coffee, but fortunately, Steve is one of the few cafe’s that stock dandelion tea and I drink it with delight. You could find me often chatting away with the locals or typing away at my laptop, scribbling away on my notepads, the newly idyllic, starving artist.
The one constant in my life, other than change, the cafe, now sadly I depart from soon, too. As soon as I landed my new job, I quit after meeting with Gaz and finding my life purpose to become the writer. I am now moving along again in my personal journey, stopping home in the state of Hawaii before commencing world wide travels and chasing consciousness movements all over the globe. I now begin to say goodbye to Steve and the crew at detour. The dollar fluctuated, friends spent more and less time with me in different periods, jobs changed, boyfriends stayed as long as time and experience allowed, and the clouds and rain and dust storms passed in and out of the sunshine. My flatmates too provided my family, but even now I have been replaced by another. I depend on the kindness of my friends to house me from night to night, day to day.
No matter what, I can count on Steve and the crew to be there for me in moments of celebration, pain, comfort, love and the ever-changing range of emotions we human beings experience through our journeys that take us through constant change… I can count on Steve to tease me and shake his head and accuse me of being a heartbreaker, and when I quit my job to write, very occasionally sneak me a dandelion tea on the house. In loving gratitude I write this to Steve and to everyone at the cafe, for they grew to provide me with a comforting constant like a family while I have been in Australia, a very healing and self-realizing place for me.
I’ll miss you guys! And you can keep in touch at www.revolutionofself.com
