This is where my home used to be

You are standing on a wide, deserted road. Mowed berms, driveways, fences, hedges and letter boxes stretching ahead offer all of the safe and predictable hallmarks of suburbia. To your left lies a bright blue dairy. On closer inspection, you realise that it’s long empty.

The interior is faded, yellow and dusty. The side windows are smashed, others are boarded up, and a fluorescent green electrical disconnection sticker has been crookedly slapped on the door.

You travel further up the road and see that there are large, muddy craters where houses should be – section after section void of buildings or any sign of human occupation. You reach the end of the road and are met by a large orange bulldozer. Its clawed arm looms over a tangled heap of bricks and crumpled sheets of iron, frozen mid-action. The machine hastily abandoned by its operator as soon as it ticked over to 5pm on Friday.

This place is Brooklands. It used to be my home.

An isolated lagoon-side community of approximately 500 houses, in the north-east of Christchurch about 20kms from the CBD, Brooklands was once a slice of vintage New Zealand – the kind your nana reminisces about, with a volunteer fire brigade, kids playing sport in the middle of the road, and an emphasis on family life, community and leisure.

You feel resentful, trapped, stressed and constantly tired. You bicker more with your partner until you can’t even be bothered doing that anymore

My partner and I moved there in 2009, having just bought our first house together. I was 25, and though I never admitted it at the time, I assumed I’d found my ‘happy ending’: a dog, marriage and perhaps, someday, children seemed to be the next logical steps.

We only got as far as adopting a dog before the 7.1 earthquake hit on this day, four years ago: September 4, 2010.

It brought the community to its knees, and it never really recovered. The ground sank half a metre; we choked in shitty, sticky, grey, liquefaction; we were without power for over a week, and toilets for months. Over the following year, as the ground continued to rattle beneath us, we stayed stuck in limbo, waiting for insurers at first, and then CERA to decide the fate of our houses and land.

Eventually, in November 2011, CERA deemed the land on which Brooklands was built to be too prone to flooding, too damaged and too expensive to remediate. It turned our entire suburb into a designated red zone. Sections were to be acquired by the Crown, and we were advised to settle our respective insurance claims and move on. Brooklands, as a community, would cease to exist.

For the next seven months, while we worked out our options, we continued to live in our house – where we knew we had no future. It was a strange and destructive experience, like being forced to attend a class that you know you’ve failed or a job that you’ve been made redundant from. You see no point in trying to keep it tidy or maintained, and so you give up. You feel resentful, trapped, stressed and constantly tired. You bicker more with your partner until you can’t even be bothered doing that anymore. You secretly scroll through travel sites, late at night, dreaming of selling all your possessions and running to somewhere far away, where you’re no longer burdened by a broken house, government authorities, insurers, a mortgage and a relationship.

We eventually shut the gates on our house in June 2012, by which time the rot had already set in.  Ever the romantic, stuck in an alternate reality, I like to rewrite the memory of our departure as an old-fashioned ‘Hollywood exit’. In my head, we walked hand in hand through the large iron gates at sunset, and after looking back at the house one last time, we turned to each other, he took me in his arms, tilted me back like Audrey Hepburn and we exchanged a long, passionate kiss, as the orchestra swelled in the background.

In reality, we did kiss as we closed those gates, but it was a quick and dusty peck on the cheek – a “thank fuck that’s all over” expression of relief. Which was fitting, as that was the last kiss I ever remember us sharing. Our relationship, like so many throughout Canterbury at that time, ended two months later.

A course of events outside of my control, far bigger than anything I could have ever imagined, had ripped apart my narrative of the past five years. I was now faced with nothing but blank pages, and no idea on how to start over. My previous assumptions of a happy ending now felt very naive and humiliating.

I purposefully never returned to Brooklands after that last goodbye. I always told people – in a defensive, puffed-up tone – that I didn’t believe in looking back. That doing so would be pointless. The past is the past, and it should remain undisturbed.

It took over two years, but this week, I went back for the first time.

The only word you can really use to describe these eastern ghost suburbs, as you re-enter them, is ‘bleak’. There’s no overt emotional attachment there – just an overwhelming emptiness and sense of waste. You can’t help but feel like a tourist on your own turf, slowly driving, gawping, pointing, and then you catch a glimpse of yourself and realise you’ve become one of those disaster tourists that used to make you so angry.

I reach the site where my house once stood. As expected, it is completely bare – even the fences and most of the trees are gone. Without a house to draw focus to, the section looks incredibly small and insignificant. It’s hard to believe that our entire lives were once tied up with this sad rectangle of dirt and grass. Treading carefully on the uneven ground, tyre tracks from bulldozer still present, I attempt to visualise a floor plan beneath me in order to find some kind of familiarity.

What would life be like if there hadn’t been the earthquake, if we still lived here? Would things have turned out different? Would we be happy? Who would I be?

I’m standing where the kitchen was, when I uncover a palm-sized wedge of stone that used to clad the house exterior. I pick it up and dig the flesh of my palms into its sharp edges a little too hard, just to try and feel something other than numbness, then drop it into my coat pocket. One final morbid souvenir.

Then came the part that I had been dreading, that I realised I’d been avoiding the whole time – flashbacks to my old life, followed by the inevitable, unanswerable questions: What would life be like if there hadn’t been the earthquake, if we still lived here? Would things have turned out different? Would we be happy? Who would I be?

But as soon as those difficult questions entered my head, all feelings of negativity and sadness were quickly replaced by other, much stronger, emotions: relief, gratitude and pride. Relief that that period of uncertainty, stress and danger was over. Gratitude that we’d both grabbed that opportunity to start over when it was presented. And pride at the progress I had made in the past two years.

I look back on how I thought I had my happy ending, and the embarrassment I felt when it all fell apart, and wince. The happy endings peddled to us as children only create pressure and disappointment when, as an adult, things don’t go as planned. It’s a fantasy that I no longer subscribe to, nor want to believe in. These days an ongoing journey in which you take control of your own happiness as you go seems much more comforting. Sure, the unknown can be daunting, but that’s part of the adventure.

Despite my anxieties regarding going back to Brooklands, the value in doing so, and closure it brought, was far greater than I could have anticipated. If you don’t ever stop to look back, then how can see how far you’ve come?

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