Home.
I am home.
One day spent travelling some 4000km is not enough time to spend processing such a change from A to B, from desert to city. My body expects dry heat; my eyes look to see red soil, great cylinders of rock and the distant white glare of the salt lake. Here at home the air smells of damp, leaf mould and grass; the trees are all different deciduous species in various stages of leaf-fall where I expect to see nothing but eucalypts. I remember the sky in the desert as fearless and blue, fully large enough to make one half of my vision if I stood outside; here it is crowded out by clouds, tree branches and buildings. My horizons have shrunk to the roofs of the houses across the road so every detail of the world must be fitted into those fifty or so metres - so my foreground, middle ground and background are all busy and complicated. In the desert the rooms are all the same, exterior and interior equally neutral and inoffensive; here each house on our street is different and the inside of our house is full of things I remember; my bedroom is full of my memories and they crowd into my head. And yet not everything has come back to me yet, because I look in the wrong cupboards in the kitchen, and the crosswords in the newspapers confound me and I have forgotten their patterns. In one day I have seen more rain than in the last month. All these things combine to make a sort of malaise and weariness although I am happy to be home. I am not sure whether the cure for it lies in walking outside in the strange, damp air and wandering up and down the streets; or if I should close my curtains and sit inside my room until I am comfortable with it before I move on to the wider world. I realise that I accept, intellectually, that I have come home, but I don’t know it yet.
One day spent travelling some 4000km is not enough time to spend processing such a change from A to B, from desert to city. My body expects dry heat; my eyes look to see red soil, great cylinders of rock and the distant white glare of the salt lake. Here at home the air smells of damp, leaf mould and grass; the trees are all different deciduous species in various stages of leaf-fall where I expect to see nothing but eucalypts. I remember the sky in the desert as fearless and blue, fully large enough to make one half of my vision if I stood outside; here it is crowded out by clouds, tree branches and buildings. My horizons have shrunk to the roofs of the houses across the road so every detail of the world must be fitted into those fifty or so metres - so my foreground, middle ground and background are all busy and complicated. In the desert the rooms are all the same, exterior and interior equally neutral and inoffensive; here each house on our street is different and the inside of our house is full of things I remember; my bedroom is full of my memories and they crowd into my head. And yet not everything has come back to me yet, because I look in the wrong cupboards in the kitchen, and the crosswords in the newspapers confound me and I have forgotten their patterns. In one day I have seen more rain than in the last month. All these things combine to make a sort of malaise and weariness although I am happy to be home. I am not sure whether the cure for it lies in walking outside in the strange, damp air and wandering up and down the streets; or if I should close my curtains and sit inside my room until I am comfortable with it before I move on to the wider world. I realise that I accept, intellectually, that I have come home, but I don’t know it yet.