When my dad said I’d be staying in the study, I thought he meant they had rigged a bed in the crammed foyer between bedrooms at the top of the stairs. What had happened is that my old bedroom had gone from storage space to study space, with my dad’s books, files and desk surrounding my little sister’s old bed. I feel relieved as I saw that my old loft bed has been dismantled, and in its absence a ceiling fan has been installed. Before I stepped out of the plane – surprise landing, I was too busy with my thoughts and feelings to notice the plane descending on the tarmac – I braced myself for the oven heat of home.

A lunch of rice, kangkung in watery soup, fried chicken yellow with turmeric skins, small fishes crisped straight from a jaunt in the wok, and a tumble of fried and spiced anchovies and garlic. A small dish of pulped chillies that makes me happier than anything I have yet to see in my one day back.

When she packed up to leave, she knew she was saying goodbye to something important, which was not that bad, in a way, because it meant that at least you had said hello to it to begin with.

– Agnes of Iowa, The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore.

R & S sent me off at the airport, and my eyes were dry. Maybe that was it, maybe I had reached the end of it. So glad was I to say goodbye to saying goodbye. At the gate after the guard had checked my boarding pass and let me through, I almost forgot to look back and saw their faces too quickly before I disappeared behind a wall. It didn’t seem right to stop and go back. Everything was in motion, and I had to keep moving.

I read a whole book on the plane. Sempre Susan by Sigrid Nunez. It had nothing to do with what I was feeling, with my business of leaving and leaving and leaving. But I finished it, and it was good. It punctuated the sore-necked sleep of an 8 hour plane ride; distracting from the sad meal, hunched over your food tray with plastic utensils and foil lids, self conscious and surrounded by others doing the exact same. A collective embarrassment. A collective fatigue.

I unpacked with my two little sisters in my room, the cats knocking over boxes and skittering about. The girls were alternately nonchalant and wide-eyed. I am their big sister and I have come home. Here were my suitcases, filled to the brim with things they could question and touch and fight about. The vanilla of my Melbourne Breakfast tea had seeped through its Ziploc case but it smells of nothing more than tea.

“The United States – how can you live in that country?” the man had asked. Agnes had shrugged. “A lot of my stuff is there,” she’d said, and it was then that she first felt all the dark love and shame that came from the pure accident of home, the deep and arbitrary place that happened to be yours.

– Agnes of Iowa, The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore.

My brain made an incomplete and interrupted list of things I would miss from Melbourne. It was a broken slideshow because my heart wasn’t in it. What were these shining pieces I was trying to grab at? Were they not all just lying there, waiting to be claimed? Waiting to emerge? It was all too soon, and it was pointless. Let home sink in. Let leaving home sink in. Let coming back sink in. I am a stew boiled down to ______.

Everything is a thing I have done before. The easing of my foot off the clutch, still shiny from use, the left-up movement of first gear, the language, the slang, the communications of family, the taking off of shoes before entering the house, the lack of hot water, the knowledge of which keys go in which locks.

And yet I notice the high price of cornflakes and tuna, so different from Coles and Woolworths. The lack of toilet paper in vertical stacks. The price of apples. The longer wait in the checkout line. The dresses that have never soaked in this tropical humidity. If I start walking in either which way, I will end up nowhere but in a state of sweat. Google Maps does not know the way to my friend’s house, and neither do I, I don’t think. Perhaps it is not forgotten. Tomorrow I will get in the car and drive and hope my hands on the wheel can take over and I’ll end up where I need to be.