Coming Home

Photo by Josh Hoffman

When I got back to Perth, to Australia, I noticed the things tourists notice. How huge and blue the sky is, the crackle of a dry landscape. Low buildings, screen doors, the harshness of the sun. It was both intensely familiar and strange; the novelty of being home.

I settled, I got a job, I moved house. I stopped writing my blog, because it was a travel blog and in my mind I had stopped travelling. I relearned the contours of my hometown, caught up with friends I hadn’t seen in years, met new ones, was intrigued by the changes and comforted by constants.

The festive chaos of December came, went, brought in the old routines of a brand new year. That deep craving I had for heat after all that European cold was sated by a good, solid Perth summer. Most of my time, it seemed, was spent either going to or coming back from the beach, and there were daily revelations of, “We live here. Here, in this stunningly beautiful, laid-back small town next to a city, with those beaches and that river and all that blue. We fucking live here.”

But, then, the novelty wore off. Without a project to keep me busy or enough shifts at work, that restlessness returned. I noticed that small town descent into nothing to talk about, and that the contentedness with simply existing so common in Fremantle is something that I’m really no good at. Rest in abundance becomes suffocating, and is just as overwhelming and paralysing as too much stress.

So I’m going to start writing this blog again. For something to do until I take off again in June; because I’m about to catch a lift in a van across the Nullarbor and that should be something good to write about; and because I am still travelling, in a way, even if it might look like I’m standing still.