Home Again

I am home. I am jet lagged.

It is six in the morning and I have already been a wake for the past hour. This is not by choice. Right now, in my head, it is 8 pm. So, with a little bit of music to keep my company on this ever-too-early morning, I’ll simply rejoice in being home.

Home is, like a fish flapping on the ground and gasping for air, flopping between the totally familiar and the subtly changed (and thus, unsettlingly foreign). A few moments of reverse culture shock have me shaking my head and those societal rules it only takes a year to forget – note to self, remember which side they drive on here?

Seeing my family again has been great and I look forward to spending more time with them. Some details from an email written to a friend this morning:

My parents are so happy to have me here. It’s kind of silly really. All last night, they had enormous grins stretched across their faces.

Oh and (my dog) Arthur – he’s hilarious. He’s gone quite deaf and so when we got home, he didn’t hear us come in. He was sleeping peacefully in another room. So, I went in and woke up with my voice. He was very groggy and confused. He eventually started sniffing me and I think once he had figured everything out, he just said to himself, “Oh, okay, this is how things are supposed to be,” and carried on with his normal routine of trying to get a treat from my parents when they come home.

It was just weird because there wasn’t that moment of “Holy crap! Darby’s here!” It was just, “Oh, you’re home. Well, carry on then.” And now he just acts like nothing had ever changed. He hangs out with me and looks for love and kisses. No fanfare, just resuming where we left off.

And now at six in the morning, painfully conscious, I am sitting at an old desk, steeling myself for the tasks ahead of me: Make plans for my next travels and finish the damn web site. This albatross around my neck gets to drop away while I’m in Calgary. Mark my words. And mark these too – I will make the best of the Kuala Lumpur debacle. My possibilities are so endless I don’t know how I couldn’t.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 12th, 2005 at 8:26 am. It is filed under Blog, Travel and tagged with Travel, travel log. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.