Monday, February 23, 2009

Coming Home

So little time
Try to understand that I'm
Trying to make a move just to stay in the game
I try to stay awake just remember my name
But everybody's changing 
And I don't feel the same

- Keane, Everybody's Changing

It's the 23rd of February, and in a couple of hours I'm going to board a plane back home. Six months away, and with a passport full of stamps and something nasty incubating in my lungs, I'm finally going home. 

When I started this trip, I had a loose idea of where I wanted to be at the end of it. I won't elaborate upon it, because it's basically a pile of fantasy built on cotton-candy, but suffice to say it didn't go according to plan. Not that that's a bad thing, mind you. John Lennon sang that life is what happens to you when you're busy making plans, and that's basically the way it goes. Things always get more interesting when you take the scenic route. 

But the end of the trip is staring me in the face right now. I can feel its eyes upon mine and its whiskers tickling my cheeks and I can smell its foul, fetid breath fogging up my glasses. It's here, travelling beside me, waiting to escort me back home. 

In another two hours, I'll be on that plane and in another nine, I'll be home. And then it's back to reality. Back to angst and toil and the blunt edge of hopelessness. Back to that gnawing doubt that the clock's ticking away and that everything's passing me by. And a part of me is reluctant to get back into it, because I know how much effort it'll take to couple myself back to the system, to get back on my little hamster wheel and run, run, run. 

And that part wishes that that ticket to Melbourne could be fudged to read Mumbai, or Madrid, or Montreal, or Montevideo....

It probably sounds a bit ungrateful, I know. 

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