'Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.'
- Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz
I'm going home, was what I thought before I sat on that flight. And then I arrived in my home country, and god, there was so much to take in. The sight of things that used to be familiar, new things that I'd never seen before, the changes in the house. It just didn't feel right any more. It didn't feel like home. For the first few days, I missed Australia. I missed the routines that I had created in the past 9.5 months. I had a culture shock coming home. Which sounds ridiculous, I know. But it's true. I felt a legitimate shock at how things worked here. There was a gap in the knowledge I had about how things worked here and the reality of how things worked in the country I was born and raised in.
So many things remained the same, but they all felt different to me. The height of the drawers, the sound of the card machines on the buses, the frequency of trains arriving at a station, the density of people in a shopping mall. I just wasn't used to it.
When someone said "home", I thought of my house in Australia and not the one in Singapore. I was surprised that after nine months, I could replace the home I knew for 19 years with the house I hd lived in for 9 and a half months, but I have already done so. And after arriving in Singapore, being exposed to the changes that had occurred within me and the country, I don't really feel home anymore. I'm slightly more comfortable here, but I have to admit that I don't feel like this is home completely.
Thankfully, I have a number of friendships that require low maintenance, so it hasn't been hard to meet up with my friends and reconnect. But everytime we do meet, I always feel a gap. Because it's already been three-quarters of a year that I've been away. There's so much that has happened in my life that I can't translate using words alone. To use W's words, it feels like my life overseas happened in an alternate universe and no one else from here can fully understand what it's like. To quote Chelsea Fagan, "You cannot be in two places at once." I can only choose to be in one place at one time and it feels like my relationship with my first home is growing distant. It's disheartening to see it happen but I would choose this over being overly attached to my first home and not making the most of the life I have in my second home. I'm starting to feel the bitterness that D warned me about and to be honest, I don't mind it at all. A part of me thinks that being bitter about this place will allow me to feel better when I'm back in Australia. So that I don't feel jealous when I miss out on the things happening here.
