First day back home and I lie in my familiar bed and eat familiar things. The television is on and we listen to familiar variety programmes with their mindless tabloid news. Judgemental comments are passed, both by the people in the television and the people sitting behind the coffee table eating lunch. Everything is so familiar but different. Somehow I now feel what 4 years of piecemeal accommodation in school, with dribs and drabs of stays at home,  could not make me feel - but now that I’m back  permanently, there is a sudden homesickness. As if to say, look, this is what you’ve missed out on for 4 years. Grandma’s shuffling slippered-footsteps outside your open door, mom’s sometimes laughter at something… this room filled with years of junky memories,  now cleared to make room for a new chapter in my life. I am lying here, lying still. For a moment I try to remember this room at the different stages of my life. Primary school graduation. Secondary school graduation. High school graduation. The room has never changed but yet the feeling each time is different. At first it was the giddy, childish excitement, then disinterested freedom of teenagedom, and now the simple serenity and content. Perhaps it is not the room, but the owner that has changed.

I look at the glow in the dark stars on my ceiling, stuck on when I was 18. It’s meaningful to me because it was something I did in the past and it reminds me of the small things. They’re just like the real thing - all the stars I saw from the balcony of our gold coast apartment. There my 22 year old self marveled at the vastness of the sky and nature. Just like how my 18 year old self stuck stars on the ceiling, bouncing on the bed because she wasn’t tall enough to reach the sky. Same same but different. We both sleep under starlight from a different period every night.

Circa Dec 17 2013