I'm going back to Australia tomorrow. Already I feel the excitement, of meeting my colleagues again, of returning to my familiar bench with its pipettes and racks, of telling my favourite supervisor about all the things I got up to, of sitting down with my other favourite supervisor as we trim my progress report into something amazing (or at least dry and technical, given his preferred writing style). It's all very cruel considering I'm already at home.
Here's the thing. Home is where you spend most of your time while happy. By that definition, my lab at Monash is currently home. But I can feel Singapore itching, straining to become home again. There's that roti prata stall at ION Orchard that I love, the easy feel of the EZ-Link system (if myki was the system introduced in Singapore, it would already have several horrendous nicknames highlighting its inadequacy), the trees everywhere, the lower cost of pretty much everything...and twenty years of history that I can't ignore. This will be my home again someday, once I stop leaving. I can feel it.
Until then, I have to pull away, keep it at arm's length (or ocean's length, as the case may be). This will be home, but it can't be, yet, otherwise I won't survive being away from it for the better part of a year. I have to accept there as home, for as long as I have to be there.
I have to keep pretending to myself that there's someplace else I'd rather be. The pretense is so good that I readily believe it.
But I will come home, for good, someday.
And then I will pretend that my bench and my supervisors and all the things that belong to me and which I belong to there mean nothing to me.
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