Chapter Fourty-Three: Homefree (~jinghan)

You wouldn’t think it would be too different, but having a holiday as a uni student feels profoundly different to having a holiday after a year of school. I think it comes down to that extra bit of freedom. Clumsily trundling my way out of exam period I found that I could not stand the sight of my room let alone my desk, so I found myself taking any opportunity to escape that came my way. I can proudly say that I have spent more nights away from home than at home.

I have my book open on my lap as the train gets further and further away from Melbourne, but I’m not reading. My eyes are fixed out the window, and there it is! My first sight of the sea. I am travelling down the Frankston line to the south of Melbourne on the longest journey I have taken by metropolitan train; and I could be flying for all the freedom of it. At Franston I change to a bus and go to Sorento where my friend has a family holiday home. I lose the page that I was up to in my book.

A week later, I am travelling back to Sorento after spending the weekend at home. I can’t help loving the fact that it feels like I popped into Melbourne for a weekend, rather than that I am going to Sorento for the week. Home, right now, is a restless place that stenches of unfiled study notes; regardless of what you spend your time doing you feel like you should be doing something else. In Sorento, I sit outside cross-legged on the veranda in a hoody and watch the aftermath of the rain drip from the tips of leaves, as sodden birds perched on electric wires preen themselves – and not an instant of time is wasted.

A week and twenty hours of flying later, I am opening all the cupboards and doors in the apartment that I will share with my sister in Rouen, France for a month. Everything is unfamiliarly brilliant and you look at everything twice. Homesickness? What’s that?

Five weeks and no longer countable hours of flying later, I’m sitting in my room with papers, diaries (my 2010 and my 2011) and lists all around me. I eat raisin toast and green tea for breakfast with nostalgic appreciation. I strike out “to do list” on the pad in front of me and replace it with “stress-list”.  Part of me is glad to be back in Melbourne with the familiar sound of summer tennis in the background and friends in the same time zone. Part of me is on edge restless already, cramming things into my diary unsure of whether it makes me excited or stressed that every day I’m not sorting out things for uni and etc. I’m squeezing in time to meet up with people.

I open my new 2011 diary and flick forward two weeks. “TBC: go to Sorento,” I jot down – in pen.