What You Know.

I burritoed my boy in a blue towel after splashing in the shallows. My last mouthful of wine: sandy, still sweet, rich. After the colours sank lower, lower, now beneath the horizon, we pointed at stars, and I couldn’t find the Southern Cross anymore. I settled for the Big Dipper, saddened that I had forgotten how to find my glowing arrow that for twenty five years had pointed me home. 

Home. A word that resonates like a pounding drum in the chambers of my soul. Oh the longing, the ache I felt for home since the day I left. I’ve seen much change through my years, in twenty something houses and eight schools and four countries (or maybe five, depending on how Welsh you are). I’ve traveled with friends and traveled alone, and I’ve moved across the world to be with my love. What adventure. What possibilities! And yet home, pounding, beating. Daily the pain of far-ness and the yearning for the familiar has pulled at my flesh, tugging, begging. 

I ached to be there, under my parents’ roof for Sunday lunch, now in the yard with my mother and my son and a green tube of bubbles.

I dreaded the decades of missed birthdays. 
Holidays.
First tooth’s.
And, maybe, last words.

I miss driving to the beach for sunrise. I miss my mum and dad. I miss family dinners and Kangaroo Point picnics and walking my niece home from school. I miss my little nook of the city, where it takes far too long to walk and pick up groceries because I’ll likely bump into Charlie, and Adam, and probably Amin. 

Brisbane is perfection and bliss and everything, and it’s not my home now. I’m gone.

Life here feels further away than I thought it could. Being far is so much harder than I thought it’d be. This place is so surprisingly unlike all I had known. But this place is my new world, and my oh my has God breathed upon these days. I know there is purpose in the distance, and I know I can trust the Comforter to be the Comforter for my loved ones, and I’m sure I will find that He will be Himself for me too. I know that much of the path before us is unknown, but Mum reminded me that we need to get good at this. 

So I hugged tighter my nephew when I felt his sobbing, before we went through to the gate. And I slept soundly on a damp pillow when we finally got home, knowing I am where I am meant to be.