Going Home When It's Not the Same

Giant humpback whales crashing into the water off the rocky west coast of Fraser Island; the Sydney harbor at twilight, the scaled opera house looming in the blue-green sky like some giant prehistoric sea creature that just crawled from the water, and, of course, Ayer’s Rock rising red out of the desert, its sandstone walls blazing in the sun, older still than anything I can imagine.

From all these dazzling places, I returned to dusty, smelly, old New York.

“Everything, in fact, was achingly, monotonously the same as I had left it. ”

There is nothing quite like Newark Airport on a rainy October afternoon to make travelers wish they had never come back. Going through customs felt like facing the Spanish Inquisition. I was pushed and jostled at baggage claim. Outside, seedy characters smoked and eyed the tourists as taxi drivers shouted and leaned on their horns.

At home that first night, I felt like I had wandered into a Kafka story. I saw my television and the books on my shelf, and knew that they were mine. But it was as if a stranger had just informed me that this was my apartment, these were my things. My cats looked up at me distractedly, sniffed my bags, and went right back to their food.

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