Where am I?

I awaken from an afternoon nap. My eyes take in the room: the heavy chestnut cupboard with a massive stone buddha head placed upon it; the abstract painting, a japanese couple hugging across the milky way-like smudge of white paint; a couple of weathered bar stools; a thin stripe of sky outside the window, so blue it makes the eyes pop. All achingly familiar, all known and touched a hundred.

Then why the vague sense of unease? Why the feeling that I am still dreaming, yet to awaken to a place and life that is truly real?

Deja vu?

No.

Sydney.

I have come back.

***

In the labyrinths of airport - incessantly waiting, tasting my own well-practiced patience - I was brushing past time. I had reached the cliched point of no return and decided to take it as a blessing. I had feared it. I had fantasized about deliberately missing the plane. Now it's here. Happening.

The impression that I'd set out on this journey some immeasurable pieces of existence ago helped me, paradoxically. It held me when my fingers expressed the sudden and desperate clawing for the past. When the great moan for what I'd left behind uncoiled in my gut. Had it only been a day since I walked the grassy greens of my parents' backyard, since I sat on the porch wrapped in a blanket, watching the sky go to sleep? Time. It twisted and danced around me like an Indian sari, first entrancing me with its seemingly weary stillness; then again jumping up and ahead like an agile horse, leaving behind chipped remains of hours.

Another seat on another plane, I closed my eyes, letting myself drift back towards Poland, amidst the pine forests and barley fields of gold - caressing the moments I'd spent there, living them again in fast-forward. When I opened them back, I found out that time had galloped forward again, swallowing several precious hours of being, and bringing me closer - geographically, mentally - to where I was headed.

The timelessness of traveling on planes, I have fondness for it. In the fume of filtered, microbe-laden air-plane air, between the neatly packed rows of seats, hosting simultaneously bored and anxious hordes of co-passengers, liberation occurs. Somewhere between what's already the past and what is to be future. A bland but poignant now. You are given space to farewell what's left behind, then - to open to what's coming. It's a rite of passage.

And then I was there. The fed-up mouth of the Boeing spewed me out, mercifully, right into the fresh and wintry Australian ground. And into my friend Jenn's comforting arms.

I still have to wake up though.