phthallo.

For the years I’ve existed in this world, I’ve had trouble telling apart my easts and wests. Which is strange, because I’ve spent these 18 years living in the central region of Australia - the bridge, passed-over as transit between the mining sector and the popular, culture-rich east coast. It is so cookie-cutter clear - this is Western Australia. This is the Northern Territory. This is South Australia - this is all the direction you need to know for where you need to go.

The Adelaidean youth so often lament the quietness and dullness of this city. Though, here, it’s very common for new high school graduates to simply just - live with their parents and commute to their local university. I am 16 and I am living the same life when I find Hack Club. I think I will live and die in this city, possibly before I graduate, possibly before I turn 25. It’s almost scary how easy it happens; a month later I say yes to moving countries; a year later one gap year just as easily turns into two.

The days come where I fly 30 hours east from Adelaide. Hours and hours of the Pacific turn into mountain ranges into corn fields into greenery characteristic of Vermont, one of America’s most rural states. The New England area is almost nearly the antipode of Australia. Such vibrancy in life, small towns and bustling cities alike caked in mid-January snow. Australia is 15 hours ahead of us now. I start seeing (tomorrow) in people’s timezones, a reminder that I have chosen to be behind.

It’s quiet. I walk on the wrong side of the footpath (pavement) and mess up my lefts and rights. At crossings, on stairs, escalators, I oscillate from side to side. I waver at cars unsure of which side to enter. I look the wrong way at roads and miss the walking indicator at traffic lights because they don’t make the distinctive rapid tones¹ I’m used to. We’re on the colder east coast and I’m knee-deep trudging through snow I cannot see the sides of, because I didn’t bring enough layers to pad through a glorious, glorious winter.

California, on the west coast, brings a reprieve from the wilder weather; I first visit it in July, long after the Vermont ice has melted away. Summer in San Francisco reminds me of Australia; California and South Australia are one of the few places in the world that share a Mediterranean climate. Eucalyptus trees adorn the roadsides and just north in Berkeley, which houses the densest grove of eucalyptus trees outside of Australia.

There’s a joke among Hack Clubbers, and I guess, the wider tech community as a whole, that all roads lead to San Francisco. On my many visits there I can see why - the community is electrifying. I pass through SF more often on layovers and am afforded just a glimpse of the land outside - AI ads, a futuristic art display, open Macbooks adorned with stickers. Flights through SFO bring me to west to Sydney, but also to Chicago, Dallas, New York, Philadelphia, Taiwan, Los Angeles, South Korea… I sit now in Pueblo, Mexico, and I’ll return to San Francisco in four days and still I see the same eucalyptus trees draped over colourful buildings and cracked roadsides.

What a privilege it is to be able to fly. An estimated 4 out of 5 people have never been on a plane before, did you know? What a privilege it is to be able to travel so much; to be born into this nationality; to have serendipitously stumbled into a life where I have friends from so many different places who welcome me into their hearts and homes. There’s a dream I have in which I love the world. ² I flit from couch to bed to hotel to hostel to a middle seat in economy with a scarce 3-inch recline. It’s on planes where I dream the most. Not literally, but in the dark blue haze - broken by flickers of screens, the shuffling of bodies down the aisle - is where I bury myself in liminality.³ There is no concept of time in the air. The world is indifferent - but here, I am a human among humans, so I cannot help but love the people I see.

It ends. Somewhere in between the baggage carousel and the local time, the pilots welcome me home.

I go home.

I go home again.

I go home again.

I’m not sure what is home anymore. Everything is the same but different. They flatten the showroom whose car park my siblings and I used to ride bikes in. The walk to my (third) primary school is surrounded by construction, fences-for-hire and towering lights erected along the road. I shuffle through pages and pages of my old belongings, exams and assignments and papers I cared so much about - years of pocket notebooks with a blunt pencil, a child’s right-handed-scrawl painstakingly noting the exact number of footsteps I had taken each day. I measure this with a navy Garmin then a cream Fitbit (substituted with black when the cream band begins to fall apart) and then now, nothing at all. For months on end an uncharged smartwatch encircles my left wrist merely because habit and familiarity demand I do. Dutifully, I unclasp it and rest it beside my head every night.