A New Dawn

5 a.m.

I wake from a deep sleep, disorientated and dishevelled. For a few seconds, I’m suspended in that strange vacuum, not quite sure which country I’m in or what I’m meant to be doing while the world remains enveloped in darkness. I uncoil from tangled covers and wipe old mascara from tired eyes.

2026 is already racing ahead. January is gone in a blink, time moving whether we consent or not. Fully awake now, I stretch out, searching for a cool patch on warm white sheets. I wriggle, settling myself, purring like Georgie when he bakes in his sunspot, his ginger coat aglow.

My arm reaches out and finds fire. I make the connection. I need to feel him when I sleep; his warmth is the only thing anchoring me now that the ground beneath my feet has shifted. He makes any bed home.

I stumble to the bathroom. The lights snap on, unforgiving. I catch my reflection and recoil for a second before running a hand through frizzy hair, attempting some sort of order.

Dayum, girl. When did sixty lay such heavy hands on you?

I scoff as the past months unfurl in slow motion: the brutal, endless sorting and packing; leaving Asia after eight years; the heavy, tearful hugs and the finality of the farewells. Then the return. Resettling after a decade away is like trying to put on a coat that has shrunk in the wash. Home has moved on without us, its rhythm familiar yet strangely new. I’m the ghost here now, with Brunei etched quietly into my bones and no one quite knowing how to read the map of my experiences, which I greedily share with anyone who will listen.

Seven bags unpacked. Every item was chosen, agonised over, and freighted with a memory that goes far beyond function. This is what movement does; it strips you back and then reassembles you into something new. How do expats and immigrants on borrowed soil ever remain intact? Living across continents doesn’t just change your scenery, it reshapes you. We absorb the rhythms of languages into our mouths, climates into our nervous systems, and foreign customs into our muscle memory. We learn the lonely art of belonging everywhere and nowhere, simultaneously.

Everything looks the same, but everything has changed.

We become layered beings: versions of ourselves stacked gently, sometimes painfully, upon one another. I carry a version of myself from a city that knows a different version of me...a remodelled figure standing in this remodelled room trying to make sense of the world.

Still, we keep on going; growing was never optional.

Back in the bedroom, pillow-faced, lavender flowers are etched into my skin like a temporary tattoo on a newly blank canvas. My gaze drops to my left side. Scars from recent illness and an old accident remain, a physical tally of the cost of “moving on.” Stress is a ruthless taskmaster, and these raised marks cling stubbornly, refusing to be erased by a change in postcode.

I wear them as evidence of what happens when life is lived on automatic.

Numb is no longer an option.

I open my arms and let the world - this new, old world - rush in. Inspiration arrives at odd hours and in unlikely places.

On silent feet, I return to my sanctuary as morning light filters through summer curtains, guiding me down the dark passageway.

His voice drifts from the warm white bed.

“Come here.”

Arms open wide. A body like hot granite. My soft place in a big, big world.

Thirty uninterrupted years: a lifetime of love and lust. Of rest and revolution. Of peace and chaos. Of hope and belief.

We’ve got this. We’ve survived the move; we’ll survive the landing.

It’s time to come home.