Kansas.

I arrived home at 8:40am yesterday. The wait at the luggage carousel felt unbearably long and then I hurried out into the light of Australian morning.

I'm still amazingly jet-lagged and tired but I'll tell you what I remember- and what I know. In my last few days in New York I; went to an incredible Broadway show, wandered around the Hell's Kitchen Flea Market, ditched going to the Bronx in favour of a belated breakfast and book-shopping in Greenwich Village, missed the city's world-famous Halloween parade, went to the top of the Empire State Building, saw Times Square at midnight and plotzed a little bit, walked the length of Central Park, spent an afternoon sitting in and walking around community gardens in Alphabet City, ate my last piece of $1 cheese pizza, bought my last copy of the New York Times, and lifted my seemingly lead-lined backpack onto my shoulders for the last time. The things I'll take away from it all? A brief conversation with an impromptu fisherman unconventionally succeeding at his craft in a pond in Central Park. The ability Sean Hayes has to sing his lungs out and make me develop yet another crush on a gay man. The quiet that can be found in the city that never sleeps in the ever-ethereal gardens that never feel fully awake.

This will be the last post, of course. I have a lot to think about now. I have $8 to my name and my head is more fuzzy than I can ever remember it- in relation to work, school, life. I didn't think a lot about that before I got here; my expectations were fairly short-sighted. But despite my surprise and apprehension in regards to the decisions I have to make now, I am so excited about the realities of my homecoming. I think they'll be better than any projections I might have considered. Thank you for reading, whoever you are, I appreciate anyone who chose to witness this chapter of my life as I decided to write and edit it. We'll see how well the rest of the story goes, documented or not.