an expat you’re given grace to be a foreigner and total strangers move mountains to help you acclimatize to your new location. An instant support network is born of non-judgmental people whose only commonality is that they’ve been there, they know what it’s like. “Yes, me too!” they sympathize. We’re all in this together, as the song goes.

Today, I can define home as the place I identify with, and I identify with more than one. Each one of these homes completes my identity and makes it so rich. I am homeful and I feel so blessed.

Stranded white people would show up after dark looking for a place to stay till morning. Someone might bring a friend or child (always at night, for some reason) who had been bitten by a snake or stung by a scorpion, because we had an electric shock treatment to neutralize the poison.

longer an insider back home, I’m an outsider looking in. I join expatriate networks, people like me, ‘misfits’ all, except they are the ‘real’ expats, foreigners in my home country. I’m the ‘local’ now, and the day it dawns that I no longer fit in there has me in open-mouthed shock.

For at least three years prior, we had been having what I call the ‘expat talk.’ Similar in discomfort to any deep ‘where are we going in our relationship’ talk yet unique to multilingual, multicultural and multi-confused families.

During these random interactions, it usually comes to a point when you can get so completely lost you begin to form two looks: one is pretending you understand and the second has pursed lips, neither smile nor frown. After all, you have no idea if she is telling you her son had just died tragically or whether her grandchild just took her first

The heat and humidity was stifling and the amount and size of the insects were enough to drive any sane person mad.

I sit up with a start. That’s it! I feel comfortable when I am in the unfamiliar. Now that I have returned to the familiar I feel uncomfortable. I feel totally displaced being here in Melbourne. And it occurs to me that this is the first time ever that I have returned to the same place, the same house even. I am so out of my comfort zone.

I so very much want to be wanted, to belong, to say, “Yes, me too!” to all the lucky ones who can identify their forever home. So I will park my expatriate history in a suitcase and store it on the far corner of the topmost shelf of my heart, take a deep breath, and dive into my present.