"This country immerses you, wraps its stories round you, makes you care about them"

I have a confession: my heart aches when I look at pictures from Australia, both mine and other people's. Sometimes it's the kind of ache that comes from too much happiness crammed into a short amount of time, but sometimes it's an unsettled, unfinished business kind of ache. Sometimes it's a fleeting feeling, but other times it feels as if it starts in my chest and radiates out to the tips of my fingers and toes, consuming every inch of my body for hours at a time.


This sounds dramatic, doesn't it? And perhaps it is, but it's the truth. I've talked about my flair for drama, for feeling emotions deeply, and that more than applies to this subject.


I still haven't started composing my posts about my trip because I haven't been ready to fully invest myself in reliving my life-altering adventure. I feel silly as I type that because it was just a 2 week vacation, right? A vacation that I was really only taking because I wanted to see my best friend. A vacation to a country that was hardly even a blip on my radar for the first 24 years of my life. So why get so worked up? Because something about the entirity of the experience, from traveling alone to going against my control-freak nature in order to embrace whatever came my way, changed me. I'm more my true self now than I was when I left Denver on April 9th. The people who know me best, the ones who can read me like an open book, can vouch for this. I am different; not any better or worse, just changed.


Australia changed me. And, I like the new me, but I still long for the country and the people and the culture that felt so much like home to me.

quote about AUS by Annamaria Weldon