chapter 14: dots on a map

At some point, in a fit of procrastination disguised as organisation, I started making lists.

Lists of the airports I’d passed through: Mount Gambier, Hobart, Canberra, Adelaide, Perth, Broome, Kununurra, Darwin, Cairns, Townsville, Sydney, Brisbane, Singapore, Colombo, Shanghai, Lisbon, Paris, Munich, Vienna, Prague, and many, many more.

Lists of the countries and cities:
Europe – Portugal, France, Austria, Germany, Italy, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia, Hungary, the UAE.
Asia – India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Singapore.
Pacific – Fiji, New Zealand.
And, threaded through all of it, Australia, in all its fractured glory.

On the page, it looked like an impressive catalogue. In my head, each name was less a brag and more a memory trigger: a street corner, a cramped hotel room, a particular conversation, a missed train, a meal eaten too late, a badly translated sign.

Over time, the dots on the map started to line up into something that looked suspiciously like a life. Not a planned one, not a neat one, but one that made a certain kind of sense in hindsight.