First week home...

...is nice. As it always is everytime I am home, it always feels like I never left. But I did, for a year. The roads are the same, the traffic, the temperature, even my room smells the same. I like it, it feels like home. My flight was OK, although my feet were happily relieved when it can finally touch the ground once more. Above Jakarta the weather was extremely cloudy. I looked outside and all I can see was white - like being wrapped in this immensely fluffy cottoncandy. Fun for some but not for others as the pilot tried to navigate the way out. It can be rather scary I admit, the pilot had to decrease the altitude up and down rather swiftly. The baby on board was crying. I was just looking outside, seeing the rain hitting the body of the plane but was immediately blown dry by the heavy wind. I sat there thinking to myself damn this is cool.

Adrift in the midst of this fluffy whiteness.

Slowly but surely it subsided, and I can see the ocean. Rice fields. Messy-ly organized houses with red-bricks-roof. The highway. Cars. Lots of cars the size of ants. Slowly magnifying itself with every second, until we felt a thump as our plane safely arrived in Jakarta.

But nothing really indicates the fact that you're back until you take your first inhalation. The hot, humid, almost sticky air filling your lungs.

Or the first time you step out of immigration, when you see your parents standing there by the door waiting for you. They look up, tired from waiting, and their smiles made the long hours fly by.

I went home, went in my room and immediately looked in my drawers. Closets. Bathroom. Jumped on my bed. I went downstairs to see my piano, the keys unplayed. To my sister's room, to my little brother's room, to my parents' room, to the kitchen, to the garden. Everything is the way I remembered it to be. This sense of little consistency despite the constant change is reassuring.

This morning something weird happened that made me smile. I asked my maid to make me some fresh coffee, and she asked if I want it black or mixed with milk and sugar. I said black. She looked at me, and her eyes were filled strangely with this little sense of secrecy.

"Oh you want black coffee? Well I have this stuff I brought from my village... Really nice stuff."

I felt like talking to a dealer, and couldn't help but to laugh.