So it's 11:07 pm and I'm waiting for the latest episode of House to load on the free illegal website I use to download television shows, the website with Chinese subtitles that I always scrutinize way beyond my normal capacity for comprehension. I have these lofty hopes that I can teach myself the characters if I just see them enough, at frequent intervals. I don't really know what I'm still doing awake. I'm sure it has nothing to do with the screaming drunkies sitting out on the balcony below mine, chain smoking and letting the thick grey plumes waft upward and through the crack at the top of my door that's always there, even when the door is locked. My room reeks of cigarette smoke and I accidentally drank caffeinated tea and I can guarantee you I won't be going to sleep for quite some time.

I wonder what it's like in Seattle right now, if the rhodies are blooming, if the grass has grown enough to need mowing. I miss driving to the grocery store and being able to load my purchases into the wayback and drive straight home without the inconvenience of a crowded (or as my friend Laura and I like to call it, a "fully hydrogenated") tram with hardly any standing room. I miss my oversized feline and my crazy bi-polar fish who sometimes follows my finger along the glass but most of the time just flares his gills and darts psychotically in and out of the plastic Greek ruins my mother bought for his bowl when I was in Europe. I miss the slope of my bedroom ceiling. I miss the incessant clicking of my dorm room heater that would wake me up multiple times in the night and that I swore I'd rip from the wall and dropkick to Tucson. I miss sharing a room with one of my closest friends, laughing about things that were probably only funny at 2 a.m. when we were already sleep-deprived from the night before. I miss my mama's pottery studio and going to shows at my daddy's theater and helping my brother stir his wine and cork the bottles. I miss my weekly chats with my advisor. I miss the Metropolitan Market--in particular, the heavenly mozzarella basil panini and tomato soup--and the way my campus looks when it's snowing and everything is crisp and pure and fragile and all sounds settle and the sky never really gets dark.

My time in Melbourne, while I would never trade it for any experience in my life, has ultimately made me more aware of how much I love my life in Washington. Nothing can compare to the animals and plants and people and architecture and natural phenomena I've seen here in only three months, but my home has cultivated within me a love for myself that I never really noticed until I saw Lake Washington disappear beneath the clouds as my plane took off. I love my life here, don't get me wrong. I love it more than I can say. But believe me when I say that "I want to go home" can't begin to express the extent of my homesick sentiments. To everyone reading this at home, I love you. I miss you. Please don't change without me.