The furthest I ever traveled from home was everywhere.
A round-the-world ticket—
you can’t really get further away than that.
I left with research in my bag and Duke University
as my compass point.
Duke was extraordinary.
Magnificent buildings, gothic arches
designed to look older than they were.
Exceptional students and world-class teachers
walking polished halls that had been paid for
by Methodist tobacco farmers.
A world-class medical centre
built on contradictions.
I arrived just before March Madness
and discovered I was the only one
cheering for the Blue Devils.
“Why not Duke?” I asked.
“Because we can’t get our kids in there,” they said,
and sure enough, the carpark told the story—
license plates from everywhere else.
To find terra incognita,
I rode the buses.
I was the only white passenger,
surrounded by those who couldn’t afford a car.
Their conversations cut sharper than any lecture:
“Why are we involved in this war?”
“Why are we the world’s police?”
Questions that felt more honest than
the privileged chatter on campus.
Sometimes I wandered through ER
just to taste real life.
When the work was done,
the world kept pulling me forward—
Nashville for a Blues festival,
St Martin where sunburnt tourists
played at being someone else for a week,
New York, magnificent in its energy,
Paris, magnifique in every sense.
By the time I got home
the map inside me was torn open.
The world was too large,
too chaotic.
I didn’t know where I belonged.
So I took a day trip to the Blue Mountains.
Sat on a rock in the late autumn sun,
birds stitching silence into the air.
An hour later,
I was grounded again.
I knew who I was.
Where I belonged.
Home was not the end of the map—
but the place from which
every journey begins.
The Afterword 
Leave a comment