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This is all a bit of a mess. Here's a rambly post I started writing a week ago and never finished. Rather than try to make sense of it, I'll just throw it up in all its glorious incoherence....

Well I can't tell you how mad it is to be home. Ever perceptive, Walt said, "I won't ask you how it feels because I'm sure it feels like all sorts of things at once". And he's right. Now, for instance, it feels like a crashing hangover.

But I have to confess, over the last year there were so many times when I missed Dublin physically, in a small, unidentifiable way. I identified it coming from the airport last Thursday afternoon, the cheery, autumnal outsideness to everything. So many people on the streets! Kids in school uniforms, couples, hundreds of people on bikes. And people at bus stops, pasty people, ugly people, Irish people damn it, it was just beautiful! The light here - I know I go on about the light, but really, hear me out - the light is incredible. I drank wine with Eoin last night outside the IFSC, and it took the sky 2 hours to go from glowing pale blue to a velvet navy - they say that Ireland is green, but it's not really, not compared to Honduras. But it's certainly blue. I'm loving those big cartoony blue skies, the sky equivalent of the Caribbean sea, which so perfectly set off the red bricks on the South Circular Road. The things I've missed. And how I've missed them.

My body responds to change slowly and forgetfully. I still expect to wake up in Tegucigalpa. In my heart of hearts, I never really left Dublin. But I never really came back either. One day I'll wake up and realise I'm not going back, but not just yet. Does having left make them all less real, my friends there - do they keep existing? None of us are good at email, and there are very few that I'll see again in Europe. I have one friend in particular, a Nicaraguan who travels a lot in her work, but never to Europe; and as I packed my bags and skyped simp every other day, counting the hours until I'd be home, I felt more strongly than ever the inequality between us. We talk about meeting up in Columbia to visit a mutual friend who's moving there, but I know she won't. She's sending money home to her family, dollar bills slipped into the pockets of friends when they travel back, so she doesn't have to give a penny to the Western Union. No way she could drop $1000 on a holiday to South America. But maybe we can organise a conference for her, as a pretext....