Last week I had a message from my friend Gabie, an Israeli living in Italy who I met when I was cycling in China. She is coming to Australia, and this news precipitated an unexpected internal turmoil. Since we met we have lived increasingly divergent lives, mine becoming more and more conventional as hers becomes less so. She has been catching dengue fever in Laos while I finish my degree, selling clothes in the markets in Italy while I try to save the mad people from themselves, and -apparently- applying for a working visa to Australia while I enjoy the plateau of peace of my early married life and wonder what the catalyst will be that will jolt me out of the complacent pleasures of certain love.

Suddenly I am imagining the way it will look to her- a sign of submission to the patriarchy on my ring finger, an ensuite, forty hours a week at the office. It drags me out of my complacency and I am starting to wonder if this is how she felt (and Jorge, and Dirty Rotten Jack) when I came to visit them in Europe before I came home from Jordan. Why do I live in the way I do? It feels like pure circumstance but there is no such thing. Having visitors from foreign parts, especially ones I rarely see, has the strange effect of forcing me to look at myself and my surroundings from their perspective, and always generates an internal process of reckoning. Maybe it's a habit bred from years of secrecy, from possessing a character so private it borders on shiftiness- a thought process that goes Is someone looking? If so, am I doing anything I want them to see?