The vendor hands it to me and says "very traditional, Chinese New Year snack" and I'm standing there thinking: I learned about this from teenagers on TikTok three weeks ago and now I'm eating it in a UNESCO heritage zone in Melaka, and I'm Singaporean Indian so none of this - not the snack, not the festival, not even really this street - has anything to do with me. But here I am anyway. I've spent forty years like this, actually - living alongside Chinese culture without ever being inside it. And now the internet has made it so I can eat grapes coated in sugar in Malaysia because an algorithm decided this northern Chinese street snack should matter to me, and I'm trying to figure out what it means that the distance has collapsed but the adjacency remains.

It was raining on our last morning in Perth, and we stayed close to home, and we found something worth carrying forward. Which is, I think, what last days are for: not grand farewells but small noticings, the kind that accumulate into meaning, into the particular texture of having been somewhere with someone, paying attention together, sheltering from the rain.

I want to say something profound about thresholds. About how we're all suspended between departure and arrival, neither where we were nor where we're going. About liminal space as metaphor for the modern condition. But standing here, sweating slightly despite having spent my entire life in the tropics, what I'm actually thinking about is whether I positioned myself at the right door.