Reunion in Kuala Lumpur

I couldn't wait to see my parents. I couldn't wait so much that I became almost sickened by the waiting. The hours I had to sit still on a plane and the hours of a journey from the airport in Kuala Lumpur to finally reach them in the city. I couldn't wait to see what it was like to travel with them as grown up woman and for them to be impressed with how fully adult and independent, relaxed and confident I was about this whole business of travel, now that I had been on the road for over six months.

Except that when I finally got to the hotel in KL and finally saw them I couldn't believe it was happening and involuntarily disassociated from the overwhelmingness of the experience. The heart I thought I had un-armoured, by sweating out all that angst on Fiji was still very much armoured and had made itself cold to the hurt it might feel if it acknowledged the great relief that seeing my stalwart parents again brought.

I have a close relationship with my parents, it has been at its most acutely close in the times in my life when I have been doing something unusual like deciding to halt a career to travel alone or deciding before that to leave a boyfriend I had just bought a house with who kept threatening to ask me to marry him (run like the wind, am I right?). Or deciding to move to Spain for a year, or deciding to uproot again to move to Norfolk... Most recently they have been relentlessly cheering me to health when 151 days ago, an Illness called Ramsay Hunt Syndrome rudely invited itself into my immune system (a journey of a different kind, you can read about here). 

Arriving at the hotel in KL and over the next days, I didn't think I knew how to be close to my parents and also be this new grown up, irrepressibly independent woman I decided I definitely now was. I confused closeness with neediness and withholding with independence.

It wasn't that I hadn't been single or alone in my adult life, just that I hadn't been so unencumbered and off-grid as an adult. I was jobless and unsure what the future held beyond my travel. In conversation with other people, I was tying myself in knots answering fairly basic questions about who I was and what I did for a job with "I am my parents' jobless (and slightly lost) daughter". Feeling ashamed that I could not find the words to introduce myself in any other way, I retreated further into aloofness.

When I finally got over myself and relaxed, allowing each day to enjoyably unfold rather than agonising about how I was supposed to be, I had a beautiful and golden time with my dear, pleasingly eccentric folks. I taught them Caroline's card game and my mother and I almost wet ourselves laughing at my poor old Dad's sideways understanding of this relatively simple game. We gagged together in slippery Bat shit filled caves getting a slightly spine chilling glimpse of Bat colonies in the cavern above us and squawked a little later pulling invading leeches from the holes in our trainers on a river walk. We spied on Macaques dive bombing each other at the Botanical Gardens, met Rhinoceros Hornbills at luncheon and although we didn't see a Malay Tapir, we saw a river Otter (the size of a human) doing the backstroke as we waited for a bus to take us to Taman Negara.

Leaving them was agony. I let go hiccuping tears before getting into a taxi to go to the train station for a train to Thailand. They soothed and reassured, but I know they felt wretched too.Travel alone up to that point had been incredible and character building. It was in the deep security of being with kin-kindred spirits, when I surrendered into being a loved daughter again I finally got to meet the woman I had been looking for all this time.  At the end of our spell together I felt myself sinking into homesickness. A longing for that relaxed version of myself I could already feel retracting and diminishing as I armoured up ready to go back out there alone. I felt more lost than ever. I was pretty sure I would get to Thailand and fly straight home - but I'm so glad I didn't...