When you've reached four years of being in a new place, calling it a new home is no longer just something you say to comfort the decisions you made that lead to this point. For better or for worse, for all that you've experienced being where you are for so long. It no longer is a new home anymore. It has become your home.

As I sit here waiting to begin the next step of my experiments, in my office, in the lab, in university, in Wagga, in Australia. I can't but realize that the last 4 years has been such a long time. It doesn't feel like it flew right past, it just feels like I've lived so much in those 4 years. And why not? It was here that I took the chance to be everything I couldn't be back in Malaysia.

Here I stretched my hand and felt more at home than a place where I was raised for 21 years. Here I endured a pain that changed everything. Here I found another chance for redemption and peace. Here is where I defined myself even more as the person I am. Here is where I am accepted as the person I am. Here is where I ended an old life. Here is where I started something new.

Here is where I am and in a world where home is where the heart belongs, maybe the memories that you make on your own terms carry with them more significance than experiences you lived through simply because you had no control over them. I think it is suffice to say that I don't have to keep commemorating the events that have lead to this point. Whatever I have done in the last 4 years is more than enough to say my life now isn't at a beginning but at the long winding road. The chapter of my life has at least reached the interesting middle. That which I can look forward for.

The end of the new and the beginning of else entirely.