What Had Changed Was Me
Itwas 1996, and I was back in Dubai after three years away. From the backseat of a Toyota taxi — its upholstery cracked with heat — I watched the skyline rise ahead of me as we crested the Al Maktoum Bridge. The air was thick with heat and a strange familiarity.
The driver, a Pakistani man in a salwar kameez who spoke no English, had picked me up at the airport. We exchanged a few Urdu words, combined with gestures and brief nods, as he wound his way through the city’s arteries.
The skyline was fuller now — more metallic and vertical than I remembered. But what caught my eye was the old Inter-Continental Hotel, rising like a memory from the haze. In the seventies, I had worked there, back when I was young and newly arrived in this city with little more than ten dollars and a stitched-together confidence. That evening, I would be checking into that same hotel — not as an employee, but as a guest. As an Australian.
It was a detail that unsettled me more than it pleased. There was something almost absurd about it, as if time had looped around and played a trick.
Three years in Sydney had changed me. I had come back not just older, but altered. A father of four. A holder of a first-world passport. No visa line. No questions. No fear.
And yet, Dubai reminded me — swiftly — of where I was. The cab driver slowed to a stop, not at the entrance of the bank branch where I once worked, but across a wide, busy road. He pointed. I was to get out there and cross on foot. There was no crossing. No signal. Just heat, horns, and the indifference of traffic.
In that moment, something shifted. What once had felt normal — routine, even — now felt jagged, unfinished. Sydney had changed the way I moved through the world. It had changed what I expected from it.
I stood at the roadside, luggage in hand, watching the cars stream past, and realized how quickly we grow accustomed to comfort — and how distance — temporal, emotional, geographical — can render the familiar foreign.
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