This is a photo that I did not take of all the photos that I have not taken; of nine months worth of going to classes and meeting people and going home and coming back…

This is a photo that I did not take of really, really missing home.

This is a photo that I did not take of being here anyway, because it’s the right thing to do, because even if I miss home, I don’t mind it here…because maybe by the time I get home, I’ll appreciate it all the more.

This is a photo that I did not take of being so ready to go home.

This is a photo that I did not take of waking up in the middle of the night, getting up to use the bathroom, and for the second night in a row finding the cat sitting outside my room, watching my door, like some kind of rogue kitty assassin…

This is a photo that I did not take of my first days in Perth—of the street that I live on, covered in sickle-shaped flower petals from the trees above, like an especially bright tomato in colour. This is a photo that I did not take of the parrots that live in those trees, green and red and blue and loud.

This is a photo that I did not take of a ‘muster point,’ which just makes me laugh.

This is a photo that I did not take of my enrolment, a set of eight steps that forced me to run around campus like I knew where I was going, even though there was no map and there weren’t enough signs, and this is a photo that I did not take of finding a clash in my schedule, trying to fix it and only making things worse, and my currently incomplete class schedule.

This is a photo that I did not take of myself actually managing to complete nearly everything that needed to be done, and spending my day drinking tea and writing a post about photos that I didn’t take.

This is a photo that I did not take of landing in Sydney at 6am, and zombie-walking through my first day in Australia, and going to bed at 8 o’clock and sleeping for 11 and a half hours.

This is a photo that I did not take of the Sydney Opera House, which is white, as it turns out, not silver or purple or pink like photographers like to show.

This is a photo that I did not take of the flying foxes in Hyde Park, even though my dad said he’s seen them, but I didn’t, because as it turns out they are nocturnal. And they’re bats. And my dad said he’d seen flying squirrels. And those don’t seem to live there at all.

This is a photo that I did not take of the hurricane that ransacked my bedroom, leaving only chaos and taking all of my favourite things: headphones and notebooks and clothes; cameras, stuffed animals, jewelry — all packed away into neat (if huge) bags, like the hurricane has obsessive-compulsive disorder.

This is a photo that I did not take of my own panicked face as I realized this morning that none of my music had made the leap to my new laptop, and that the hard drive I was using to transfer from my desktop was corrupted, andwhat am I going to do, that was sixty gigabytes worth of music— this is a photo that I did not take of my relief that everything was fixable, that sixty gigs doesn’t actually take so long to transfer, that I know what went wrong and that I was able to put everything back together.

This is a photo that I did not take of the sweater that I just noticed lying under a blanket, hiding from me so that it won’t have to leave its home.

This is a photo that I did not take of the miscellaneous junk sitting next to my carry-on bag: two (more) notebooks;Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire; two small bottles of nail polish, my cell phone, my iPod, some pens and USB drives. My laptop. My pyjamas. My toothbrush.

This is a photo that I did not take of something that I’m probably forgetting, that I will never take a photo of because I’m not going to miss it until I’m nine thousand miles away.

(And this is a photo that I did not take of Google Maps telling me to kayak across the Pacific Ocean, and the muscles I’ll have from doing that.)