I’m on another plane, flying across water. My bag is the small yellow overnighter, not the big shiny red number I bought in Florence. This is a work trip. I’m going to Tasmania.

Not so long ago, I was on a different plane, a much larger one with much more space, booze on tap, real cutlery and a massive movie collection.

This flight is far more modest. We’re in cut-price air ship over Bass Strait now.

I don’t know how to write about my time away in Italy, about how it changed me in ways I can’t understand yet. I could easily fill this page with words about the food, and the art and the friends I made. The horse I rode that last day through a Tuscan vineyard after breakfast. The hill I climbed when everyone was at yoga; my joggers caked in deep red soil as I stepped up, up, up, past the deer stand, up to the ridge, where I huffed and puffed and gulped water and took selfies; where I walked along the ridge spine, my hand in the leaves of olive trees, me, so happy.

I could describe the terror of my first train trip from Milan to Florence, not understanding Italian or the rules, on my own, making do with Google Translate and a snippet of conversation I overhead from the Danes ahead of me in line for the deposito bagagli.

Or waiting until my last day in Florence to see Michelangelo’s David, arriving to hordes of people and a massive queue and realising there was no way I could see it and make the train to Rome that afternoon, so then trusting a shady lady selling pre-purchased tickets for double the price, and shrugging with the French couple who made the leap of faith with me and bought the tickets along with me, and, heart in throat, following the shady lady to another queue, handing over our dodgy tickets, and … passing through the gate without a hitch. High fives with the French couple, a speed past the half-finished statues, through a door and then … David. In all his magnificence. Because truly, he is magnificent.

The condom vending machine, real tiramisu, the sleazy Italian boat rower feeling up the American teenager; a serenade at lunch, pasta! pasta! pasta!, patting farm cats and dogs, pizza in the Piazza on Nikki’s last day, touching Dante’s door (not a euphemism), vertigo at the Vatican — pizza at the Vatican — blisters in Rome, mosquito bites in Florence, a gondola ride in Venice as a single woman (not my best idea), Chianti, Shakespeare, packing too much and a breaking my bag on bumpy cobbled streets, Hitler, Galileo, a fantasy bedroom, a rainbow above the Milan Duomo.

The rainbow.

What a finale.

I wrote and wrote and wrote and I’ve been sharing my stories here, and will keep on sharing them, til they’re all out in space.

Sorry to go all Eat Pray Love on you but I got to know myself again. Trust myself again. I know I can handle the tough shit, be with myself and be happy. My life is big again, and I can change it and shape it the way all those talented, passionate, incredibly smart people shaped and changed their environment to create Italy.

I got my dreams back. There among all the pithy travel tales and gushing over the food I made a space in my mind for a new and sacred kind of ambition.

So here I am on my bumpy Jetstar flight coming in for the land in Launceston, an old friend and her new baby waiting for me. After I see them I’ll drive two hours in the dark to reach the port and do what I’m here to do, a quiet ocean of confidence tucked away in my chest.