"Cabin crew disarm doors and cross-check."

Sacha looked out the window of the aeroplane at the city sprawled beneath her. She'd told Hannah that she was going home for Christmas - but now, descending into Melbourne, she couldn't escape the fact that it was starting to feel more like home than Canberra had when she'd flown up there a week and a half ago. She'd always stoutly defended Canberra from its many detractors, and now she couldn't help but feel a little like she was betraying it by embracing Melbourne. She hadn't meant to do it! She never knew that the city would grow on her so much! She hadn't even meant to go to Melbourne in the first place, she still didn't really know why she'd done it, except that she'd been meaning to go overseas, and that had fallen through.

If she'd fallen for a foreign city, would that have been better? Would the claim of loving the exoticism of it really fly? She couldn't claim that in Melbourne. She just liked it. Again, she didn't know why - because despite all her best efforts, she had friends here, she supposed.

As the 'plane gradually approached the ground the P.A. system popped and hummed again and the same voice as before wished the passengers on the 'plane "A pleasant stay in Melbourne, or a safe onwards journey". As if those were the only options. It made Melbourne sound so transitory! Was it so inconceivable to want to make a life in Melbourne? Sacha sometimes wondered what it must be like for the kids who grew up here: whether they saw it with the same eyes, whether they got bored of all the excitement.

Except that her Melbourne, inner city with a lot of signs pointing outwards, wasn't the same as the rest of Melbourne, the Melbourne people grew up in, ten or fifteen kilometres out, no trams, signs all pointing in. The tall buildings at the centre not even visible.

But to say Melbourne was a city was wrong, of course: it seemed to Sacha that Melbourne was a multitude of cities. It was Jasmine Town, in spring and early summer when the blooms were out on just about every house; it was Coffee Town, if you drank coffee; it was Collingwood, or Carlton, or Sunshine or Reservoir; St. Kilda or Footscray or East Melbourne, south of the river or north of the river, or just the West. And every vision was as clearly formed as every other: Melbourne was like an opinion, there were no wrong ones. Just different.

But most of all, for Sacha, it was where she found herself, strangely, feeling comfortable. It was, for whatever reason, for better or for worse, where she lived. Wasn't that a definition of home?

The 'plane shuddered in the air, hanging only a couple of metres above the ground, and then landed. The whole cylinder rattled and buzzed as the flaps on the wings shot up and the 'plane quickly slowed to a crawl. Sacha waited for the seat-belt sign to be turned off.