The Opposite Game

When my daughters were little, we played something called the opposite game during our Sunday meals. We said the opposite of what we meant, used a fork when we should have used a spoon, drank from the wrong side of the cup—silly little rebellions that kept life light and distracted me from nagging them to eat one more bite of peas.

I still enjoy the opposite game, so when the chance came to be below the equator in the middle of winter, I didn’t hesitate. Wait for Snowmageddon at home or go snorkeling near the Great Barrier Reef? I packed sunscreen and we were gone.

Around the tenth hour in the air—after a three-hour layover in LAX—I began to question my decision. We left on Friday, February 13th, and arrived on the 15th. My husband cringes at anything too romantic, so I was convinced he’d chosen the flight specifically to skip Valentine’s Day.

Getting to Australia isn’t just a long flight. It’s an international incident involving two invisible lines that quietly rearrange reality: the Equator and the International Date Line.

Most people think of them as harmless trivia questions from grade-school geography. Oh no. These lines cause travelers to stare blankly into airport terminals like the Senoia zombies. My husband and I were no different.

The Equator is Earth’s belt—its midsection—where the Northern Hemisphere ends and the Southern Hemisphere begins. You’d think crossing it would feel momentous. There should be an announcement. Maybe even a small ceremony. The captain could come over the speaker and say, “Ladies and gentlemen, we are now entering the Southern Hemisphere. Gravity will remain the same, but your seasons are reversed.”

Instead, people stretched, adjusted their blankets, and stood in line for the bathroom.

I wanted to feel something when we crossed that line. But mostly I just fidgeted in seat 43A, imagining stepping over it like a crack in the sidewalk—suddenly finding myself in the lower half of the planet without anyone even handing me a sticker.

But the Equator is only the appetizer—the bowl of mixed nuts and prosecco the Delta One passengers get.

The real chaos, the main course, is the International Date Line.

That’s the invisible squiggle across the Pacific where the calendar loses its confidence and resets itself in the middle of the ocean because it doesn’t want to argue with anybody on land. Crossing it isn’t travel; it’s thin-place magic. One moment it’s one day. You pass over water that looks exactly like the other seven million miles of water. Then suddenly the globe shrugs and says, Nope. That day didn’t happen.

No Valentine’s Day for you.

The Date Line proves the entire system runs on duct tape and optimism. I saw no roses, opened no heart-shaped chocolates, and to my knowledge there were no Mile High Club celebrations happening in the lavatories.

The rule is simple: fly east from the United States to Australia and you lose a day. You leave on Friday and somewhere over the Pacific the calendar quietly skips a page.

But something did happen.

The opposite game kicked in.

We were a day and a half from home, where night was day and day was night. While our family huddled by the fireplace, we slathered on sunscreen, swam in warm water, and worked out before the midday heat arrived. We complained about the temperature while clinking glasses by the pool.

Technically we skipped Valentine’s Day.

So naturally, we celebrated it anyway.

On the fifteenth, my husband quietly corrected the calendar. No roses smuggled through customs, no heart-shaped chocolates—just a drink by the water and a grin that suggested he had planned the whole “skip the 14th” strategy all along.

Driving became another version of the opposite game. Australians drive on the opposite side of the road, with the steering wheel on the right side of the car. The windshield wipers moved the wrong way. The radio knobs turned the opposite direction. Even the hot water ran backward from what my hands expected.

And don’t even get me started on the toilets.

In fourteen days we drove 1,550 miles, crossing landscapes so vast they made our own country feel compact. We moved from tropical coastlines to wide rural stretches where emus and kangaroos wandered along the roadside like mildly curious locals.

We learned something else about those animals: emus and kangaroos can’t move backward.

And neither, it seems, can most Australians.

The people we met carried an easy optimism—voices lifting slightly at the end of a sentence as if each conversation might rise a little higher than the one before. Their humor arrived quietly, often behind a sideways smile that waited to see if you caught the joke.

Knowing Australia began as a penal colony, I couldn’t help but admire the resilience stitched into its history. Perhaps that same spirit exists somewhere along those invisible lines—the equator, the date line—places where the world flips itself upside down.

Traveling so far into the opposite side of things has a strange effect. The steering wheels move, the seasons flip, the calendar skips a day, and suddenly all the ordinary things you take for granted back home stand out more clearly.

Opposites, it turns out, don’t just turn the world around.

They remind you what your normal is.

And sometimes, if you look up long enough in the other half of the sky, they even help you see it more clearly beneath the Southern Cross.

BIO:

Tricia Stearns is a storyteller whose essays and articles appear in publications including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Bloom, Dirty Spoon, Loose Change, and Manifest-Station. She is also on the The Citizen team (thecitizen.com).

When she’s not writing, Tricia and her husband Bern travel extensively as avid hikers and cyclists—returning home to care for her sourdough starter, vegetable garden, and a growing collection of pickles for family dinners.

To reach out or read more about Tricia go to www.tstearnswriter.com