In the afternoon every day it rains. Not just any rain, either – it pours, it weeps, it floods, the heavens open and the rain falls like someone is emptying a great big bucket from the sky all over Phnom Penh.

And every day I think, well, that’s a shame. It’s going to be a shit sunset.

Later, when the wind has stopped blowing and the streets have begun to dry out, I glance up out of my window and there is a light in the sky, the kind that is too strange and pulsing to be normal sunlight. Then I leap up and I scramble for my camera and I run to the balcony. My jaw drops, my knees go a little weak, and my heart dips like a bird on the wind because I’m falling in love with the world all over again. The sky is glowing. The sky is tumbling over itself and boiling with colour: somewhere, surely, someone has split a can of paint over the sky but no paint that I could ever dip my brush into. The clouds that were white and flat grey are suffused now with lavender and pale orange and crimson and rose – how can these colours be so intense and yet so impossibly delicate? They are pastel and they are all too much to be pastel at the same time. If I dreamed in sunsets I could not dream these colours up. Is this, I wonder, what it is like to be a butterfly? To see these colours all day long, and not just in those brief and fleeting moments before the sun dips below the horizon?

In every house I have lived in since I was twelve years old I have hung a photograph. I took it that summer, when I was twelve, of the Eiffel Tower against a blue, blue sky. It is a little blurry, and there is the corner of a car window near the bottom of the frame and the tower itself looks slanted, so all in all it is not a very good photo. But I keep it on my wall, because I think it is a pretty rare thing to have a photograph of the exact moment of the first time you fell in love. At the time, of course, I did not know it was love. I wandered through that city for five days and I could not tell you the names of the streets where I left so many pieces of my heart. It is only in the years since – years in which I have found myself falling in love over and over again, with people and places and colours and food and music and life itself, over and over and over again – that I know for a fact when my knees went weak as they did that hot July afternoon in the car going around a roundabout in Paris, when my heart took that dip and then soared upwards like it was filled with helium just as quick, when for a brief moment the world went completely quiet and shrank, shrank, shrank until it was just me and Paris – that was love.

So I do not know much but I know enough, I think, to know when I am falling in love. And here I am falling in love. That moment when I stepped out of the airport at noon and wondered where my shadow was – I had never been in a place so close to the equator, I did not know that it is possible for the sun to be so high and so hot above your head. That moment in the tuktuk, just last night, when we were whizzing past the roast chickens hanging on string from food stalls and the hunks of meat sitting among heaping piles of vegetables, and the million phone stores and the people milling around under strings of lightbulbs, and I took a deep breath in, which is a pretty brave thing to do in a city with an open sewer. And I thought, I can’t believe I live here. I can’t believe I am here.

When you love someone or something you give them a piece of your heart to hold. You say to them, this is me. This is who I am. This is my heart, please take care of it. You must trust them, and so far I don’t quite trust this place enough to love it completely – it is still too close to being unfamiliar forever, too close to impenetrable. But I think every day I get a little closer.