State of Place

Yeah, right.

Have you ever had a bad bout of homesickness? I’m talking severe–where you start missing traffic, and junk mail, and having plaque scraped off your teeth at the dentist? How did it hit, and how did you deal with it?

It suffocated me as a feeling of having slighted my family and friends. As a sudden conviction that they believed my travels to be in spite of them, and that they felt inferior to my wooden bed in nowhere, Nepal. I had a feeling of the action movie digital bomb clock countdown, that someone close to me will invariably die while I’m abroad, and everyone else will point fingers and say this just proves you don’t care.

And worst of all, you can’t say that you really didn’t mean to leave them behind. Nobody’s buying that one.

That’s just the first part of homesickness. The adult version of the childhood Big Trouble in the Principal’s Office and By The Way, We’re Telling Your Parents feeling.

The second part is wanting to make it up to them. Them–your family, your friends, everyone. Everyone who you now realize still loves you, everyone you’re realizing how much you love. This part likes to creep up on you when you’re far from a phone. But it’ll also push you away from calling because you can’t put it into words. It’s a tight-in-the-chest thing. You’d probably explode.

How does it disappear? Maybe you can call a truce with a postcard, or maybe it just subsides on its own. Can’t really remember. Most likely a couple of surprise laughs.

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