homesick

This last month has been busy. I really only remember working and feeling homesick.

Homesickness is a strange and lonely thing as an adult. It hits me during big holidays and every few months. It creeps in and stays for a few weeks, always hanging in the back of my emotional make-up, ready to move forward and overwhelm me with a wave of grief. At its strongest, I can almost feel it radiate under my skin. It is a very different thing from depression, although they sometimes go hand in hand.

The strangeness is that I do not know what "home" I am sick for. I yearn for a permenant solution, but my world is too large and too divided for "home" to have a single place. I miss my family. When I feel "homesick," it is for Texas, my parents' arms, the smell and feel of the family land, and my brothers' laughter. I know that going there will lessen the ache, but moving there will not take me "home." It has been too long since I lived in Texas and, like many people who move away, I am more of a visitor than someone who belongs.

Home could be here, on the east coast and 1500 miles from my family. Here is where I have community, an actual house, and where I feel comfortable in my own skin.

All the same, these last weeks bring forth that familiar ache. I am thankfully busy with work...busy enough that I only have time for passing moments of homesickness. Of course, this week I will still be busy because I am the only single loser who does not have a family with whom to go on vacation.

From my quiet office in an emptied building, I watch all of the families of my church migrate to the beach. Their pictures appear online and summer brings this language of beach towns, streets, and restaurants that sounds like french in its strangeness to my North Texan mind. The blazing reminder that I am not from here and that there are things I simply don't understand. This is not yet "home."

Oh well. At least this week I will be free to have full-blown pity parties for myself...no one will be here to interrupt my misery. The pool should also be pretty empty. I can swim in peace.



A quote from the ABC Family movie Revenge of the Bridesmaids: "Great being home, isn't it? Surrounded by familiar faces that will never understand you."