It is three thirty in the morning, and I am desperately homesick. Here the nights are heat, lying in bed with no cover, trying to find the push that is needed to sleep. I am tired but I cannot sleep. I want to go outside, where it is cooler, where the air breaths, instead of this stuffy room. But I don’t know this place. I have lived here for a year and a few months now, but it is not home. Stupid little bugs swarm my screen. This wouldn’t happen at home.
Home right now would have the bit of autumn. I would perhaps add another blanket to my bed, relishing the weight. I love weight when I sleep. I love an open window, hearing the sounds of the night and feeling the night air. I do that here, but there is no night air. And I rarely hear the night. I hear fans, and disrespectful people talking and laughing and music. Not the slight wind in the tree boughs, the occasional pass of slow cars, the long and far away call of a train. At home, there is something in the air, something that I hear but don’t know, can’t describe.
When I return home, the first thing I do is take a deep breath, and I smell the scents. I think it is old pine trees, rich dirt, clean air, and the love that you have for something that is your own. Depending on the season it is biting, or languid, soothing and yet exciting. I always yearn for it. I usually return first at night, after flying for hours. I don’t return enough. It is hard to remember what the first smell of home is like, especially if you stay there for a while, and then leave for even longer.
The daylight in summer is something else to be held. I dislike full noon, the sun leaches the color from the day, it is harsh. I love around three o-clock on, until when I am not sure. But when the sun is farther down the colors seem true, perhaps even more so, the greens are much more vivid and the sky is such a clear blue. This is only true of sunny days. And yet I love the rain as well. The cloudy, overcast skies offer solitude and calm. The rain sooths, and my window stays open, listening to it hit the branches and roof. Night and day.
I have a hammock. I go there, with a book sometimes, with thoughts others. I can just stay there, lying in that hammock, staring at the trees that stretch up above me, watching the needles move and the patterns they make. I don’t understand the fascination. There is nothing there that should hold my gaze so much, my mind so intrigued. But it is there. It is the same with the land around me. Sometimes I just wander, barefoot and careless, through the land. I don’t fear it, I have walked it since I was young. It has always been home to me. It always will be.
And yet, I am frightened. I yearn for that place, and yet I yearn for others too. I long for the ocean, a rocky, turbulent, cold, crashing shore to stand on. I am too far from that at my home. I don’t find it here. I yearn for different countries, the pull unknown, confusing. Scotland, Ireland, France, Italy, Japan. Why these places? Will they take me from my family, from my comfort? I am frightened of them, of the pull they have on me, but I will go. I will return to the place where I belong, and I will find a way to have it all. I must.
But in the meantime, here I stay, too warm, too nervous, too tired. And I will wait until I can come home, wait until I can take that first deep breath and feel my home welcoming me back.
