Homesick
It hit me from out of nowhere the summer after I turned ten…
Retrieved from https://www.ebay.com/
The Lindsey All-Star Camp brochure had been lying on our kitchen counter for months. It was a full-color, tri-fold production with a picture of its founder, Charlie Heatly, on the front. Inside it had a sample daily schedule, some pictures of coaching headliners, and an aerial shot of a gym full of ambitious campers-- seemingly dribbling in unison-- in matching white camp T-shirts with their respective last names ironed across the back. The portion of the brochure below the dotted line where you filled out your personal information had been clipped and sent in with a check only days after the opportunity had arrived in the mail. I looked at it minus its entry form, every single day for months. I could not wait to go.
I’d been packing for my week away for weeks before departure, even though the essentials were all that were essential for an 8 in the morning to 8 at night daily gymnasium grind. I laid out shorts, shoes, travel size soap and shampoo, toothpaste, toothbrush, towels, a set of twin bed sheets, a blanket, a pillow, and lots and lots and lots of socks. And I laid awake at night and dreamed of June.
When the day circled in red on the calendar finally arrived, I couldn’t get to basketball camp fast enough. Once there, my mom helped me get checked in and find my assigned room in the hallway of middle-school classrooms that masqueraded in the summers as a hotel. Then she helped me make my bed (aka mattress lined up on the tile floor side by the side of 20 others) as I hurriedly slipped on my hot-off-the-press camp T-shirt and laced up my canvas Chucks.
We said our goodbyes quickly, hugged in the street for good measure, and I made my way up the steps outside the gymnasium toward the serenading whistle of Sweet Georgia Brown. All the stars had most certainly aligned. I had everything I wanted. I was living my best life.
Retrieved from https://www.dosomething.org/
Then my mom drove away and I thought I might die.
It hit me like a tsunami.
I was exactly where I’d dreamed of being and yet, suddenly, I wanted to be anywhere but there. My heart weighed a thousand pounds. It was as if despite my careful packing, I’d left part of me at home. Prior to that moment, I’d never really known anything other than happy, sad, and mad, with the latter two of those three being emotional visitors who just briefly came and went. But there alone in a crowded gymnasium, I experienced a seismic shift. I was paralyzed by a yearning though I wasn’t sure for what.
It wasn’t my mom, per se, or our house or my room that I missed. It was all of it. I was sick for home. I ached for all that was familiar that I could no longer reach out and touch. I could feel myself floating, untethered. Dizzy with emotion, not sure which way was up.
That’s how homesickness happens. It buries you alive in waves.
While my first encounter with the malady came when I was ten, it’s kept up a steady appearance through the years. I felt it again when I moved into my dorm at college. And again, four years later, when I moved away from campus with a diploma in my hand. It washed over me when we sold our first house…and again when I first took the kids to school… and again twelve years later when each one got their own formal graduation papers and moved out from under our roof.
I feel it sometimes still when the congregation sings “I’ll Fly Away” at church, and when I pull weeds from the well at the base of a newly planted tree (the way my dad once taught me to.) I feel it when I put my Christmas stuff away, and when I travel (almost always, regardless of where I go), and at the first cool smell of fall. The sand just siphons out from below my feet and I go under.
I get sick for a home I can’t reach out and touch. A place that I can’t get to anymore.
Some might call this nostalgia, but homesickness is needier than that. It’s a bottomless pit of melancholy minus the fangs of grief. And the worst part about this disease of displacement is that even when you feel it coming, there is no way to escape. It’s like restless leg syndrome of the heart. You can’t ignore it and yet there’s really nothing you can do to make it go away. Half of you-- or what you love, which is often the very same thing-- is here and half is somewhere else. And no matter how you contort, you cannot fill the void.
They say when a tsunami is coming and you find yourself in a boat, the best thing to do is head out to sea. It’s the running away that will get you. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to not try so hard to hang on. I just let the feeling overtake me, relishing and re-living everything I miss. I still get out of breath and a little scared when it hits, but letting it do what it’s bound to do anyway somehow makes me feel less upside down. Homesickness is, after all, despite its heavy shroud, a reminder of the good gone missing. A hole only appears where a thing of substance used to be.