homepressioness

"I just want to finish this year and go home."
I had only known my suitemate, Ashley, since August but I knew what was coming next. She'd cry. I'd panic.
Why is this a big deal? What in the world is she missing that could make her cry like that? ... Why aren't I feeling it?
At the glisten of the first tear, the minor mention of that longing of home by any of my fellow freshmen, questions started banging around in my head, unanswered and annoying. I looked on in confusion as everyone around me cried their way through the first few months of college. In those days I took pride in my ability to adapt, mold, reshape in a new place. So when the feeling first hit in Chile, it took me a while to identify it -- to call it what it was: homesickness.
My friend Megyn said homesickness is like honey -- "it creeps in and I get stuck in it." And she's right. It starts by spilling slowly over my heart, coating it. Slowly it drips down into my stomach, where it hardens and sits. It presses at the back of my throat leaving me a desire to throw it up but it just presses there until tears come. It's not just a miss, it's a craving like when it's 3:34 p.m. and you're driving a long way and you still haven't eaten lunch but you only want arby's so you drive past exit after exit, wendy's after wendy's, only thinking of arby's and being drained by the hunger. It's a craving for the little things I never knew I liked. For the desire to fling my phone out the window when my dad gets on an i-know-what-you-should-do-even-if-its-not-what-you-want-i'll-tell-you-anyway role that I can't interrupt. For the irritation that makes me keep my eyes closed when my mom wakes me up at 7 on a Saturday because "I just need to tell you twoooooooo things." It always turns into 10 and I never remember any of them. For the fury that burns through my cheeks when Ellen pinches me on the butt so hard and then laughs. "Har har." I crave that one time when Hammond threw things at me from the back seat the whole time I drove home from school. Or that feeling of annoyance between my eyes that makes me clench my jaw when Dylan wants to listen to NPR when a really good song is on and I know I have to change it because that is what older sister's do.
Homesickness doesn't even make me want the good times. It makes me love the bad times, the overbearing times, the frustrating times, the humiliating times, all the times that make me want to flee when I am home flood me when I'm gone. Homesickness oozes over my memory, making the bad times sweet, getting me all stuck and wallowing in memories. The danger is sometimes the honey hardens and you can't get out to notice all the amazing memories going on around you. Homesickess is tricky business. It's good and bad and gray. It makes you appreciate what you never noticed, but glamorize what isn't real. Being back in the United States, the things I missed in Chile still make me mad here. I still have hard days here. I still have miscommunications and frustrations. I've decided homesickness isn't really homesickness because I feel it at home too. It's discontent: the inability to enjoy where you are: in my experience it's almost equivalent to what people who know stuff so affectionately refer to as situational depression. And, I know this sounds cliche or even oversimplified, I think the only remedy is God. But sometimes God is a lot harder to swallow than honey, even if honey makes you sick.