I’ve been thinking a lot about homesickness over the past day or so. I was reminded of one of the worse times that I had out here, back in early December. I was just past settling in, so nothing was new and exciting and fun anymore. I still had a loooong time in front of me, and my job seemed a lot less promising than I had hoped it would be when I came over.
And worst of all, I really missed my life back at home. I really missed all the normal, boring things that you don’t think about when you’re in the middle of them, but I kept noticing because I didn’t have them. You know, trips to gas stations and going out to the drive-thru at McDonalds and shopping at Wal-Mart for random stuff that it just occurred to you that you might want (usually as you were browsing the aisles). I missed being able to pick up my cell phone and my ID and just… drive… go anywhere I might wish, just because I felt like moving, like having the humid Alabama night air washing over me from the open car window…
Anyway, I can come up with a lot of examples like that (possibly inducing a similar bout of homesickness in myself right now), but the point is, that was where I was in early December. And it felt terrible. But I realized, recently, that homesickness isn’t hitting me in that way anymore.
All the “normal things” about life at home seem less normal and more mythical to me. I remember that once upon a time I used to go through drive-thrus and I used to go shopping and I used to watch TV shows on my DVR… but the immediacy of it all has faded. It really seems like another person used to do those things. (Like the way it feels to read your own journal from college or something–you remember, vaguely, feeling that way, but you don’t remember how it felt.)
This doesn’t mean that everything is perfect now and I don’t feel bad about things from time to time, but it doesn’t take the form of pining for life back home. I miss certain, distinct things (my soft bed, having windows open at night, leaving work in the late afternoon/early evening, for instance), but they’re more as contrasts to the things that I find trying about my existence here.
I guess that, for me, reality has metamorphosed into really being what I now experience. My life just is what it is. I live in a trailer with enough stuff to fit under the bed and into my wardrobe next to my bed. I go to work from mid-morning to late at night. I brush my teeth with bottled water (though even this past week I forgot and rinsed the toothbrush with tap water and had to re-rinse it with bottled water). My life is surrounded by blast walls and sandbag buffers and palm trees and dust, with the occasional rainstorm (after which the dust becomes mud and tracks everywhere).
I wonder if I’ll get homesick for this life?
Posted by Kjirstin 
