Home Home

Sometimes when I'm sitting here idly, watching the people mill around me and waiting for cleaning morning to wrap up so I can go about my day, shop at my stores and eat at my cafes and ride on my busses home, while I'm waiting not unhappily, while I'm comfortable and feel relaxed and recognize familiar faces, while I'm feeling most at home here, because this is where I live now, not just a place I've travelled to, but where my stuff is, and where I live in the normal, unexhausted pace that normal people experience when they are close to their base -

these are the times when I realize most starkly that I'm far, far, astoundingly far, far away from Home.

I get frustrated here, I can't believe the inefficiency and the feigned-or-not stupidity and the effort it takes to live life, and I curse this country and glare at these people and yearn, not for Home, but for elsewhere, other, not this. And I did that at Home, too, because I'm fully coming round to the idea that Laura was right, comforts really are relative, so five minutes of waiting at the post office on the corner of Larkin and whatever felt just as maddening as waiting two hours at the post office in Kacyiru. But it's when I'm happy, relaxed, at my best here, when I'm feeling at home, that I realize that this is good for a visit, for a year, for an experience, for some insight, to shake things up in my smug mind, for a challenge, for a break, for a spell, for a bit. For a bit.

At the foundation of my current relaxed happy state lies the knowledge that in the future, no need to hurry, there will be a time when I can feel like this and simultaneously feel at Home. Where I can sit on the balcony of an ornate old theater hall with unnecessary beautiful decaying detail all around, with a glass of beer in front of me that I'm drinking because I like the taste, and that I can afford without thought, with a shoulder against mine and a hand on my back, with music streaming in that I love instantly, with that life-defining ahhhh that only seems to come when I'm at Home.

Pining for the old brunette.