I Miss Home

Hello, tender friends!

Waves of homesickness occasionally envelop me even though I haven’t lived home for well over a decade. I’ve left the name of my hometown/state blank so that you can insert the name of wherever you consider home and see if anything resonates with you.

Oh, and here’s a little photo gem from when I was 16, took life way too seriously, and still had my baby fat on my face! (So much baby fat! Such 90s eyebrows, lol).

Here goes:

Part 1

I miss ____. I miss where I grew up – where people knew me and my family and the house we lived in. Where we knew the neighbors by name. Where I didn’t have to exhaust myself trying to gauge whether or not I was making a good impression when I talked to people on the street, at the grocery store, at the shops surrounding “The” town stoplight. Where I knew people, and they knew me, well enough to grant each other grace when we all f***** up.

I want to go home, to have the possibility of crossing paths with someone I knew when I was young.

Someone who remembers hiding between the tree line and the brick wall during elementary school recess. Someone who remembers the scratchy brick against our sweaty backs and the thrill of running out for a round of tag.

Someone I sat with in the Middle School cafeteria, so relieved to never have to be alone.

Someone I played basketball or lacrosse with from the time I learned to dribble. Someone who remembers singing along to Britney Spears on the bus to away games.

Someone I auditioned with in high school theater. Someone who knows the thrill of getting the part. Someone who understands that as you put on stage makeup and got into costume, something inside of all of you changed. Someone who remembers the corporate metamorphosis that occurred when the curtain parted on opening night.

Someone who could tell me the theme song of our senior prom because I don’t know.

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Part 2

I miss ___. I walked 600 miles across a country to find myself. But never retraced my steps at home.

Take me back to the house I lived in in 8th grade. I could show you with perfect cartographical precision where I stood when I received my first real kiss, not on a dare. No x needed to mark the spot.

My first real kiss, from a boy who was a sophomore(!) in high school, whose affections made me feel like the prettiest girl on Earth. Whose cologne I can still sometimes smell when I dream of my hometown. Whose mother and father and brother I’d still recognize in any crowd.

Take me back to my first job other than babysitting, at an ice cream parlor, my freshman year of high school. I was young, thin, clueless. I ate ice cream unabashedly during every shift, blissfully oblivious that I’d vow to never eat sugar again 14 years later when my mom was diagnosed with cancer.

Take me back to the bliss. Take me back to the oblivion.

I want to hug and shake the girl that I once was, to scream across the years, “You are lucky. You have a damn good life. You will miss this place.”

Three transatlantic years, then life in three different states has taught me this: all of adulthood is a search for people who will love you and stand by you like the people you knew when you were just a kid.

And I will always miss _____.

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The language I’ve used is inadequate, but after writing about how much I miss home on and off in my diary for the past 2 years, I’ve decided to share this approximation of the experience. I know it needs some structural help, as the first section goes in chronological order from elementary school to high school and then I jump back to 8th grade in the section below.

Maybe I’ll polish it at some point. Maybe I’ll simply send it out to the universe with a prayer.

I’ve written about it at some point on this blog, so please guess where I’m writing about if you feel like having some fun!

And to make it really easy, here’s a picture of my undergrad graduation day:

Thank you for stopping by, and thank you for sharing!

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