Homesickness

On By The Homesick Homecomer

I’m currently wading through what I’m calling “a dark night of the soul.”

Maybe it’s the time change after we “fell back” earlier this month.Maybe it’s the starkness with which the seasons change up here in the mountains.

Maybe it’s the antiepileptic medication.
Maybe it’s the 55-gallon drum full of trauma that I’m dragging around while I try to dig to the bottom of it all, understand my feelings, and clear it all out.
Most probably, it’s a combination of all the above.
I spent my first year back here convinced that I would feel more at peace once we found a house. Okay, that’s not exactly true. I spent our first three months here thinking we had a house, then I spent the nine months after that trying to find a house. That was the prize that I kept my eye on. Just find a place to live, and everything else would sort itself out. Eventually (almost a year to the day after we moved), we closed on the house we’re living in now.
Then I was diagnosed with epilepsy, which means I can’t drive for at least a while.
Then Gomez and Elroy met a deer in the middle of the highway and almost rurnt my little car.And the hits just keep coming.

Seeing how happy Elroy was here and seeing Gomez flourish at his job were enough to sustain me through a solid year of the three of us living out of one bedroom, but I don’t know how much longer that sustenance will last.

I’m homesick, but my homesickness isn’t for one specific place.

I’m homesick for a pre-mined Yates Gap that doesn’t have a clear view to where my grandmother’s house used to sit and for a Fremont that doesn’t smell like the sulfuric pits of hell.

I’m homesick for our old house because that’s where I watched Elroy grow up.

I’m homesick for my life before I came back “home” – when distance was the reason I felt like we were always on our own because the truth is that absence is a choice, and the truth hurts so much.

I’m homesick for the option to shop from more than one grocery store, for a Wal-Mart that doesn’t take the better part of an hour to get to, for decent healthcare that doesn’t require taking a sick day and spending three and a half hours on the road to access.

I’m homesick for our barely-middle-class life, for a time when the idea of having to pay for braces for Elroy or a routine oil change or an annual property tax bill didn’t send me into a “how are we going to make it this month?” panic.

I’m homesick for the anonymity that living in a larger (relatively-speaking) area provides. That way, I could seize out in school in peace without having to assure my mother months later that I absolutely did not have a stroke despite what “everybody” says.

And despite all of my backward-looking sadness, I know that we have to make this work. We chose to move here, out of everywhere in the world, and we don’t have the option to change our minds now.

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