Less than two weeks left. How did that happen? I mostly don’t want to leave. I love it here, and I’ve been enjoying myself far too much to have felt homesick. But I have been thinking a lot about going home over the last couple of days, mainly because of the practical things we’ll need to sort out like packing, distributing or disposing of things we can’t take home, you know the sort of thing. But also because I’m really looking forward to seeing my family. I had initially written that I am also looking forward to being back where things are more familiar, but I looking back on it I realised that that isn’t strictly true. I feel utterly comfortable here and the slight strangeness of it all is part of the appeal. But I am looking forward to seeing familiar people.
I was looking back over Everything but the Squeal, and came across this passage;
... it doesn’t matter what kind of life you’ve made for yourself away from home, how integrated you have become, how content you are in your foreign land. You’ll never entirely escape those subtle, inexpressible feelings of loss that assail you when you least expect them, fleeting memories of a place that formed and nurtured you, but which you can no longer see or touch.
and it reminded me of a bit from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where, in an unusually gag-free and earnest paragraph, Douglas Adams talks about the idea that we’re all attached to the place of our birth by a long, invisible string. The further we go from home, and the faster we move, the more the string gets stretched, but it can only stretch so far before it snaps. I suppose we need contact with the familiar on a regular basis or we’ll snap, so to speak. We’ve been lucky in that sense. For one, we have each other for support, which has made it all much less scary. But we’ve also had my mum and Jo’s sister come to visit, and those visits helped to remind me that the familiar world is carrying on without us, and that it will all be there for us to go back to when we decide we want to.
