It's taken a while, but in the last week or so, the tug from home has pulled hard enough that it's starting to ache. I miss home. And home isn't even a specific place anymore; it's where the people I care about are, wherever you are (and of course you're all dispersing/growing up as fast as you can). I knew when I left that what I was leaving behind wouldn't be there when I returned. Whatever awaits me may be good, as good, but it will be altered, different, and I will miss what I left behind.
It's complicated and tricky leaving, or in fact staying, or indeed just existing, because every beautiful, joyful moment is fleeting; echoes with, 'this too shall pass'. Living is an exercise in faith that more beautiful moments and people will come, in waving goodbyes as you laugh a hello at whatever is next. Life is an exercise in simultaneously embracing and letting go. It makes the difficult moments more bearable, but it makes the beautiful moments bittersweet, laden with nostalgia even as you experience them. That moment in the early morning, when the light is so soft, and the sun's fingers are creeping across the sky, and it's quiet, a pregnant silence, as we teeter on the cusp of another day, and it's just so breathtakingly exquisite that you want it to stop so that you can revel in it forever, but you know that the next moment will be equally breathtaking and yet different.
When I get homesick, I do a few things. I practise some gratitude: I'm homesick because I have people at home worth missing, and I'm homesick because I'm halfway across the world doing something I never even dreamed I would be able to do. Salt cures everything, be it sweat, tears or the sea. Apple with almond butter helps, for some reason. I write a letter or an e-mail. I just write. I look at photographs (although this sometimes makes it worse). I find my new friends and spend time with them laughing or ranting about the state of the world. I find the centre of the melancholy and I sit in it and let it pass through me. I study. I read.
It's starting to sink in that the downside of being a rolling stone is that you gather no moss. If I want to keep on moving, and exploring, if I want to work all over the world, it will come at a price. I'm trying to figure out if I'm actually the sort of person who can just pick up and ship off and be happy away from home, or if I'm actually more of a homebody and less of a gypsy than I would like to believe. Everyone likes to think that they could just pick up and become a mysterious, wandering gypsy, right? Can we though? Maybe I could for a while, but there is something attractive about putting roots down somewhere, about not being permanently in a state of motion. Then I think of sitting in the same job or place year in, year out, and the idea makes me feel instantly claustrophobic and bored. I have permanently itchy-feet-wanderlust and generally insufficient resources with which to scratch the itch.
I suppose being twenty-something and confused is par for the course.
'Run free, fearless into the future.'
Harder to do than it looks.
Anyway, enough navel gazing. I'm reading 'The Wretched of the Earth'. I'm riding my bicycle to school and to yoga and to kickboxing. I'm kickboxing, although it's more box than kick. I'm trying to keep a lid on ice-cream intake. I'm thinking about racism/homophobia/gender/discrimination and how absurd all of these social constructs and their very real dimensions are. I'm pushing as much information into my brain as I can squeeze in; it's beginning to feel like an overladen washing machine. I'm thinking about South Africa, and what I could possibly do to help, and trying not to feel totally overwhelmed by the monolith of trouble ahead. I'm missing all of you, and looking forward to evermore news and text messages and pictures. I'm thinking of my brother, who's about to start writing his matric exams, and I'm so excited for him and sending him so much love and luck. I'm wondering when everybody got so old. I'm preparing for my class presentation on the Treatment Action Campaign, and feeling angry about the failure to halt the raging HIV epidemic back home. I'm trying to come up with a paper topic for my sexual politics class - something about how heterosexual men and boys are being left behind in the feminism movement, maybe with regard to the way that HIV prevention is often directed at women and not men. I'm wondering how there are still countries that don't permit abortion, even to save the mother's life. I'm struggling to understand how it was ever okay to try and control women's bodies. Or men's bodies. I'm researching my paper on prison rape in the U.S. and looking at the measures they've put in place to prevent it, and wondering why the hell Texas thinks it's doing enough to stop prison rape given that 5/10 of the worst-affected facilities in the country are in Texas. Thinking. Lots of thinking.
That's all from me. Love and miss you all implausibly much.
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