Invariably it comes over her whilst out venturing in the big world, playing the Voyaging Visitor, the sudden and absolute, overwhelming inundation of wishing, just wanting so badly to be home again. Just that. Adrift in a World Class City so brimful of sights galore, awash with sites of inarguable Cultural Significance, not to mention Artistic Merit–she is filled only with mental foot-stomping at every proffered profound possibility.
Homesickness, they diagnosed it in children– understandable in kids away from home for the first time to camp or boarding school– expected even. She was always an odd one, never homesick, not then.
In an adult full-grown and even worldly, by some calibrations, the identical overmuch yearning ranks as idiosyncratic and really rather gauche, after all. Consider only the glorious display of delights that abound in excursion! Such a trove of occasion! But no. For this one the campaign amounts to a measure of ash on a tongue craving only sweet scent of rooms with no fragrance at all.
She recalls with a pang that absolute quiet of mornings, back there, stretching so richly expansive with sheer unobservedness, downright overflowing with freedom from… every last trace of potential judgment– which is it, after all, on some level. The vise of anxiety occasioned by daily, discursive exertion of behaving just so, of shaping oneself infinitesimally toward a perceived audience framed by grillwork of projected expectation. Oh, first world headcase’s burden in simply sharing space with other bodies–for all that a felt yoking tug into place of face pieces to form appropriate expressions for Agreeable Guest.
True pleasure travel– that lark! Oh, she knows! She has done it, by god. Travel that’s actually awesome, inspiring, and actively,vitally vibrant. Ooh, la la! Quelle jouissance! This, regrettably, entirely other occasion of travel, which should by all rights be enchanting, instead unfolds as an experience, internally, of crap. Actual versus experiential, to be sure, but here, somehow, now, all the warmth and kind hospitality in the world serves merely to rattle peevish nerves like links in a chain forged, doubtless, by her own perversity.
She feels unequal to company, unable to explain hipdeep dragging disinclination toward generalized delight, instead drifts dismal into shadow-silted corners, explores odd empty nooks in chilly cafes and cluttered libraries, hides herself out inside books, accomplishing hunkered achievements of invisibility. In this way she whiles away time, willing it to pass more rapidly onward, to bring her the sooner and faster back into arms of the beloved, back to the place where she lives as herself, known and familiar, returned awash with great gratitude, cured and home again.