homesickness, dealing with absence

for two months now by my own volition, i have been alone in the north of france. i am here on a three month exchange program, doing school full-time and living with a host family in a town of about four-hundred people, going to school in a town of not much more. i am alone in the world for the first time, and on the phone my dad asks me, expectantly, warmly, well, do you feel grown up? i reply that i am lonely. do we both understand it as yes?

homesickness has always been defined to me as a kind of desperation; an incessance of longing to come home and be whole again, and that it is a natural part of separation from a place associated with memories of comfort and love. i’ve been told numerous times that homesickness is best treated by distraction in your new home, picking yourself up from the pit to dwell; do not give it time to fester. do not pick up your phone too often, or look at photos from home. this sensation of ‘homesickness’ has been a pining familiar to me since i was young, a displacement and alienation, and yet situationally, it is completely unlike all other emotions. i have felt here that at times, this homesickness has the physical potency and mass to completely dominate all other feeling, leaving just you and it, almost like you’ve born a new consciousness. at home, i find the similar pining void can be appeased with a simple negotiation, for there is something more basic and logically lacking. it is an intelligent void of the same breed of it’s more greedy brother ‘homesick’, and normally, although it cannot be solved with bathing or buying myself something nice, i reason with it’s complexity while i search for solution, and i hope it will give me time before it knocks me out from under myself. in the past, it has been filled with a change of priority, by inspiration from nature, and by being in love with something—this will eventually solve some kind of exhaust or negation within me that causes the void. but what i am lacking here is a fundamental: a vital love found only in belonging to community.

this sense of community is something i see around me every day, which is how i have managed to pin-point it to myself as missing. the joy of real community is that it is simply, and by all means, there. Aristotle first defined community as ‘[a] group established by men having shared values’. the definition has grown beyond this, of course, but perhaps aristotle’s definition does establish a basic foundation for the term, which has since grown into variations. ‘variations of community’, meaning it does not mean you lack community if for example you do not speak with your neighbors when you already have community in interest, people in a club or who bond over a bi-weekly activity or even people who understand and share generally, illusively your same interests; that is defined ‘community’ as well. in community you find understanding, reciprocation, and love. here, i am short of this. i find these things without looking when i am at home, for it is rhythm of way and precision of love; not politeness, not niceness, not newness.

i find community in stumbling out of my bedroom in the morning to my mum, who wants to hug me and ask me if i slept. in waking up from the sound of my brother in the kitchen, ravenous for food, eating with him in the night. i find community in delivering my neighbor’s wandering dog back to the front door, or letting our two dogs greet each other for we walk at the same evening hour. i find community in my school, where i see people i have known for a decade and ask them about the gossip spreading between our mothers’ tight-knit group of friends. in my teachers who are also my mentors, and who i am indebted to. it is in my dad and i at the fireplace, drinking and crying. community i find in driving past buildings i have seen my whole life, and knowing the names of streets before checking the signs. checking them anyway. good, they’re still there. community is in my two little dogs who know my nose and the backs of my calves as their own, who recognize it with their whole being. it is found in the school coffee shop where i am not allowed to go, but the owners give me my order now without asking my name, and say it loud as they hand it to me; like i am also hearing it again for the first time. in my closest friend who i hold easily like a curtain, peeling and delighted at the world’s reveal each morning. it is found in my old places, where i used to sit and read, in the op-shops and the restaurants where i sat balling into my knees, and people came to check, because they only cared enough to know. here i am developing into a shallow, dewy girl with but no place to go.

this past week has been the only time that i’ve managed to identify this feeling and then label it very relatively as “absence of presence”, for there is not exactly something new, but something old which has been taken away that i know distantly of. it does not weigh on me so much as it is an empty and uninspiring, denoting grief, a dull hum in the background of all vision, and i call this feeling which now occupies the space taken once by place and belonging, absence. i am not altogether in agreement of the idea that homesickness implies, which i take to mean my longing is is so active that it disturbs me, for it is not. i do not weep about it or shudder about it or call, wishing to come home. it is active in my brain, but nowhere else. it is not reality, but a new brutal configuring of importance and priority that leaves me ultimately disoriented and drawing myself farther and farther back from this new life, despite efforts to run after chance and opportunity. despite my collective effort to be here, i feel withdrawn by absence. as i write this now, i cannot explain how, but this all feels highly spiritual. i am mastered by absence, following blindly and sheepishly and occasionally jumping in hopes to run fast enough away to escape it. i was under the impression a couple of days ago while walking around memorials in Verdun that at any moment it would be possible to leave myself behind in the bunker. i picked a purple flower and felt very powerful, for i knew it had grown from war and yet it would not survive my hand. i looked at it’s dismemberment and felt a stroke of luck and fear that i also no longer had roots; i am floating above ground.

absence responds to your questions with bluntness and unkindness, an instruction. i say, “will i be here forever? i do still have a home, don’t i?” and absence will tell you very courtly, you’ll wake up tomorrow and still be here. don’t think about all that now. my voice of reason is grossly insensitive, and i have no consciousness left to cry to; it wakes with me and dreams beside me. it makes me an empty, ragged thing to deal with. and after all, i am the one who must deal.

the view outside of my bedroom window

in the evening, i gawk out in a watchful silence, and pray speedily for the end of the day, talking only to vastness, and hope that the next will spare me of any more of my own vertical madness. but each day i wake to find it is only more difficult than yesterday, as it slows and bores me, dulls and maddens me; reminds me of life and it’s like i am in that horrible story about the man who plays music for the dead in the inferno—i cannot remember the philosopher—and they all cry in anguish for they are so desolated by the reminder of life and it’s beauty, their horror for spending it foolishly, and it’s like i am the idiot at the end of his own book, watching death approaching as he counts the seconds, preferring it, however grotesquely, to acknowledging life in all of it’s terrifying persistent beauty; i cannot remember now what dostoevsky’s point was. is it that we are all born blind of our rejection or is it that we are cursed never fully to open our eyes until we cannot? no more life.

in the evening, i listen to downtown by by petula clark. what do i wait for now, i think, what will fill me just enough to push me over the line into abysmal blue? clear-water, light rain, a field to rest on, a chest and just one eye open.

there is much to gain from this waiting, this ‘whatever there is’, this aloneness, i know, i know, and i will come back grateful to have ever felt so sub-human, for i already feel taught. i feel greatly resentful already for expectation and delusion, and i stave off madness like it is my calling. i feel exceeding loss for the self i leave behind with each day that passes, and i embrace my new body as the time moves with me; i know this grief is worthy. i say it in the quiet night hoping to raise the dead, hoping she will come back and tell me, “you are doing the right thing,” but there is none of that, so i must move on anyway. i must keep moving at least to forget, and wait to remember at the moment it begins to hurt less. is this the reality of loneliness? is this the reality of living without love? i am not sure. but it is the reality now, and so it is in front of me like a creature at the bed-head, waiting for me to decide, to breathe, run to turn the light on only to see there is nothing there—thank god—or to stay squeezing my thighs together tightly under the sheet, shuddering; back to absence. it is an impossible decision. i am the idiot after all.

days will become easier, too, and so it has, but grittier. life will slow down while hours will quicken. i will find rest in a bed that’s not mine soon enough. but for now, i have such horrible dreams; i wake tired, the day goes by uneasily, it is like trying to dry-swallow down a hundred pills with no water available. it’s painful. it’s impossible. i am here, and i am gone to them; what am i then? i reside with absence for company. i write i miss you after every message i send, and i write it at the end of every page of my journal that i can stomach. i whisper it to my selves. i rise to the thought of an ending i can see, and i hope and hope and hope that my absence does not stay ceaselessly after i have filled it with home again. like the rocking horse winner, i know that i am lucky, in cold cracks between my bones; but i am rocking madly back and forth, a plague on the lookout for god to pray. i await myself for a final answer but she is never listening.