homesick

it's true, i started this post an entire 18 months ago. in all honesty i couldn't change the date. so i'll just finish it off - and finally post it, for better or for worse.

it's january first, 2010. the first day of a new year, a new decade. and i'm sick, sick, sick right through and through. homesick.

which sounds ludicrous when you realize that i'm in my home state, living in a town i've lived in for something like 9 of the last 13 years, in a similar environment to what i'm used to, and only 70 miles from my actual home town. how can i be overwhelmed with homesickness, this close to home? how can the very marrow of my bones long for the salt air, the drops of rain falling through the conifer needles, the rush of coastal creeks riding high on winter rains?

i have a confession to make. i want to go home. i'm like a whiny child, looking for their mother!

and yet, to admit this - to acknowledge it - is a huge step for me. i want to go there. it's like i've been circling around it, avoiding it, for the past 18 years. but wanting to go home, i now realize, does not mean that i'm afraid of failure. it does not mean taking the easy way out. in fact, it might just be the hardest thing i could do.

because it's easy to be anonymous. it's easy not to have to invest in people you meet and places you see. it's easy to be the stranger.

that's the great secret to moving around all the time, i think - that it's so easy to be the stranger. if you don't mind being alone, then being the new person in town simply means not having any obligations, not having any ties, not having a whole lot of responsibility.

what's hard? facing who you were before, whether you liked it or not. facing people's impressions of you that they carved decades ago, and being strong enough to tell them how you've changed and how you want to be seen. working to change, for the better, an imperfect but beloved place rather than searching for a perfect but unknown one.

for me, leaving is easy. going home - that's hard.