The Distance Between My Heart and My Home – Part 4
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
Separation by W.S. Merwin
Homesickness is generally defined as ‘a feeling of longing for one’s home during a period of absence from it’. In the US, homesickness is most often associated with a child’s first experience at sleepaway camp.
They’re away from home for the first time in their lives and they miss their parents/pets/home, sometimes to such an inconsolable degree that they have to be picked up early, sobbing and begging to go home.
But homesickness can strike us at any age, in any place. Whether we’re on a lengthy overseas trip or just visiting a friend for the weekend, an unexpected pang of missing home can stop us in our tracks.
I’ve been living in NZ for almost two years now. I’m finding my rhythm and building a life here: a phenomenal partner, a job I enjoy, a lovely community, and immense beauty everywhere I turn.
Yet when people ask me if I’m ever homesick, my response is always the same: I don’t miss my home; I miss my people.
I’m very close to my parents, share a best-friend bond with my younger sister, and have many close friends. And I miss them all so, so much.
The longing is reciprocal, as my loved ones back home are also struggling with the distance. It helped immeasurably when my partner came home with me for two weeks last year and my family and friends could finally meet him, and it will help even more when people can eventually make the trek over here. The vast majority of my friends have never been to NZ, so they can’t visualize what my life here looks like. Just for them to see my home, my town, the estuary walk they’ve seen in photos; all of these things will help my world become real to them. They’ll have context. It will make the distance between us feel a bit less vast.
There’s also the mind-bending time difference between us to contend with. Massachusetts is either 16, 17, or 18 hours behind NZ depending on what time of year it is. Catching up with my loved ones doesn’t happen nearly as often as any of us would like it to, and when it does, it takes exhaustive planning: “Wanna talk Thurs? … Your Thurs or my Thurs? My Thurs won’t work … I can do Sun afternoon! … I can’t – your Sun afternoon is my Mon morning – I’ll be at work.”
Repeat ad nauseam.
Sometimes when I hang up from a long chat with someone back home, I feel a warm afterglow and am left smiling for a while.
Sometimes I feel empty. And sometimes I just cry. While writing in my journal recently about how much I long for the company of my friends and family, I flipped to a blank page and simply wrote:
“What do I do with all of this missing?”.
Because what do you do with it? I don’t want to move home; I really do love my life here. Yet I also don’t want to always carry this profound, aching sadness in my heart.
I haven’t found a solution, but I’ve found things that help. I video chat with my parents and sister every Saturday morning (our Saturday morning, that is; their Friday afternoon).
I swap voice messages with people on WhatsApp, since getting to hear their voices more often makes me feel more a part of their lives. We text little updates or sometimes just send a heart emoji. All of it says, “I love and miss you.” But of course nothing changes the fact that it would take me 24 hours and a lot of money just to hug them.
In French, “I miss you” is tu me manques, which literally translates to “You are missing from me.” In my case, it’s: ils me manquent – they are missing from me. Everything I do is stitched with their colour.
Words by Hilary Emerson Lay
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