When You’re Homesick For A Person

When you’re homesick for a person, you realize that what you miss is not a place but the comfort of their arms, the familiarity of their touch on your skin. You don’t feel an ache to be where they are, necessarily, but be with them, making even the most foreign of places feel familiar.

When you’re homesick for a person, you’re not longing to return to any specific spot on the map or to relive a certain memory or feeling, but you long to remember the taste of their cologne on your lips, the softness of their cheeks, the way you felt so whole and at ease when they leaned over to you and brushed a loose strand of hair from your face.

When you’re homesick for a person, you just want to be with them—location irrelevant—because time stops with every kiss.

When you’re homesick for a person, it’s not about wishing you could return somewhere, not about boarding a flight or a train to travel to them, but somehow fighting space and distance to be somewhere in the same moment, wherever that may be.

When you’re homesick for a person, you’re constantly reminded of them, you’re forever imagining them standing next to you, you’re always picturing what it would be like if they were there, touching the small of your back or making you laugh over something silly.

When you’re homesick for a person, it doesn’t matter where you are, you never feel as if you belong without them by your side.

When you’re homesick for a person, you could return to the town where you grew up, to the city where you went to college, to the place with four walls and windows that you pay rent for every month, to the house where your parents are, to all the places and spaces you’ve claimed throughout the years, and still feel a nagging to be somewhere else.

When you’re homesick for a person, there’s a dull, numbing ache at the pit of your heart reminding you that there’s something missing when they’re not around.

When you’re homesick for a person, time passes slowly, each minute dragging into the next until you can finally hear their voice, a little reminder that they, too, are feeling the heaviness of every long day without you.

When you’re homesick for a person, you cannot make sense of why your life is so full and yet you sometimes feel so empty, why you are always in one place but wishing to be somewhere else, why you feel so lonely even though you’re not alone.

When you’re homesick for a person, you realize that your home wasn’t ever a place, but a connection, but a feeling, but a desire to be intertwined with someone physically and emotionally and spiritually and completely.

When you’re homesick for a person, you cannot find where you fit unless it’s with one another, making a dwelling in one another’s hearts, one another’s souls.

When you’re homesick for a person, you do whatever you can to bring yourselves together, to erase the space and distance and hours that have nestled between you. You learn how to love through the obstacles. You learn to make homes out of one another.

And you fall beautifully, terrifyingly headfirst into the arms where you belong.

Marisa Donnelly is a poet and author of the book, Somewhere on a Highway, available here.