This Is What Homesickness Feels Like

When you move away from home, you think that eventually, the memories will fade as you adapt to your new home. You think that eventually, you’ll forget all the chains that connected you to your old home as you keep making new memories and meeting new people.

But as time goes by, you remember everything more than ever, you start missing the things you took for granted back home. You start wondering about certain people and thinking about them at the most random times. You start wondering if maybe you should have told people things you were afraid of saying because now you don’t know if you’ll ever see them again and you start to question if moving was even the right decision. If maybe you should have stayed home because you can’t find yourself in this new city. You don’t really belong.

Because homesickness is not just a feeling, it becomes a lifestyle.

It’s seeing pictures of your friends every day and wishing you were them because you can’t stand missing another wedding, birthday, baby shower or any other special occasion.

It’s walking alone in the streets wishing your best friend was walking with you because you’ve had a horrible day and no one knows how to make you feel better.

It’s constantly fearing something will happen to your loved ones and you won’t be there for them.

It’s feeling lonely in a crowd because they don’t understand you and you don’t understand them.

It’s struggling to find someone who feels like home because no one knows how to make you feel safe and loved the way your first love did. The way anyone you’ve ever loved back home did.

It’s trying to accomplish your goals as soon as you can so you can go back home and finally live in peace.

It’s constantly wondering if you should give it all up and book a one-way ticket back home because you’re convinced more than ever that there’s no place like home.

It’s the incomplete joy when something great happens to you but you can’t celebrate it with the ones who really matter.

It’s comparing everything new to the old and suddenly it’s not the same. Suddenly, you appreciate the old and you wish you had known its worth sooner.

It’s learning every day that you can survive anywhere, but you can only truly live at home.

It’s finally understanding that the cliché ‘home is where the heart is,’ is not a cliché but the ultimate truth that people have traveled all the over the world and suffered to truly comprehend it.

It’s being patient because you know sooner or later, you’ll go back home because sometimes it feel like you never really left.

Rania Naim is a poet and author of the new book All The Words I Should Have Said, available here.