230416 - Day 12

Ever since I left, I’ve felt this longing. Something like home-sickness. An absence. Only, it’s an illusion. What is absent has never been. Not in any larger form, anyways.
Which means this loneliness I feel, this longing, has no ready-made resolution. It’s just there. Letting it exist, I am frightened by its depth. It’s just emptiness. Vast.
I read this passage today, by David Foster Wallace. It made me cry.

I miss Vance with a fierceness we reserve for the absent who cannot return. … I miss Leonore, sometimes. I miss everyone. I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that’s odd, isn’t it, because I was home, all the time. What on earth are we to make of that?

I feel lost. Scared. I feel so caught up here, it’s like I’ve replaced one cycle for another. Yet thinking about leaving feels even worse. Sure, the cycle is more beneficial. And there’s certainly more stillness, here. Are we doomed like this, always in one cycle or another? The times I’ve tried to make my own, it has just deteriorated into something much too hedonistic and lazy. But I think I need space. Solitude. Time. I don’t know how to enter this space while active. Non-action. I get distracted. I guess it’s why I came here. It’s just… It’s so hard.

It feels like I’m just writing about the bad stuff. Of course most of it isn’t. It’s enjoyable. But these things aren’t worth writing about. Nothing yet, anyways. I look at myself and I don’t recognize who I’ve become. The things I’ve done, they make me proud. It still feels like I’m that scared voice in the back of my mind, that’s always shy and never wants to leave home. But here I am. It feels impossible, in a way. The force that’s taken me here, that couldn’t possibly be me. There is of course comfort. A home. We just have to remember the way. Breathe in. Breathe out. There you are. Here and now.