Homesick

Though I feel little pangs of sadness and homesickness for the places I love, it is a comfort to know that they are there. Not only can I mentally walk the streets of Lake Bluff, noting the familiar cracks in the sidewalk, and admiring the street corners where the leaves are surely burning red this week, but even as I write, people are walking those streets, the leaves crunching beneath their feet. Some of them are strangers, but others are so dear, the lines on their faces as familiar to me as the cracks on the sidewalk.

I remember visiting West Palm Beach after graduating and after breaking up with Jordan. It felt so empty; so hollow. Like seeing Nana lying in the hospital bed after she died. It wasn't her anymore. West Palm Beach felt like a body void of its soul apart from the people who made the place so dear.

It is the people that make the place what it is, yet it is not people I have missed since moving to Germany. I miss the places. I miss Lake Geneva's silky, warm waters. I miss Breckenridge, with its crisp mountain air and sunny skies. I miss Captiva and the familiar crunch beneath my feet as I walk to the beach on streets made from crushed bits of shell.

Lake Geneva, Wisconsin

Garden of the Gods, Colorado Springs

Captiva Island, Florida

Vail, Colorado

This is not a new phenomenon for me, this missing of places. Freshman year of college in Florida, I plastered my walls with pictures of my beloved Lake Bluff. Sophomore year, I longed for the warm beaches of Florida, as I spent a semester studying in Colorado. Junior year, my desk was adorned with pictures of Colorado...

Garden of the Gods, Colorado Springs

 

Lake Dillon, Silverthorne, Colorado

I am often longing for...elsewhere. Dreaming of the day when I will return. And when I do, it's not long before the elusive desire for elsewhere grabs me again.

Is that why I wander?

South Park, Colorado

“If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy,
 the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”
--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
 

Perhaps that is the reason I long for elsewhere...

...I am homesick.