Displacement 2.

I’m homesick.  And it really is a sickness - it affects the majority of my life over here.  I haven’t been at home for just under five years, not counting the summer I spent there in 2004, and it’s starting to tell inside me.  I read the blogs and look at the Flickr photos of friends in Portland with something twisting inside me.  I daydream - and dream at night - about being back there.

This probably sounds terribly melodramatic, and I know that you’re probably all really tired of me yammering on about this.  And, truthfully, I wouldn’t have believed that I could get like this from homesickness.  Sure, I was homesick for Texas for the first few months of college, but that went away.  This hasn’t.  There haven’t been but a handful or two of days since I left in 2003 that I haven’t thought about Portland. 

Part of me wonders why I ever left.  Okay, I know that, really, I left because I knew that if I didn’t go away for a while at that point, I never would, and I wanted to see more of the world.  But I didn’t intend to be gone this long.  And while there are some things that I am glad have happened, and overall I know I am a stronger, possibly better, person for having done all this, there are other things that I regret.  Also, dammit, I’m tired of being blue.  I feel constrained, restless, but know that there is no solution other than to wait and see whilst steering towards whatever of my future seems certain.  I’m not a patient person, not really.  And I worry about opportunities passing me by, perhaps irrevocably, while I’m sitting, waiting and seeing.