Time away

When I was a junior in high school, I was accepted into a summer academic program, a sort of overnight camp for nerdy types, and my parents dropped me off and left me hours away from the house I grew up in. It felt huge. I spent six weeks living in a college dormitory and attending a class on African literature (of which I remember very little, so don’t ask), and by the fourth week, it felt like an adrenaline rush to the finish line, a tight-rope walk to when I could be home again. I still vividly remember, after getting home, standing upstairs in the hallway that led from my parents’ room to mine, running my hands over an old quilt that they hung on the back of a chair, and feeling like I could relax, like there was something in me that had stayed tightly wound for all those days and hours that could finally unravel a little bit.

It’s funny how, as you get older, big gobs of time feel so much less epic, and not much more than a drop in an expansive ocean. Six weeks now rushes by in the blink of an eye. We’ve been here for about one blink, and there have only been one or two fleeting pangs of homesickness. Home over the past ten years has been divided between so many places – my hometown, my college town, Philadelphia – but I’m lucky to be far enough away from the entire expanse of my country that I get to miss it all, in one fell swoop, every now and then. Technology makes it so easy to keep in touch with the people I’m close to, and to see them, so that most of the time I don’t feel so far away. But every once in awhile, something sets my head reeling just for a moment. Seeing pets over the camera is one of them. You can’t chat with pets, and when my sister’s cat makes her way into the camera’s view, I feel the distance a little bit more. When my mother’s dog looks pitifully at the talking computer that seems to know his name (before he scrambles away – he’s the sweetest dog, but he’s incredibly cowardly), I feel like tearing up, just for a second.

I was a frequenter of independent coffee shops first and foremost in the States, and I only ever went to Starbucks because I was desperate (and it was the absolute only place to get a warm drink in the independent-business-wasteland of a neighborhood where my job was located in Philadelphia), so when I saw that big, round, green and white glow during a recent trip to Antwerp, I was surprised at how jelly-legged I suddenly felt. It was a cold and overcast day, so I sat and had an Earl Grey tea. The smell evoked something vague and desperate, no specific time and no specific place, not even specific faces. But it was something melancholy that made me think carefully about where I was, and, just for a minute, reminded me both cruelly and sweetly of where I was not.