August Arrived

I don’t know what happened but August arrived, just a flip of the calendar and I couldn’t stop this feeling of wanting to cry. I’m kind of an emotional person, so to those who know me this isn’t the biggest of surprises but it was still there, just hanging around in my chest. So I Skyped home because that tends to help and my brother excitedly got hold of my mom’s phone and went, “Amielle, you’re home in 29 days. I know that because yesterday it was 30 and tomorrow it’s 28 but in 29 days you’ll be home,” and that helped but again it didn’t because all I wanted to do was run back to Madrid and board the next plane out and just be home already.

I realize I am beyond lucky and fortunate for these last two years and I can already feel this ache growing inside my chest when I think about not being in Madrid in the fall, of not getting to go out for coffee with Alex or using my metro pass to slide through the barriers or not watching Real Madrid with Melissa or…or….or and the list is endless and if I’m missing it all now, I know it’ll be worse when I get back home and there’s no practicing Spanish with waiters and random people on the street, when there’s no gaspacho on the menu or pintxos to nibble on or tapas with my beer.

Travelling is the best thing I’ve ever done and I love it and want to do it more and more and more but man, it’s painful. It’s leaving parts of myself all over, of wanting to hug all of these things and people close to me and stick them in my carry on and bring them home, spread them out on the table for my family and try and get them to understand. It’s wanting to be here in Calahonda and there in Madrid and back in Sweden and once again in France and still in England and a little longer in Prague but definitely back home in Saskatchewan, all at the same time. It’s sending postcards home of every place I’ve been and trying to send that feeling back home to them while wishing that they were here with me to experience it with me. That’s a lot of feeling to have crammed into my 160cm of person and some days I want to rewind and do it over again and others I just want to fast forward and finally be home.

Of course, I’m trying to just shake it all off and enjoy my time on the beach and eating fresh fish and drinking tinto de verano like it’s water (well, kind of) and my time volunteering at the charity shop and reading as many books as humanely possible, but under all that ‘soak it all up while you can’, there’s still the undercurrent that keeps whispering, “Home, home, home,” and then I can’t help mentioning my mom, my dad, my brothers, my sisters in conversations whenever I can.  I don’t know how to reconcile wanting to be here with wanting to be there and I don’t know if it’s possible but I’m trying to get them to be at peace with each other, for my sake, because it’s tough.

So August has been spent trying not to cry over Snapchats of my siblings playing cards together that I save to my phone like a crazy person or trawling through pictures of Madrid and London and Lyon and Prague and Lund. It’s trying to decide if it’s alright to want the month to speed by so I can finally go home and if that counts as me being a traitor to the feeling of wanderlust. It’s accepting that I want to go home but that I’ll also want to leave again, even though the thought feels impossible right now and that things will have changed in ways I’m not able to understand right now and that I have changed in ways that my family may not have anticipated and that it’s going to be a lot more than just landing in Regina and seeing nine faces that I have missed more than words can possibly explain, but that that moment of landing and seeing those nine faces is the only thing I really want right now, even if everything before and after that moment is complicated, that moment is what is what’s making everything else bearable.

Today it’s 18 days until I’m home. Yesterday it was 19 and tomorrow it’s 17 but today, today it’s 18. One day at a time.