Homesick is a verb

Because I like lists and the type of certainty they offer, I have taken to making them again, in the same way I have taken to doing other things again. Lists, people would say, are largely harmless. They would say this, if say they were ignorant of the content of the lists.

If say, you were to think the lists were names of places you have visited over the last 12 months, they might say how nice, how lucky. If say, these lists were divided into cities, towns and rural places; if say I were to have visited 23 cities, 6 towns and 4 villages and if say that list were to exclude where I live, you might begin to do the maths and think that sleeping in 33 different places over 52 weeks might begin to look like strange, even bad maths, the type of maths that might mean when I do wake in my own house, in my own bed, I am beset by the type of panic previously reserved for other places, a type of panic that means I lie there for a time, unable to know where or why I am where I am. A type of panic that takes an hour at least to abate. The type of panic that might give rise to other lists.

These other lists, if they were to exist, would be simple lists. These would be entirely harmless lists listing what I have eaten in a day. They would be short lists. At times these lists might contain only liquid. If say these lists were to exist at all.

You make other lists too. Some of these lists, you don’t remember making. In bold you have written, I would like to know what we are scared of. You think of this we in the same way as the we in Bill Callahan’s Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle - perhaps it is an accidental we, perhaps not. Other lists, you made when you left the forest and forgot how to see yourself in a mirror - it is 8 am and I have seen myself five times; there comes a point you must consider the themes of your life - not what you want them to be but what they are; you must become a small factory (disregard the rest) and so it goes.

I list all the places I have been this year, and the second to last place I was, I stood thinking of my great grandfather standing in the same docks, watching the sunset perhaps like I was that evening, but me spending the day just a normal day but him getting on the boat leaving for South Africa, and how could he hold that in his mind’s eye, a whole different continent, had he even seen it in atlases, were there even photos for him to look at, or had he just got himself into the type of trouble he needed to leave? How to leave for somewhere you don’t even know how to imagine. How to leave a sunset like that, without knowing what came next.

I am good trouble. I am good at leaving. I suspect I have only become good at both because I am not naturally given to either. I stood there thinking of him, watching the kind of sunset you only get in the west.

Recently, I have been missing everything again. The problem with missing one thing is that missing one thing only leads to missing another thing and this another thing leads to missing the rest, until all you are is made of is missing parts. You are at a party in Turin when you are beset hard and heavy by this missing. You like to think you have mitigated this missing with handsome wealthy men and stolen gin. These things make for a good story but like most things that make for a good story, they are far from the truth. You are in a castle, and it is a particularly beautiful castle full of particularly beautiful people who happen to be particularly brilliant. The chances are on that night and every night really, you can pass for neither. You balance your gin tonic as you walk the stone stairs of the castle to the rooftop where there are many authors you recognise, and possessing neither the wit nor the energy to talk to them, you light a cigarette and look out over the city hoping you appear aloof or even enigmatic, instead of simply strange. You sit with the noise and the crush around you, the intellect and the ideas, thinking of the only person you really want to be talking to. You think of how they’d make you laugh, and, trying to dispel them in the truest sense, in that you are using all the magic you have ever known to forget them, you recall the stupid quote from Catcher in the Rye painted on the stairs you just climbed don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody. And it doesn’t matter if you first read that at twelve years old, the night of a thunder storm, lying face down on your bed, that summer you read everything you could, with the windows open and the hot breaking air coming in, it’s still true, don’t ever tell anybody anything. It becomes important you turn yourself into a citadel again. One built to keep everyone else firmly out.

Or maybe it does matter that you first read it then because all of a sudden reading this quote again, you start missing everyone. You start and you don’t know how to stop. That’s why you stopped telling anyone anything; why you stopped missing everyone, in the hope you’d never start again. That’s why you do things like move all the time, just to say look how good I am at it. That’s why you deny your appetite, just to pretend you’re not hungry all the time. That’s why you don’t stand in the docks in a city like Liverpool, say, and look out over the Mersey, thinking of the last person in your family who did the same. That’s why you don’t think about migration routes, of birds and people, of ships and planes, that’s why you don’t message a friend you trust with an idea of a book you are definitely not thinking of writing, and when they reply it’s a great idea, you’d be crazy to try, you do not think of it as an invitation, a gauntlet thrown.

You never could say no to a dare.

When you are split between two continents, two races and two religions, it is hard to know where home is. It is hard to know if you are wholly anything at all. Easier to stay half than to reconcile anything, even if the recent lists indicate the necessity of trying to solve this problem. Even if homesickness seems to have become a verb in the sense it is acting on you, in that it does things to you, in that you are sickened by the lack of home, pining perhaps for a place you knew and another place you have not yet known, even if you miss your grandfather’s films with a hunger you knew and hoped yourself not capable of again, films you watched in the summer, films tinged with the colour of memory now, VHS tapes where you crawl across the floor, trying to escape his lens, your voice one you hardly recognise, even if when your cousin tells you of the veld and the monotony it brings, all you want is just to go home, back there, wherever it is, just for an afternoon, although if you did, if you were able to, you’d never leave. You’d love everything you hated, you’d love the place you only ever wanted to escape, you’d eat the dinner you cut up into smaller and smaller pieces on the plate, you’d watch the sunset and not think of dying, you’d get in your dad’s truck and let him turn his bad music up, just once, just again; you’d do what you were told, just to be home, just for an afternoon at least, like a Swallow, just flown in for a time.