People call it a midlife crisis.
I’ve never liked the word. A crisis sounds like a sports car, or a sudden haircut, or someone leaving.
What I feel is closer to homesickness.
The strange kind, where you’re homesick standing in your own kitchen.
The house is still the house. Same rooms, same windows. But it’s quieter now, and I hear the quiet the way you hear a clock after it stops.
My mother is gone. My father is gone.
With them went the two people who knew me first. There are questions I never thought to ask them, and now I can’t.
That’s homesickness too. Missing a place you can’t go back to, because the place was a person.
My daughter is in college now. For most of her life, she wanted to be wherever I was.
Now I’m the one who wants to be near, and the calls are shorter. It breaks my heart every time.
Maybe that’s the hardest kind of homesickness. The person is still here. I hear her voice whenever she has a minute. But the place she used to be, close enough to need me, is somewhere I can’t go back to.
I won’t pretend I’m fine. I’m not, not yet.
The life I built everything around has changed shape, and I’m still working out where things go. I’m heartbroken. I’m also proud of her. Both are true.
I keep reaching for things that aren’t where I left them.
Nobody warned me about this part. That you can miss a time while you’re still living in the years that came after it.
The cure for homesickness has always been the same. You learn the new place slowly, street by street, until one day it starts to feel like yours.
I’m still learning this one. But I’m learning it.
Have you ever felt homesick without going anywhere? Tell me in the comments. And if this one stayed with you, subscribe below so the next one finds you.