“You can go other places, all right – you can live on the other side of the world, but you can’t ever leave home.” — Sue Monk Kidd
It is June 1, 2018, and I am on my first flight home after 9 months and 18 days away. The clock is ticking, but I am uncertain of the actual time. All I know is that I am 3 hours and 6 minutes away from home.
………………………….. ~home~ ………………………………
I love the sound of it on my tongue and inside of my head. It’s a word that can get me either tearing up or smiling nonstop. Sitting by a window next to a lovely Cambodian couple, I find myself constantly staring at the time on the screen secretly wishing for just one thing that could possibly fast-forward to the moment when I am on the ground reuniting with my family whom I am certain are as positively anxious as I am in this moment. I do not normally have trouble falling asleep, no matter where or when, but ever since 5 this morning, I have been awake imagining what it feels like to hug my mother so tight I can no longer know how it feels to miss her every single day when we were apart and to look at my father up close and hear his voice without the reliance on the existence of internet connection.
I guess this is how it feels to sense a kind of happiness so close you can almost touch it, but you are unable to just yet. And you are afraid that if you are distracted, that happiness with slip through your fingers before you even have a hold of it. We all might have felt this at some points in our lives. We might have experienced how it feels to miss someone so much that we spend days and nights envisioning what we would say and how we would feel when we finally reunite.
2 hours and 51 minutes away
Whatever word exists to describe the overwhelming excitement a person feels to the point that he/she cannot even contain it within himself/herself would be best used to depict how I am feeling right now. I wish I could fall asleep and then wake up to the instant disappearance of this duration that stays between me and my family. It is said that there is no use fighting against what is beyond your control, let alone trying to defeat the beating clock.
45 minutes away
I still find it hard to believe that I am going to see my family in less than an hour. When I set my foot on the plane taking me to the US last year, I was taken away with an expectation of not returnig until graduation, but this is happening. I am looking out of the window. The plane is getting lower as the sky is clearing up and I can finally see the ground from up here. At some points, we expect happiness to derive out of complications, but it could lie within something as simple as this.
3 minutes away
For the past 9 months, I have seized every moment to do anything that brings me closer to home. It takes a bit of distance for you to appreciate what you had, for when you are too close to something, it is impossible for you to have the whole view of it. I loved it when people asked me about home, about where I come from. Yet some questions were just hard to answer without feeling a bit of pain in my chest. One of them was ‘Are you planning to visit home?’ ‘I wish I were.’ was always my response then but right in this moment I am whispering to myself……….
1 minute away
I am home.