Oftentimes, my weeks here are so filled - with homework, classes, socializing, reading, sleeping - that I'm not able to reflect as much as I'd like. February was a cold gray blip in time and for the first time since arriving here, I didn't leave this area once. I forget that I'm here, in England, away from home, that I do not go to Keele, that these humans I've befriended will be departing from me too soon. Maybe I'll be departing from them, since I'm leaving first. Ninety-three days feels like nothing and yet June feels so very far from here, where I am lying in the dark, putting off going to sleep of all things.
Today was the first day in a few weeks where I felt abundantly homesick. Here, I always am missing home, but not in an all day every day kind of thing, but today it resurfaced and I wanted to see my mom and dad and siblings and niece and nephews and my dog and my house. I want to take the people I have there and bring them here, wish I could double and be in two places at once.
England is a strange, funny place. I find something new to like every day and is blooming as spring comes. So thankful I am for having winter here, where it is mild and windy and wet instead of snowy and freezing. A few weeks ago I went on a walk around our campus because I had never really seen it since the fall was odd and the winter was cold. I feel like I wasn't here at all last semester.
Here, the clock changes later and Mother's Day is next weekend. The water is different and the sun is a stranger and flowers are sprouting everywhere. I can hear people all day in their rooms, singing and laughing and talking and wonder if they can hear me, too. My sense of style is stalling in the year I was born and there are less days until my birthday than I have been in England. I miss writing and have forgotten its simple pleasures and wish someone would lend me their characters so I could reignite that passion.
Already, I have read twenty books and I am writing this so I can sleep tonight. I am learning things about myself because I am a living cliché. I wonder what made me want to come here and am ever grateful for the perseverance that has brought me here, made me stay when it wasn't what I expected, that made me fall in love with this funny little place. I absolutely hate goodbyes but I love hello agains even more, and know now in March that I will be using that love to power through my goodbyes.
