HOMESICK

I am homesick.

I lie in curled up in blankets on the couch that I bought myself, the first piece of furniture that can truly be called mine. I am snuggled up in the warmth and safety of this little flat that is all mine, with its crooked walls and slopping eves, its peculiarly shaped windows and doors that don’t quite fit. It is perfectly imperfect. It is mine. During the day, this building shakes from the crashing and hammering of the workmen below, but now in the darkness, it is still. Outside the rain pounds down, hammering against the fragile windows, demanding to be let in. It thunders down upon the roof, drowning out the sound of the cars driving along the street below. The wind howls down the chimney coughing little flurries of soot onto the hearth. Despite this onslaught the little flat prevails and I wriggle further down into the blankets and listen to the oddly reassuring cacophony of weather.

My first flat.

My little haven of safety.

My home.

And yet.

I am homesick.

I am homesick for the rooms and spaces that are no longer mine. The roofs that shelter what is now someone else’s home. Homes, that were I to stand inside their walls, would no longer feel like home to me, rather a strange jumble of bricks and mortar.

I am homesick for the house I barely remember, the winding wooden staircase, the shaft of light darting across the bedroom floor. For the red brick house with its red tile kitchen. Its two gardens, one filled with trees and hedges, the other hiding a small blue wooden house. Its shiny new conservatory where we saw in the millennium and covered the fading Christmas tree with the stands of party poppers. The sink where I stood on a stool ‘washing up’ and making soapy ‘cappuccinos’. For the house that was a stop gap, a maze of precarious staircases and forgotten Christmases. For the ramshackle old farmhouse where I did most of my growing. The groaning pipework, the squeaking doors, and the long lost ability to tell who was walking up the stairs just from the way the old wooden boards creaked. The sound of claws screeching against slate tiles as the aged puppy frantically answered the call of the clunk of gate and the crunch of gravel, perpetually followed by the crashing sound of her shoulders ramming into the back door as she stuck her great daft head out of the cat flap to welcome the wanderer home.

I am homesick for houses that weren’t mine but felt like they were. The warmth of the Aga, the dogs on the rug, the dens in the garden, and evenings in the snug. The dinners parties with a jumble of extended family, who weren't really family at all, but yet were. The evenings only recently lost when we would squeeze five people into one bed fending off the cold with chatter and laughter or sometimes just a contented silence. The days when we would hide under the duvet, watching films and avoiding work.

I am homesick for the town where I grew up. With its shortcuts and ginnels and secret pathways. The estates I still get lost in and the faces I know that belong to people I don’t, those ever familiar strangers - the butcher, the baker, the wedding dress maker. The hideouts of our youth and the pubs of our present. The minty smell of the factory and the grassy smell of the meadows. The back lanes and farm tracks and towering landscape. The place where I cemented lifelong friendships with friends who no longer live there. The deserted fellside and the views from the summit, the in-between hours when the rest of the world was still deep in slumber and the roads were empty and canal path seemed mine and mine alone. Driving down those winding valley roads will forever feel like coming home.

I am homesick for the holiday houses we made feel like ours. Where we escaped from the real world and built a fantasy land. Big kids’ sandcastle building competitions, short cuts through sand dunes that got us all lost, battle re-enactments on ruined walls, and walks whose only purpose was the pub at the end. Fruitless fishing trips and dropped ice-creams. Card games and make shift tea pot shaped decanters. The summers spent under canvas. Temporary homes in temporary places. Long days and short nights. Rising early and settling late. A just so cosy tent in a mishmass canvas village. A band of pirates, fairies, and tribal beasts. A family of adventurers.

I am homesick for the places I have not yet been and the places I will never go, but most of all I am homesick for the house I long to return to. The home I haven’t been in for eighty eight days, and won’t be in for another thirty eight – not that I’m counting. A whole four months and three days between visits, and even then it was only for a night, a resting stop between two journeys. I long for the cosy front parlour, the warmth of the cat on my lap, the mug of tea on my hand and the fire in the grate. The overflowing bookshelves, the distant whir of the coffee grinder, the music floating down the stairs, the quiet contented hum of a house that I will always call home.

As I as sit here, on my sofa, in my flat, at my permanent address, surrounded by all my things, things that make a house a home - I don’t really feel at home at all.