The minutes after the conversation ends which you spend listening to the static of a cut connection, wishing that lonely sound would give back the loved voice, with any word to say but 'goodbye'.
That is when the ache sinks in, forcing you to diagnose yourself with that particular illness most often titled 'homesickness'. And the moment of diagnosis is when you feel, most poignantly, that whomever was on the other end of the line or whatever they symbolize is and will never cease to be your heart's home.
And you are not there. Not with them. Not in that house. Not within that sanctuary. Not home.
In fact, you are so far away you cannot consider return without also thinking of the funds, time, and opportunities that must be sacrificed to accomplish such a feat. And even worse is the inescapable truth that what you miss is not the only home of your heart. You now sit in another one that you will, given enough time, grow ill for when you are away from it.
It is the sad fate of humanity. The curse and blessing of all Adam's fallen descendants: to ever construct new homes for any place that their heart--for any significant expanse of time, affection, or struggle--finds rest. And thus it is our doom to ever be homesick, if we sit listening to the static long enough to think about it.
There is no turning back to the blissful contentment of childhood, once you cross the threshold from your first home out into the unknown. The greeting to that first adventure we so craved as children is also, in fact, a farewell to the people, place, and sentiments which will never again be our sole home. First home, yes. Only home? Never.
What then? Are we to ever wander, ripping our heart from one home to another until it is, at last, nothing but pieces? Perhaps. It could be that a broken (or at least divided) heart is the cost of real affection. True love knows no container--no boundaries--no one home.
Or doesn't it?
Perhaps all these homes are only a precursor--a taste--of what is to come. Maybe true love is testing itself, settling in every place it can in order to assure itself it has not, yet, found the home it was meant for. Maybe we are all homesick, but have not yet found that place we miss so dearly. Perhaps love was made to be restless, unsatisfied, and a little painful in this life, so it would never be satisfied with anything less than the life it is destined for. Maybe 'Home' is that unimaginable plane which we can scale to only through the hurts of this life and the inevitable end of death. Maybe Home is just beyond that curtain no living man can breach, and maybe...
...it's waiting.
"For now we see in a mirror dimly,
but then face to face. Now I know
in part; then I shall know fully,
even as I have been fully known."
~1 Corinthians 13:12
