being away from home is sometimes difficult. and you crave familiarity and just all around comfort. so much so that you sometimes do strange things. you eat too many tootsie rolls because even though there is chocolate here, it just doesn't compare to a tootsie roll. you look through old pictures. you constantly check your email to see if you have messages from people back at home. you snuggle up and take a nap with your ratty stuffed animals even though you are an independent 21-year-old. you write messages to your friends about inside jokes in an attempt to feel closer to them. you decide to make pancakes at ten o'clock at night because you just want to eat something familiar, something that tastes like home. you read student news even though none of it really applies to you. you have your computer set up to check the weather back at home even though it is 3,800 miles away from where you are. you download podcasts from gordon because the sound of familiar voices is comforting. you love getting emails from your mother about nothing in particular, just the regular daily ins and outs of life back at home because it makes you feel not so far away.
And then when you come home and you've been back in the U.S. for awhile, you make your desktop a picture of your house in Peru with pics of your host family photoshopped onto it because you miss them. You make lomo saltado for your grandparents and buy a bottle of pisco for $25 just to make pisco sours. You plaster your wall with pictures of everyone you met in Peru - you're favorite memories. You drink tea with lime juice in it when you're sick because you know that's what your host family would give you. And you watch episodes of Al Fondo Hay Sitio even though you never saw it while you were in Peru because you know that everyone there loves it and they speak in your Peruvian slang. You frequently check how much flights to Lima cost and read your old blog posts.
ReplyDeleteWhy can't we just be in two places at once?