feeling listless

Home Karen, someone I met on the train said something which resonated last night. She said that when she finishes her University course, she wanted to move to the North West permanently, Manchester probably because she ‘felt at home, more at home in fact than were I’m from originally’. She said she didn’t feel homesick when she began her university course because everything felt right.

I was terribly homesick when I went to university. I cried almost solidly for two weeks, and my mum is particularly haunted still by one phone call which made her drop everything and come and see me in Leeds. At the time I knew I wasn’t homesick for Liverpool. Although I like Liverpool I don’t think I’ve ever been love with it – it’s a scary place to go out in at night alone. I decided I was homesick for the creature comforts – having people to talk to who understood me and who I could relate to.

But rationalising now, think about what Karen said, I feel as though I wasn’t actually feeling homesick – what I was really feeling was a lack of security. The inability to look around and be in place or situation I can completely trust. Which somewhat twists the concept of home. Home in these circumstances – it becomes the way you feel in a circumstance, be it snuggling with your honey or watching a movie at a particular cinema. So while I feel something every morning when I go to work, something which feels like homesickness, it’s actually because I’m going to a place I don’t feel complete in. And the fact that Karen felt that completeness when she stood in the square near Manchester University proves how personal I thing this is. Home for me then, at the moment, is when I step though my front door at seven-thirty every night and know for at least the next twelve hours I’m completely safe.