Homesick: Part 2

 The first time I felt like this, I was in the 7th grade. In a tent in a national park, surrounded by tigers and cricket warnings of the night and what lurked in the bush. I had an analog phone for emergencies and I called up my parents, crying quietly about wanting to be taken home. I didn't want to wake the others and let them see me like this.

The second time I felt like this, it was a different 7th grade, and I was being left in a boarding school. They're an object of pride where I come from so take it with a pinch of salt, yeah? It was my first night alone in a dorm of nine other boys, and all of us could hear each other sniffling in the dark. We pretended we couldn't hear each other. The illusion shouldn't break, at all costs.

I still called, crying, hiding, wanting to be back home. Until one day the tears stopped. Then the feeling ebbed away like paper boats in a rainstorm, crushed by the water and swept downstream. I still hid everything. Words leave scars and mine became habits in the way I didn't say things, making myself smaller, as if my volume was somehow equivalent to the abuse.

I never felt that way by the time I ended school and began college. New life, new chapter, new friends. The feeling was nowhere in sight, I carried myself with the experience of six years as a boarder. Home was never a place, it unravelled the longer I spent my time moving and going.

Until you. People talk about how people are home, and I've always scoffed or died of the cheesiness, and now the tightness in my chest mocks me. Six months since we said Hi and home became your arm around my neck. Bumping along in the metro, the way our palms become hot and sweaty whenever we hold hands and we have to let them part. Home became looking at you, your eyes, tracing my fingers across your undulating desire, burying my nose into your neck to memorise the scent of you.

You noticed how I move when your hand grips my neck, the way I bare it, daring you to bring your teeth closer to my lifeblood. Did you notice the shivers, the quivering breath. My body trembles, and the illusion breaks.

I used to perform for the men before you. With you, my mind scrambles, begging, begging all the while sunlight shines your back gold. Language fled my tongue and found expression in the scraping, desperate fingers across your back.

The way you held me, I cried out and wanted to shed tears but they wouldn't come. The ecstasy of a despair I had been holding in for so long that it had forgotten what an open door looked like, and it just stood there. It looked at you and turned into this feeling I have not felt in seven years and I still couldn't cry in your arms even though I wanted to.

The peace you balmed my soul with, what touch did you use? Which finger trailed where? 

Show me. 

Come back to me and do it again.

I have not felt this kind of heartache in a 

long 

long

time.

How much more can I say that I miss you, when what I really mean is you're home to me. Come back to me.

You're home, and homesickness shares a bed with me again.

For D., the love of my life.