Homesick

In the movie Almost Famous, there's a scene on the bus where Patrick Fugit turns to Kate Hudson halfway through singing "Tiny Dancer" with the band and tells her "I need to go home." She responds by mystically waving her hand in front of his face and saying "You are home."

Most people who see this watch her and think "God she's so free and beautiful, if only I had been abducted by a mediocre band in my adolescence and gotten a chance to write for Rolling Stone and meet Kate Hudson..." But for some reason, my reaction was more along the lines of "You're not home! You're a minor and you're around a lot of unsafe shit and you should go home, regardless of how crazy your mother is! Don't fall for the groupie, you idiot!"

This is kind of what my homesickness is like. I'm really enjoying my surroundings and it feels dream-like to be this far away and this liberated. The most interaction I have to have with my parents is the occasional e-mail which I can choose to read whenever I want to. Ex-boyfriends, college counselors, and small fights that have been replaying themselves for years in the same friendships are so far away. But I still know in the back of my mind that this is not home and - regardless of how unpleasant things back home can be at times - I am really starting to miss having such a firm grasp on everything and being able to predict it all. None of this is familiar or comforting, and I still feel uncomfortable interacting with strangers in a language that I'm still convinced high school teachers invented to stretch our minds. I'm starting to think about everything I'm so far away from, which is really making me miss it. No matter how familiar this all gets, it's still going to be really foreign. At least I don't have to put up with Kate Hudson or other free spirits yet.