As seems to happen every month, I have several different plans of what to write for my newsletter. I had a draft of an entry about restorative justice, how to understand it, and what it’s been teaching me. I had written down quotes and created an outline. However, that’s not what I will be writing about this month. A different reflection has emerged and felt much more pressing.
I have arrived at the October blues. The startling newness and rapid learning have begun to abate, and I am left to settle into ordinary rhythms. This leaves space for the small ache of loneliness and remembered loss to sneak into the hollow places of my schedule. The ease of a visit with a precious college friend highlighted the ways that life in Alamosa is hard work and uncomfortable at times.
I recently met with a pastoral counselor provided by MVS. I shared my story, my faith journey, and how I had ended up in Alamosa after a last-minute surprise shift from my plans to join a unit in Chicago.
She listened quietly then said, “Are you homesick?”
“No…” I mumbled, unsure of how to explain my complicated relationship with that word. You see, I’ve lived a lot of places… I don't really have a home.
Are you homesick?
No. I shake my head. I’m enjoying learning about a new place, my head is full of piles of new information, I’m beginning. You can't be stuck lingering in the past when you are starting again. As Edna Mode from The Incredibles says, “I never look back darling, it distracts from the now!”
Are you homesick?
No. definitely not.
“That's a lot of loss”, she says. I pause, the zoom screen capturing the frozen look on my face. I nod silently, the full weight of all I’d shared coming to settle back on me. I felt my shoulders sink under the weight. “Yeah,” I breathe out. The wooden chair creaks beneath my back.
Later that night I lie in bed on my stomach, a pillow tucked beneath my arms, the elderly fan spinning hazily in the corner of the room. I flick through the apps on my phone, my brain too heavy to pick up the book I've been meaning to read. Inevitably, each night, I open Find my Friends and stare at the map with its little bubbles. I feel like a sorceress, holding each precious loved one on my screen, as if in a crystal ball. I zoom in to see the street names, prowling like a jealous lover - are they at a friend’s house, are they driving from their work, are they at the public library? Sometimes I like to imagine that one of them is also studying find my friends, that we are both looking at the other person’s floating pin on the map, imagining what the other is up to.
I feel an invisible thread of longing pull at my heart, my soul stretched between each of these points like a thin skein of vellum stretched over a drying board. Surely if these points don’t release me I will rip to shreds, drawn and quartered like a medieval martyr. Do they feel this invisible pressure as well? Do they lie in bed on a Sunday afternoon thinking about me? My chest is tight, a letter from a friend threatens to unspool me. Her description of a Chicago crosswalk makes me close my eyes, the pavement beneath my feet covered in shattered glass.
I wake up from dreams where I am back home, crying to a friend about our time apart. My subconscious roams through my past, dredging up memories with a canal hook.
One weekend I lie bundled tightly in a sleeping bag, the narrow mat beneath me shifting as wind blows over the sand dunes. The stars are spilled out over the night sky, startlingly clear in the middle of nowhere Colorado. I never really noticed them when I lived in Chicago, and the trees in North Carolina often clouded my view.
I stare intently at Orion’s belt, the only constellation I can consistently identify. Each of my friends were also under this constellation, whether they knew it or not. I learned a few while ago that the light from the stars is several years old by the time it reaches our eyes, that the stars might no longer exist, absorbed by a black hole, their final particles of light reaching our eyes decades later.
I was warned last summer in a swath of reunions and weddings that I should soak in these moments because I would need them later. I return to them now, in this emotional winter, delving into the dark cellar and bringing out jars of memories. I empathize with the cucumber-nosed BFG, his walls stocked with dreams and memories. I hoard postcards, ticket stubs, pictures, small stones. I will need them later, a memory coming to me like a dove over the water, an olive branch clutched in its beak, I lean over the bow of the ship, fingers grasping at familiarity. Sometimes just knowing that someone out there understands me is enough. The olive branch comes in the form of a postcard, a rediscovered picture, a voice memo with questions, and a packet of curry in the mail.
I remember a walk by a creek in Illinois. The light is dappled over the path, a mote of dust caught in my throat making me cough. The stream is dry sometimes, Andrew says. Just rocks, twigs, dust. Other times, times like right now, the sound of running water moves through your feet, your lungs. The water always comes back. The stars are always there, even when you can’t see them, even when you are afraid all of them are actually gone, that the light is a lie, a trick of time, physics, and lightspeed.
I sit on a couch, an open bag of chocolate-covered pretzels at my feet. A blue light bounces around the projector screen. It better work out. I say. For any of this to be worth it. I need certain things to be true. I need to know that we all come back together in the end.
I hide my tears from a friend on the phone, the unsteadiness of my voice hidden by poor connection and road noise. I repeat my demands. Heaven needs to be real, I need to have all the people I love together again, in one place. She understands. But maybe, if it's that important, you can make it happen now. She reminds me of our dream of living in an apartment together. I shut my eyes. There is a giant bookcase and lots of plants, a sink full of unwashed dishes. My fault, a vice I haven't grown out of.
Are you homesick?
I sit down to read a book by Andrew DeCort called Blessed are the Others. Each chapter explores one of the Beatitudes. I arrive at Way-Station 2: Blessed are the grieving. I have to set the book down. Just the invitation and permission to grieve cracked me open. I had been trying to outrun my grief, but it caught up to me. DeCort weaves in the words of Etty Hillesum. She writes, “Give your sorrow all the space and shelter in yourself that it’s due, for if everyone bears their grief honestly and courageously, the sorrow that now fills the world will abate.”1
Tears flowed down my cheeks, the sadness expanding within me. I had pushed aside my loss, putting on blinders as I plunged into a new place. I had thought the best way to enter in was to leave behind everything else.
But I can’t fully enter into this new space if I haven't stepped through the process of grieving what I’ve lost. I let my memories, and the spectres of long-distance friends consume me. Toni Morrison is my guide as I open myself to the pain. “It's not evil, just sad. Come on. Just step through… anything dead coming back to life hurts.”2
I fall through, into a God who has known loss intimately. Soren Kierkegaard writes that “Jesus has made a covenant of tears with everyone who weeps.”3 DeCort’s invitation to grieve echoes those of Jesus, “Blessed are the grieving because they will be comforted.”
A friend calls me later that week. I sit on my doorstep, letting her words wash over me. She reads a liturgy from church.
“As you journey, may God dwell with you while we are away from one another. May God fill you with the Holy Spirit as you study and visit new surroundings. We pray that you will experience the gift of spiritual growth in your journey and that you will return renewed and energized.”
We both cry, the words sharp and true. I pray that our time apart, while painful, may be growing and equipping.
Are you homesick?
As I come to the end of October, I find myself in the car again, alone with the sunrise, filled with the soft sweet ache of leaving. The words of Etty Hillesum resonate. I find myself in a “strange state of mournful contentment.”4 Life is bittersweet, but we are promised that those who grieve will be comforted. I am homesick, perhaps more for the people that have held me than for particular locations. But I imagine myself like a Colorado Aspen. What appear to be individual trees scattered across a valley actually belong to one organism, their roots interconnected, their biorhythms so synced that their leaves change colors at the same time. We may seem to be separate from one another, but we are secretly holding hands beneath the soil, hidden from view. We are never alone. We are all under the same stars. May God dwell with you while we are away from one another.
*I wanted to be transparent and vulnerable with my reflection this month, so it is a bit more sad than informative. This is just part of the process of leaving and beginning again. If any of this resonated for you, or reminded you of leaving, grieving, postgrad blues, or any part of your story, I would love to hear from you!
DeCort, Andrew. Blessed Are The Others: Jesus Way in a Violent World. BitterSweetBooks, 2024, 55.
DeCort, 46.
DeCort, 52.
DeCort, 160.