One Way Thinking

It started off cold again this morning. I had the windows open to air out the room a little, and was listening to the dawn chorus wrapped in the biggest, chunkiest sweater that I own..

I am suffering, at the moment, from a weird version of insomnia. I am tired:  exhausted even: but sleep is coming in short bursts rather than full nights,  so I find myself using the time to catch up with things that I have been neglecting. writing letters that are long overdue: reading books that for months have languished on shelves (usually, a new book barely makes it over my threshold with at least half of the first chapter unread) sewing on buttons: dusting, tidying... catching up with the tv programmes I recorded,,, I'm used to sleeping badly:  its one of the more debilitating symptoms of fibro: but this is excessive even for me. And of course, I am making list after list in preparation for my next trip. At least the 'to pack' list is much. much shorter this time:  I'm not going to need to take very many clothes with me, as I was very generously invited to leave a bag behind the last time..

I guess. at the moment, I feel as though I'm kind of in limbo.. I'm doing what I need to here: looking after the flat: making sure I pay bills and buy groceries, and do the ordinary, day to day stuff, while I'm actually marking time until I can get moving on my next trip. It isn't that I don't like my home.. or that I don't like spending time here: its more that there is so much for me to look forward to that I can't wait to get going again.

There is a part of travelling that I seldom consciously look at: maybe because it isn't (for me, at least) exciting or fun: lately, it has been the part of my travels that I least look forward to: and that is the journey back. I spend weeks planning for a trip to the USA: choosing clothes to pack: deciding what else I'd like to take: looking at events or places that I would like to go to...  the only real planning that I do for the return trip is to make sure that I know from where, and when the flight leaves: and to be sure that I book the rail ticket (and can pick that up at the station)  Packing for that journey is usually a rushed, resentful affair, undertaken at the last possible moment, with the maximum amount of grumbling, and (usually hidden away in secret) a few tears, because leaving can be hard..  The trip back  from there always seems so much longer and more exhausting:  the weather darker and colder... and it always, always starts way too soon for me.

On my shorter trips: the occasional weekends away: rare visits to other cities, there is a difference. The reluctance  to leave: that unwillingness to return to the mundane and familiar still bothers me: but that feeling of being uprooted: of leaving a part of me behind is not there, I can be packed and ready to check out of a hotel hours before the required time: there is no longing for one more look around the place: one more hour just sitting peacefully:  a last walk down my favourite street..to a degree, I suppose that is because a part of me knows that I can always revisit: that there will be other weekends.  And, more importantly, on those trips, when I begin the journey home, all I am leaving behind is the place and the things about it that I remember. When I leave the US, I am leaving behind something far more precious and important to me: something, and someone that makes up a huge part of my life now: and no matter how hard I try to make it so, flying back here no longer feels like coming home.