There are many unspoken truths about homesickness. It is indiscriminate in its timing and location, striking like a wave of heat across your neck and turning a frantic piazza in central Rome into the loneliest place on earth. The guilt it evokes is enough to drive a traveller to despair, and the reason so many find themselves crouching in the corner of a chain restaurant eating food out of a paper bag.
Very often the most picturesque destinations in the world are the ones that cause the most intense pangs. Beauty is subjective, and informed by one’s upbringing. It is therefore not surprising that while casting your eyes across the rich frescos decorating the ceiling of a basilica, the most intense sensation is a longing to share the opulence with the people you love. The tragedy of hundreds of lonely people standing together in a piazza, engaging in an entirely individual experience, is the worst symptom of the phenomenon.
These feelings touch us all. How we deal with them varies indefinitely. Across the square stands a tall man, American military tattoos stretched across taut muscle. He snaps photographs with his phone and laughs a little too loudly at dirty jokes. He deals with the disorientation the same way he learned as a child. Surrounded by the dense forests of the West Coast, he fished in the rivers to escape the smog of the city. He has no siblings, he said, and therefore nobody to miss.
Turn a little to the right and there is a girl who could pass for a local. Her bronzed shoulders stand out against the painful pink flesh dotted around the square. Far from her home, alienation is her biggest fear; she pines not for a particular place, but for a chance to have friends in every language. To her, homesickness is not being able to communicate with ease. Phrasebook in hand, she feels reduced to a childlike state of expression.
One might assume that someone who spends their life uprooting themselves and seeding into new places might be averse to long-term connections. In the centre of the square stands a young man – both native and a visitor – not looking at the sights, but instead at the people. For him, this is his home as much as the place he was born. It is the people who come and go that keep him from feeling settled. Because ultimately we don’t always simply wish to return to a house, or a city. We can be homesick for a place that never really existed. It is the humans we live with that create us, and they don’t always stick around.
No matter how beautiful the location, nor how much it compares to the places we live, the desire to belong will always outweigh the need to travel. It is tempting to indulge ourselves in these emotions, but they are necessary for gaining perspective. I’m not by any means immune to these feelings, but here is something I’ve learned: you can create a home by simply reaching out to the strangers around you, be it in an Italian plaza, or even just a few steps from your front door.
By Alice Florence Orr | 6 July 2016