It's homesickness, that's what it is

The problem is, everybody, at least online, seems to only associate it with either kids at summer camp or freshmen at college, only mentioning in passing the fact that adults--good heavens!--can suffer from it too. Yeah, loads of helpful advice out there.

Well, at least I'm calling it what I think it is. Yes, it's probably mixed in with the undertreated depression I already suffer from, but the hallmarks are there: I'm constantly and obsessively thinking about good old Columbus and all the people who I left behind, and I'm having just a terrible time adjusting to New Jersey. I feel isolated and anxious and shut-in and vulnerable. I've described it to Cherie and others as feeling frightened of everything, and it wouldn't be so bad to deal with if only I were home, near my mom and dad and brothers and friends and High Street and the good old north campus area and Clintonville and...

I dunno. Since I've been gone I hear that they tore up High Street to make improvements; that Larry's, the iconic OSU campus bar with the green neon sign which Rod Serling used to frequent when he worked for WBNS-TV in the '50s, shut its doors to make room for a Chipotle or Baja Fresh or something; that the old Woolco department store building, the last vestige of the old Graceland Shopping Center that I fondly remember from my childhood, which has been sitting vacant for several years, has been torn down to make room for some multi-floor modern health club or something; and that the walkway spanning High Street downtown between the old Lazarus department store building and the City Center mall is being or has been dismantled, probably because neither of those two entities is really alive in any capacity anymore. Medary Elementary School, my alma mater, is already closed for good, and I wonder how long that beautiful old building will last without teachers and children to occupy it. South Campus has been paved over by the Gateway for a few years now.

Sometimes I wonder what if anything, besides my family and friends and places immediately related to me, I'd be coming back to if I ever did move back to Columbus. I think that's part of what drove me away, that feeling that the city was changing in a way that made it feel more like an alien environment every day, a playground for suburban yuppies and future generations of spoiled college kids from elsewhere who will have never heard of Larry's or Papa Joe's or the South Heidelberg. I suppose I felt betrayed by Columbus, and the New York area seemed like a bastion not only of relevance/importance in the grand scheme of American society, but also of a certain timelessness--a sense that it offers stability and its own set of traditions and institutions that I would be proud to be a part of.

But it ain't home. That's the thing about it. It ain't me. I'm like young Pink in The Wall, hopefully tagging along with the unresponding father of another little boy, both strangers, until they finally go away without him, leaving him just as lonely as before. (Or was it just a man? I forget.) The NYC area is the father figure I dream of, provider of security and mentorship through the much-vaunted "real world", but he's not my dad.

Fortunately, my dad--and mom--are both still with us. I talk to them for at least an hour every night. Of course, I fear for the day I call and one of them is not there, or the phone call from one of my brothers to inform me that something terrible has happened to one or both of them, and that there's nothing I can do about it, and I will have to live with the guilt that I was not there to see them off, or to thank them one last time, when their time to go arrived. Why? Because I decided so emphatically that I wanted to live away from home--far away from home--when I was younger and perhaps more foolish.

I'm blabbering on here. You'd think talking about it would be therapeutic, wouldn't you? Maybe it is. Maybe all that a therapist would add is the occasional "I see", or "How so?", or "Sure, absolutely", or "And how would you explain that?" At least I'm giving verbal shape to the things that make my whole soul ache.

Wow, that last sentence was a pretty neat little bit of rhyming lyricism, wasn't it? Parsed appropriately, it could almost be a few lines in a poem, or a sensitive song accompanied by plaintive acoustic guitar that music critics say "heralds the arrival of a major talent in the singer-songwriter genre"...except that I want to play neo-psych indie space rock.

Boy, I'm actually being funny. That's got to be a good sign.