while you live it up i'm off to sleep

There's a thousand different kinds of homesickness. You wouldn't think it but you suddenly notice it when you're overseas in a foreign country with nothing to do but count the ways you miss home on your fingers and toes. I ran out of digits within the first day.

There's a kind of homesickness for your family. And a kind for your friends. There's a different kind of homesickness for the comforting feeling of knowing things like subway stops, directions and favorite resturuants and yet another kind of homesickness for things like being unable to communicate with anyone or anything that crosses your path. There's another one for the clothes you didn't bring and the anxiety that comes with making new friends. But, strangely enough, the most common one I've found is homesickness for the home that you know you'll never return to.

When you don't have a t.v and you don't have a phone you come to sit around a lot. Funnily enough, I'm not bored. Being in the states it's just custom to flick on the tv or plop yourself in front of a computer but here, in the Czech Republic, I entertain myself just fine with my roommates but that doesn't mean 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There is definitely room for just myself and my own thoughts and that's when the homesickness for a home that doesn't exist come in. It starts off small: you just think about the way that you'll view the world when you get home. Another language under your belt, a world of experiences, a new set of views stored up in your memory and a camera full of snapshots. Then you start to think about how people at home will have changed and you begin to realize that no matter where or when or how you return you will never be able to return to the exact home that you remember. Things change. People change. You change.

It starts to wear you down. You don't want to change anything, you want to curl up in a ball and pretend that the next 4 months won't happen. Luckily, I haven't. I've trekked through but late at night I can't help but listen to the sound of my own heart breaking.

Being abroad puts things in perspective. I'm constantly desperate to speak to people. It's strange... a day here feels like eternity. At home there were people that I could go weeks without speaking to but now, here in Prague, every second I get on the computer I am scanning my list of contacts and IMing every single person. I want to talk. I want to remember who cares. I'm finding a lot less people do than I'd thought. You talk to people the same amount as you did, you say the same things but somehow it means so much more when you're a world away from home.

I've sifted through my friends in my head and I am shocked at how many I've placed in the Do Not Resuscitate bin. If they don't contact me, I won't contact them and that will be the end of that. It's also amazing how many I've put into the 'extremely important people' bin. People I never thought to place there have been placed at the top of the list. I care a lot differently than I did 2 weeks ago.

If this is 2 weeks in the life of a student abroad I can't even imagine where I'll be in 4 months.

I made a playlist of songs about being away from home. I listened to them every night for 10 days then I deleted all of them but one. "Call and Return" is on constant repeat on my computer now. It makes a lot of sense if you think about it.