Loneliness Resides in the /dis/Comforts of Home

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I just had the most fantastic urge to get on a plane and leave the country. I wanted to walk out of my suburban house and have the weather be a perfect 82 degrees, exactly the way it looked at dusk. I wanted to get in my car with a small carry-on and drive fast and hard to the airport. To fly to Europe, even though I’ve always thought of the whole escape-to-Europe/rite-of-passage shenanigan as pretty blase.

Being in an unfamiliar place and losing yourself (literally and figuratively) in the foreign language is calming and invigorating all at once. But I’m confused, because I have nothing to escape. I haven’t felt this way in years and the only times I did were when I wanted to escape. Maybe the whole point is that I feel I have nothing.

I mean, I have family. I have friends. I have school. And I have work. But I’m not actually doing anything. I don’t make the effort to go on bike rides (example), my excuse being I have no one to go on them with or no where to go. I think I am tired of being alone, more than I am tired of being in the place I always have. I am tired of the feeling that the friends that I have don’t fit anywhere but the places that they do: parties and over-inebriated moments.

I feel locked down but no one is keeping me here. Of course, if I announced I was moving (or, more rationally, travelling) to some random place all at once—my family would deduce I was crazy and of course, dissuade me. And, if I even went to ‘some random place all at once,’ I was still be: alone. I can’t even think of one person who I’d really want to come with me. But I have this boredom-drunken idea that loneliness does not exist in unfamiliar places where mysteries are waiting to be discovered.

What about the mysteries waiting to be discovered here? Part of me knows they exist, but a larger part of me is too lethargic to go looking. Alone.

The disfunction of home and loneliness is just too much to bear some days. But loneliness and foreign lands? That is a dynamic.