Feels Like Home

Stuck in the middle of nowhere, it’s easy to get lost in loneliness, waiting for a phone call or email that will never come. You can’t hop into your car and surprise a nearby friend or zip over to the nearest tea house to pick up an overpriced cup of PMT (which would unfortunately violate my new year’s resolution). Instead, you can try to have a broken conversation with the maid on your floor about how embarrassed you are not to speak Mandarin any better than a pre-schooler, and subsequently resign yourself to chat about the weather compared to back home for 10 long minutes. Or you can dine and small talk with the coworkers with whom you’ve already spent the past eight hours doing non-stop work, which is of course, the default. Nothing like emptying your beer glass a gazillion times thanking each person for welcoming you to their neck of the woods. Nevermind you’ve been here a handful of times already.

Happily I return to my 700 square foot suite (the rooms on the business floor were booked) to find a bowl of cute mandarin oranges that are as sweet as honey. As I pop one in my mouth, images of my even cuter pal searching for a crate of these little treasures at the local Chinese market fill my homesick mind. Ooh, and Independence Day, the only non-dubbed show on TV is on, a classic film promoting the ever-progressing career of Bill “Lonestar” Pullman. I think my brother would agree that Spaceballs was the penultimate professional accomplishment on Bill’s resume. If I knew him personally, I’d never let him live that one down. Time to get into my Paul Frank flannels, a gift from a girl who can almost always make me laugh. The little things are what you notice; they make me smile…at least for a moment at a time.

Trips like these make my potentially new home away from home more difficult to accept. Oh wait, no time to dawdle on the ties that bind. Bourne Supremacy is starting, and if it’s anything like the first one, it’ll cure my jetlag and put me right to sleep.

I miss home, wherever that may be.