I was talking to a very lovely but very sad woman in my pandemic dream last night. We were in a foreign country surrounded by beautiful scenery.
“What’s wrong?” I asked
“I’m just so homesick,” she said.
I sat down beside her. “I know, and it feels kind of wrong, doesn’t it, to feel homesick in such a beautiful place? But at least here, even with the restrictions, we can go for a walk and find something new each day. A flower we haven’t seen before or an oddly colored stone.”
“But you can also do that at home,” she said.
“That’s true,” I said with a sigh. “I try, but I need to be better at that.”
I think the dream stemmed from this guilt I’ve carried around for the past 18 months . . . this nagging feeling I’ve had no right to feel down when I’m truthfully in a good place.
Maybe the dream came on because the melancholy from which I thought I was emerging has returned a bit. With the rise in the Delta variant, I feel like I had finally arrived at the airport after a really bad trip, bags packed, ticket for home in my hand, only to discover the flight had been cancelled. So, I’ll remain on the far side of normal feeling homesick.
