It’s the little things you miss the most!
I rang my mother this weekend for the first time in around two weeks. Honestly, I hadn’t even noticed that it had been around 14 days since I had last rang home to my family. In the beginning, talking to my family was all I ever thought about. When I hung up the phone, I wanted to ring again just to say goodbye one more time. It’s crazy to think I’m already over halfway through my time in Brussels.
Life just got super busy out of nowhere, both my internship and my job at the bar are crazy. We had some work events where I met loads of new amazing people. I was going out for drinks with friends, coffee dates, shopping, you name it I was doing it. My apartment became a train station where I could breeze in, stop off for a few minutes before running out the door again. To top it all off, I absolutely love the change of season out here, beautiful sunsets, orange, brown and yellow leaves everywhere, crisp mornings followed by dark evenings.
Despite loving my life out here, for the first time since the beginning I felt so homesick this weekend. I was so close to booking a flight home just for one day. I wanted to see my family, my friends and my dog. I don’t know what brought it on. We had been talking about Halloween in the office earlier that day. My supervisor had never really celebrated Halloween traditions before. I was extremely shocked by this, but of course I forgot that Halloween derived from the Celtic festival Samhain.
I started showing him pictures of my masterpieces down through the years. He said he had only seen pumpkin carvings in movies. I couldn’t believe it, for as long as I can remember I have carved a pumpkin at Halloween, I remember my dad would even get Lego pieces and let us trace out what we wanted to be drawn. As I was reminiscing when I should have been working, I started to crave home so much. I would have done anything to go and buy a pumpkin in Dunnes, go out and carve it in the shed (you couldn’t have that mess in the house of course) and put it at the front door with a candle inside.
The best part was always the pumpkin soup and toasted pumpkin seeds afterwards. My hands would be blue with the cold of spending the evening standing in the shed, standing at the range waiting for the soup to boil used to be bliss.
That evening, when I was walking home from work, I wished I was going home to my parents and my brother. To hear where each of them went that day, what they did and to have dinner together. Let’s be honest I am romanticising this a little too much, we would definitely slag each other until one stormed off in bad humour but, still, it's these things that I miss the most. I would then probably go to Killykeen with my dog or go to my friend’s house and sit, drink tea and talk for hours. Familiar little things, which I never thought I would miss, yet here we are.
The last time I went home and came back, I found myself thinking one particular thing. When I am in Belgium I want to go home, but when I go home I want to come back. Home doesn’t feel the same anymore and I don’t know what it is. Don’t get me wrong, I love going back to Ireland and seeing everybody but it feels different now. Maybe it’s because I’m always there on a flying visit, literally cramming so many things into the days before I return to Belgium. I end up running around like a lunatic and I never get to see everybody I wanted to see or do everything that I wanted to do.
I still don’t know how to best deal with homesickness. I don’t know what works and what doesn’t. Distraction isn’t fully dealing with it but calling home might only remind you of what you are missing out on. In my case, I did the latter. I rang my parents for nothing in particular other than to hear what had been going on for the past few weeks. It really did help. I booked my flight home for Christmas and reminded myself of all the things I have to look forward to between now and then.
I also thought of all the little things, which I have grown to love over here - the Sunday morning markets, the parks, fresh bread and pastries, different cultures on my doorstep, the beers (cherry beer is amazing) and most of all my colleagues and friends I have met out here. Despite all of this, I said it when I moved out here, I still think it half way through and I will probably still say it at the end; there really is no place like home.
* Gemma Good is from Killeshandra and a third year journalism student in University of Limerick
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