Two months and Fifteen days

Is a long time to feign happiness when all you feel is miserable. It's also a long time to spend speaking a language that isn't your own, a language in which you struggle to explain even the simplest of thoughts, a language that keeps you, without fail, in the present because the past and future tenses are just too difficult to conjugate. It's a long time to be lonely, so lonely and desperate for the voice, connected to the face, connected to the body of someone whom you have known for more than two weeks. It's also the amount of time I have before I can get on an aereoplane and escape, first to London, then New York, and then finally to home. My real home, with my friends, my family, and my ocean.

I don't know if I can last that long.

I have to get out of here. I can't stand the suffocation anymore. And yet, it's that suffocation that is begging me to stay, that suffocation that is the reason that, no matter how much I want to, need to get out, I'm going to give in and stay. Stay here in this country that I have grown to hate, stay here and force a smile and tell them that I'm happy.

I constantly think about going home. Constantly. It's hard not to. And even as I do, I know that it is futile. The California of my thoughts is not what I'd find upon my early return. This misery I feel now is nothing compared to the soul crushing madness I was buried under before I left. How long would it take for me to slip into that if I came back? Not long, I reckon. But still, it is familiar. And there were spots of sunshine...spots of sunshine that I can never find here, not unless those who have known me for years, those who have known me before I knew myself were here, and that will never happen.

I can't go home. I can't disappoint this family here, in whose house I have been living for so little time, who have already done so much for me, who talk of trips to Florence and Pompeii, all for me. I can't tell them that I don't want their kindnesses. I can't because of the way my mom buys me cornflakes, I can't because of the way my sister hugs me, I can't because of the millions of times they've said the words "June 22". And besides, taking words from The Departed, 'I'm Irish. I'll live with something being wrong for the rest of my life.'

But I still can't look at myself in the mirror. I can't stand to put on a pair of jeans, even more so because that means we're going out, that I have to force myself to be social, that I have to break my thoughts away from a place where I never have to eat salami, fish, or chocolate bars with hazelnuts.

My usual methods of escape aren't working anymore. I've already read every book, every magazine so many times I know the words before I see them. The internet is only accessible every so often, on a computer that takes four hundred years to do anything. And the battery on StrongBad has decided to stop working for an unidentifiable reason.

Two months and fifteen days.

They tell you that from time to time you may wish to go home, but that it is just a phase. How much longer will this phase last? How many weeks do I have to stand this? Will it end when I am somewhere above Wales, seven hours from touching down at JFK? Will it end in eight weeks, when a fortnight is all I have left in this country and everything suddenly seems more precious? I don't know anymore. But I'm not sure I want to wait to find out.

Two months and fifteen days doesn't seem like much when you compare it to the nearly seven months I've spent here already. But it is still as long as the Aussies come here for. It is still a long time.

Hating and missing the greener grass,
Bee Electric