Posted on Saturday, 23 April
I never saw the mornin’ ‘til I stayed up all night
I never saw the sunshine ‘til you turned out the light
I never saw my hometown until I stayed away too long
I never heard the melody until I needed the song
Tom Waits, “San Diego Serenade”
It was late morning in the tree house and I was lying on the bed as a peaceful and cooling breeze blew the leaves on the trees outside. I briefly recognized what a pretty day it was and in what a very amazing jungle I have been living. Then, a strange feeling dropped into my chest, seemingly out of nowhere. I started to cry. It was a good cry, one with a bit of sobbing, some faint noises, and weak gasps to catch some air. Joe came over and held me in his arms and I continued on with it before eventually stopping. I did the same thing later that day. And again that night during a video chat with my sister when my cat stepped in to stare at me through my computer screen. I also had cried a day earlier. Now I am wondering if all this crying will be a regular occurrence. Nonetheless, I have taken to declaring aloud that I have officially gone crazy.
I have felt a little crazy at various points in my life. As I look back on these times—like late high school and the months preceding my college graduation—I understand that I was so emotionally whacked because I was sad, bored, and confused, or a combination of two of these three dynamite feelings. But here, on the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica, I am not sad. In fact, I think I might be happier than I have been in some time. Likewise, I am not confused, but rather clarified in my stance on the universe and desires and ambitions for the future. While I will be the first to admit that I am bored silly in this tiny tree house up on a mountain, there is something else at play, something that wasn’t a factor in my past bouts of self diagnosed insanity. It is that feeling that drops down from above and lands with a thud in my heart, like a coconut falling from its tree on a perfectly still day.
This feeling must be homesickness, I suppose. I don’t know what else it could be. It isn’t the feeling of boredom, for that is a suffocation in which the mind spins out of control from not receiving enough stimulation. And this usually has positive or neutral results, such as more time spent writing, or performing my own original songs with extreme intensity, or dancing like a fool in our kitchen as I swim in the invigoration of total freedom.
The homesickness, on the other hand, comes sometimes when I least expect it, as it did when I was simply resting on the bed after having done yoga. It can also come on after being triggered, as was the case when I started crying while watching my cat sitting in my sister’s apartment, which used to be our home, with his orange and white tabby stripes and whiskers and green eyes glowing just like they used to. It is an overwhelming feeling of drowning in something of a very heavy consistency, of losing the fight to be happy in the moment, of having no hope for overcoming it in the days that lie ahead. It is the unequivocal sense that I am not where I am meant to be and that I cannot do anything about it but wait and count the days as they pass away as weeks.
In the attempt of representing fairly what it is really like down here, I must state that we are happy and our lives are just fine. But homesickness ignores all of that. It eats up the details of reality and throws them up like a sorry excuse for a meal. Because if I had the choice, I would be back in Texas tomorrow. I would hold my cat and watch my rabbits hop. I would hug my mom and smell the scent of the Merle Norman makeup she’s worn her entire life, and hug my dad and feel the rough texture of his denim work shirt. I would chat with my brother about the house he’s building on the family ranch and laugh with my sisters. I would sit on the front porch of the home I grew up in, drink a Lone Star, and look out at the land before me. I would embrace the feeling of belonging in that place and would not think to question its strange power over me.
—-
I started to feel something like homesickness the moment we got off the bus in San Jose with our big backpacks and lost stares. It’s easy to miss the land of your life when you are a foreigner on the outside and half heartedly trying to make your way in. Still, these early bouts were weak and fleeting.
The longer that we have been away, the stronger it’s become. Joe and I started listening to country music more often, and I found that this caused homesick feelings strong enough to pain me. The music invaded so many portals of memory and emotion like only music can. I was transported, listening to the Texan accents of singers like Hayes Carll and Robert Earl Keen, the twang of a steel guitar, the words about cattle and beer and the friendliest people.
It became significantly stronger and more consistently present when we bought our plane tickets home. It was February, mango season, and the massive trees in La Zona were beginning to become full with the fruit of their existence. We left for a trip to Puerto Rico and had a swell time there. It was like being in America. Driving a car on wide, smooth interstates, picking up everything under the sun at Walgreens, and speaking our native language. Returning to Costa Rica, I was hopelessly sad.
A few weeks passed. Then we went to Cuba and had a strange and glorious experience wondering Havana and riding buses across a desolate country with vivid people yearning to be free. When we arrived back in Costa Rica, the end of mango season was beginning and the green and red ovals had begun to drop to the ground. We told each other that it was the last stretch before our next airplane ride would be the one that carried us back home. Only a short amount of time remains, we said, and we have to make the best of it.
We’ve been trying mighty hard to do just that, to live in the moment, to be happy in the present, to appreciate all the great things about this country. It works some days. But usually we spend our time talking about what we can’t wait to have back in our lives, like family and friends and a washer and dryer. We listen to country music almost every day and talk about returning to Hole in the Wall to hear our favorite bands play. We are counting down the days until my parents arrive for a visit and are convincing ourselves that after they leave, time will fly by so fast that we won’t even believe it.
It is now the end of the end of mango season. The mangos in the trees are much softer and when they fall from a branch, they bust open and splat upon hitting the earth. Piles of orange-yellow flesh sit alongside the road, rotting and smelling of rancid, sweet fruit. Sometimes I feel like the same thing is happening to us, that our time here has come and it has gone and we are disintegrating into the ground below.
I am trying to preserve what is left of us. I’ve been asking myself how we can go about surviving for the remainder of our time here. Yesterday, the day with all the crying, I decided that we should do what I did in high school when I wanted nothing more than to leave the country for the city: Have as much fun as possible so that time blurs by in a flash of ignorant bliss.
