want to go home moments

I had one of my 'I want to go home' moments the other day, brought on by nothing more than being in a group of people all  talking about their school years, books they had been made to study, school uniforms, pranks, customs and habits.... Being the only person in the group who has nothing to add to the conversation, everybody laughing, remembering incidents which are shared by all, music, stories about school life.

When that happens I am always the outsider. I don't share any of these experiences. 'Do you remember' conversations ... Friends interrupt each other, keen to share and compare . . . . . .

There is nobody who shares my memories.


Dear Anne, I think what we really cry for is the realisation that we ourselves are old and that that world we see in memories no longer exists. We cry for our lost childhood and youth, we cry for what was, what might have been and now never will be. Those moments of nostalgia come unbidden, but luckily, if we are sensible, they also go again and we make use of what we have now.

I yearn for ‘home’, wherever and whatever that may be, yet I know full well, that ‘home’ has vanished long ago and that even the people who made ‘home’ are no longer.

http://eyeontheedge.blogspot.co.uk/

It's the longing to be elsewhere that in Germany we call Fernweh, which is in my case also heimweh, the longing to be home - the terrible pull of opposites that torments the displaced everywhere.

All that remains is the familiar slight ache in the bones, like an old wound when the weather changes, Heimweh or Fernweh? A longing to be there or a longing to be here, even though I'm here already? Or to be both at once? Or to be neither, but in the old country of the past, that will never be reached again in either place? Michael Frayn

Hunting out shops which sold Smoked sausage, sauerkraut and pickled herring.
Neither one thing nor another.

People who have been exiles too long seem to end up as either zombies or vampires. I don't want that to happen to me.  Ratking.