Homesickness
I was killing time at a hot sticky cafe just by the Molo Beverello. I found reprieve here after my taxi driver dumped me on the side of a busy, curved highway and charged me double the appropriate amount. When I asked him where the nearest cafe was, he simply stared straight through me and shrugged. The one thing my dad reiterates when traveling is “Don’t look at your phone. It lets people know you have no clue what you’re doing.” But there I was, dragging my broken carry on like a lifeless body with one hand and navigating on my iPhone with the other.
I had about 3 hours before meeting the rest of the group for the ferry. The sun was abysmal, and even the sea couldn’t help cool us down. I carried my unwashed Los Angeles Apparel zip-up hoodie in the cradle of my elbow too.
Embarrassment drove me through the Naples streets. I was painfully aware of how stupid and unprepared and fresh-off-a-plane I looked. I was also desperate for a coffee. Usually I can spend a good full hour scouring all the available options, as I did in the Amsterdam airport yesterday. I can be painfully indecisive when it comes to the pre-packaged egg salad sandwich or the three-day-old croissant behind the counter. But in this case, face reddened by the heat of 90 degrees and shame, I took a chair at the first available table. Given Naples’ notoriety as a distracted and lawless place, I tried not to stray too far from my stuff while getting the tattooed waitress’ attention. Excuse me? My voice has never felt smaller, as she kept her back to me organizing the rainbow of Italian pastries in the cold case. I just sat back down instead, hoping someone would eventually come to my rescue.
Homesickness! That’s what I felt, homesickness. For the first time in nearly a decade, the feeling coated every inch of my skin as I felt so far from where I was supposed to be.
Anyone who attended camp with me as a kid knows me as homesick. For the two summers I was there, the cohabitants of T-11 would fall asleep to the sound of leaves brushing against each other in the cool mountain wind, of the crickets and nearby river and maybe a soft rain pitter-pattering against our screen windows. And also the sound of my muffled sobs into a pillow.
I loathed camp, I loathed it so much that I broke down to my parents the week before Summer #3, begging them on my hands and knees to let me out of this expensive, frivolous commitment. They acquiesced (as it’s the hardest I’ve ever pleaded in my life. I didn’t ask for much as a kid except to stay right by their side.), but they knew something was… wrong? It was a song and dance I constantly put my family through. Sign up for something. Feel the unbearable weight of anxiety, dread, and fear setting in about a week before departure. Bail and feel bad but happy at home, or feel brave but sad while away.
Summer Camp for me, though, was an utter disaster. In one of my all-time favorite TV shows, Psych, best friends Shawn and Gus solve crimes and begin every episode with a callback to a time in their childhood friendship in some way or another relating to the crime, how they would come to solve it, what adolescent tools would be applied in this case. My all-time favorite episode, “Tuesday the 17th,” begins with a camp flashback. The duo in their adult life are called back to solve a disappearance at their childhood summer camp, and Shawn — much like me — carries his disdain of summer camp well into his 20s.
Summer camp, at this point in life, has just been a funny story I tell people. Getting a full-body case of poison ivy and not realizing what it was until the last day of camp (I did wonder throughout why I had an army of gnats sticking to the ooze coming from my body). And in writing this, I simply cannot remember the bad thing that happened to me the second year, it must have been that bad.
The funny borderline traumatic tales of my teary nights in T-11 live on, but my feeling of homesickness has faded. I went away for high school, moved to France alone at age 20, haven’t really been home much since. In fact, I love going away. I considered my homesickness as some sort of metamorphic transformation, the caterpillar becoming the hawk, a different beast entirely. I felt proud to have conquered this fear, like flying or dogs or bugs. The Fear of Leaving Home. The fear that kept me up late at night before a school trip to Jamestown, Virginia — a long three hours away from my house. Or that kept my mom on speed dial during class sleepovers.
Until sitting at a cafe in Naples? Until hearing a man at my gate on the phone ask, “Is there food at the house?” On this trip, something deep inside of me stirs at this mention of home, of going home, of someone waiting for you at home. For a long time I felt proud of this home I had built inside of myself. Like Sherlock’s Mind Palace, a castle I could live in no matter where in the world I was.
“Without [Self-Respect], one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.” - Joan Didion, “On Self-Respect”
And for the first time in 15 years, I am attending Summer Camp.
I wrote this while sitting on my bed, looking out the window. I’m in another new place, in another new time of my life. It’s not raining anymore, as it did the entire day before this one, but for the most part I’ve remained inside. I’m eating a shortbread cookie with the word EKSTRA printed across it in big ALL CAPS letters. It tastes vaguely of a Lemonade, the Girl Scout cookies I’d have as a kid.
This essay isn’t about self-respect, but in a way it’s the healing ointment for homesickness. The more things I forced myself to do alone in my adulthood, the more self-respect I garnered, the farther away I drifted from this feeling.
I thought I was my own home, even so, I felt inexplicably sore for something, staring out at the glistening Mediterranean underneath a hot Italian sun. The sea twinkled just as the camp lake did as I see it in my tattered vision.
Now I’m writing this on the plane home, and I’m feeling my sickness dissipate. It evaporates like the other negative feelings I harbor from time to time. I see home just beyond my finger tips, just beyond a shaded window where the sun creeps out and spills beyond the edges.
At 6am this morning, Estonian time, I woke up to my alarm going off in my room where two fellow campers slept peacefully. My suitcase never sounded louder, dragging across the wooden floors of our hand built temporary cabin. The roll would wake up my downstairs neighbors, the drag disturbing the upstairs sleepers — damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I looked at my roommates, so peacefully asleep, as I was the first camper to leave. Always leaving before the party is over, always alone.
P.S. CAMP FOOD!!!!
Since this is a food blog, after all, I need to shoutout the incredibly comforting food on this Estonian getaway, prepared by Zenia.
All the meals were vegan or vegetarian. It was the most colorful food I’ve ever known. I asked her how she comes up with the recipes and she simply shrugged like my taxi driver. Some things don’t have a map and are left to be secrets.
Certainly an elevation from the Dirt Pie I’d have at Summer Camp as a kid.
xoxo,
Chloé