Lilly

My mother is making dinner. She looks at me when she can, glancing down at her busy hands every few seconds. “You’re sure everything is OK?” she says.

“Yeah. Yeah, of course,” I say. I watch her. People pass by in the background—my dad. My brother and his boyfriend. They all stop to say hi, and how are you, and are you excited for this summer? My dad wrangles one of the cats into his arms and he stares at me in that uncanny way cats do. I get the sense he knows what I’m thinking.

“Busy week coming up?” my mom asks. Her voice is tinny through the phone, and she reaches up to readjust it. It must be positioned in the kitchen cabinet, I think, above the stove.

“Yeah,” I say absentmindedly. “A couple of tests. And my research group just got our workload almost doubled.”

I’m not even downplaying it. I tell the complete and honest truth but somehow, even when I try to talk about how much I’m struggling, it comes out sounding confident and unhurried, a success story already in progress. I have that math exam, but we can do corrections. A couple of presentations, but I’m getting so much better at those, I’m not too worried. It’s all the truth, and I still feel like I’m holding everything together with, like, tape and prayers. Maybe I’ll just be great at job interviews.

But if it’s all that simple, that easy, why is it so hard? Why did I cry so much this weekend? My mom has to go—it must be time for dinner, back home. She hands the phone off to my brother for a moment. “We love you!” he says. “See you in a few months!”

“I love you guys, too!” I say, the smile appearing on my face automatically. I end the call and stare dull-eyed at the green light atop my laptop for a long time.

I think—

I think I shouldn’t be hasty to use the word “homesickness,” but whatever it is, it’s a funny time for it to strike. A few months ago I wrote: “It’s not that I miss home in a way that pains me, it’s just a sense of being very, very alone.” That was September, barely two weeks after I started school.

That’s more than understandable—it’s practically expected.

But it’s almost April.

I think—

I think I identify very strongly with where I come from. More than I ever expected. I say Illinois and people assume Chicago and I often go a little overboard with the clarification that no, it’s not in the city, not at all. You think you know what “flat” looks like? Think again. I don’t mention the little things, though. Getting lost in cornfields; ducking under fences to wade through creeks with summer-tough bare feet; pulling twin-leafed morning glory stalks up by the root, one by one, the sun beating down overhead. Do I miss being at home or do I miss being a kid?

I think—

I think the two are inextricably intertwined.

It’s a bad few days. I usually feel better when I’m busy but that’s because I’m usually functional enough to attack everything I need to do, throwing myself into it as a distraction if nothing else. But right now I can’t focus on anything.

***

My roommate is gone and her side of the room is clean, barren in her absence. Mine isn’t a mess, just significantly more lived in—bed unmade, a jacket thrown over the chair, desk strewn with gum wrappers and pencils and jewelry. People ask me how I’ll survive in a single, but I don’t step a foot out of my own space the entire two days unless I’m leaving the room entirely.

Plus, I can keep the windows wide open how I like it. The room is just on the edge of too cold and the air is crisp, like outside. It’s perfect. I put all my plants and good smelling things on the sill and fall asleep to the sound of the wind and cars going by. ♦