Homesickness

A favorite pair of jeans. A beloved old sweatshirt. A key sliding perfectly into a lock. Like a glove. You never forget how to ride a bike. I’m trying to find a way to describe the physical feeling of being near a close friend or old lover after a long time apart, but I’m only coming up with tired old metaphors. Is there anything like standing next to a former lover? This strange mix of intimacy and newness, of unconsciously falling into familiar old patterns of memorized physical motions all the while knowing that you haven’t felt this way in awhile. Yeah, it’s like putting on a favorite pair of jeans, or wearing an old sweatshirt, but it’s so much more.

I have a strong physical memory of the first time I wore a pair of jeans after going a long time without. I was in Bangkok, and I’d spent five months wearing nothing but flowy, shapeless, pajama style lightweight cotton pants and skirts. Fisherman pants and salwar kameeze, the wardrobe staples of backpackers in Thailand and India. Before I flew to Japan, I decided to treat myself to a pair of nice jeans, a way of transitioning back to Western-style clothing.

I remember sliding the jeans on for the first time. They were stretchy and fitted, clinging to my legs in a way I had not felt for months. Slightly stiff (compared to flowy cotton) around my body, structured. Suddenly I remembered what it felt like to feel fabric against the inside of my thighs. I remembered what it was like to zip up a pair of jeans and close them with a button. I noticed a change in the way I walked, in the way I sat down. A pair of jeans made everything a little different.

And yet it was so familiar. I live in jeans, when I can. I loved the feeling… but I was also acutely aware of its strangeness, of the way it differed from other pairs of pants.

This is the closest metaphor I can think of to describe the feeling of standing next to an old flame. It’s like wearing a pair of favorite jeans after not wearing jeans at all for months.

I had this feeling recently, standing next to someone I’d once been so intimate with. I knew, distinctly, this feeling: standing at a certain specific distance from someone, our bodies in particular positions, our heads at a particular angle to facilitate a particular degree, length, and intensity of eye contact, with (not to get all hokey here, but whatever) energy flowing between us in a very particular way. I knew that spatial relationship well. That physicality was incredible familiar.

But also new. Like remembering what it felt like to walk in jeans again, I was very, very aware of our physicality. With distance, I could examine it, I could see how it differed from my physical interactions with others. (And I don’t mean this sexually; I’m really referring to the way you interact with someone physically in, say, a bar – the way you stand next to each other, the frequency or ways in which you touch each other, or don’t touch each other, the way you angle your head or move forward or back)

No wonder it’s so easy to fall back into relationships with old loves, no matter how doomed or tragic they may be. Taking the degrees of emotional comfort and intimacy out of it for a moment…the feeling of physical comfort alone can explain it. It’s so easy to be seduced by a “fit” that works and that you are used to.

It takes time to figure out your physical relationship to someone. I think about it all the time with new friends. How close do you stand? How often do you touch each other? Everyone has a different level of physicality, and it takes time to figure that out. When do you become “hugging” friends? (I remember a time I realized a relationship with someone had gone from being collegial and work-related to more of a real friendship when we started hugging goodbye.) I have some friends I kiss on the cheek to greet hello, and other friends with whom I would never do that. (And there is a certain level of strangeness when you mix these things up! This weekend I saw a friend I had not seen in months. Instinctively, I gave him a hug and kissed him on the cheek. He responded oddly, a bit surprised; it was at that moment I realized we were not “kiss on the cheek” friends. Am I overanalyzing? Maybe. But I think we all use physical clues like these to signal the degree of intimacy in a relationship. Shift the dynamic and there are all sorts of implications. Think of the way you feel when someone you don’t know well is standing in your comfort zone.)

Physical relationships, in other words, take time to build and time to decipher. And so of course, when we find an old physical relationship that we remember, that feels so easy, that once felt so good (oh, and still does), a dynamic that once felt so right, of course we want to slip back into it.

When you’re standing outside a door, shivering cold, a set of keys in your hand, trying one after another after another, trying to make them fit, knowing they are all just a bit off, how can you not feel a sense of great relief when, finally, you slide the right key into the lock, turn, and feel the lock flip? Of course you want to open the door, get out of the cold, cold air, and say to yourself, “I’m home, again. I’m home.”