Canterbury, Winter 1999

 I know that I will never be happy here, I can feel it.  But you don’t understand that I have never felt anything before. I mean really felt it.  I have been safe in my bubble. Fear.  I guess this wrongness inside me is what they call homesickness.  Nobody ever told me what that really meant.   It must be easier for them to label something.  Makes it safer, curable.  Nobody can prepare anybody to feel this way.  All I know is that children feel it, not eighteen year old adults.  I cry, I cry almost all the time.  I really don’t know why.  I don’t know how to stop.  I hide.  From anybody, from everything.  I have lost everything that makes me known to myself.

Years later I struggle to see who I was then, and why I lost all control.  My shame knows no boundaries when I think or talk about those ten weeks of my life.  I am a man.  Everything that I had absorbed had told me that I had an implicit obligation to be strong.  I never talked to anybody.  I guess I was alone, and that isolation will never leave me.