For the first couple of years after I returned from living in Japan anything could set me off. I really missed the place. Logically it was the first place I had where I had a job, I had my own flat, I could pay my bills, take the train where I chose so it wasn’t necessarily Showa or Yamanashi or even Japan that I was missing.
I’m feeling that sudden lurch of homesickness today. I want to be living in my flat, looking out from my balconey over at Mt Fuji. Able to call Skimble and suggest we take the car into the mountains or just head to Mr Donut or Grand 8 for a film.
I own my own home with the Jellicle now, I have a garden which doesn’t quite kill plants as easily as that balconey, but I just moved a mirror which is covered in stickers of Skimble and I posing on some mall trip or other. I miss her and I miss my flat and I miss being able to decide to climb Mt Fuji randomly of a weekend.
I get homesick for ‘times’ sometimes, rather than places.
I love my life and where I am now, and I am happier here on the whole. But there were high spots that I miss from other times, and therefore other places, in my life.
Like baking on rainy days in the kitchen at Bridge Road, while Anny or Mina sat and smoked out the back door and fed me gossip.
Or frying breakfasts in Keswick Court on sun filled Sunday mornings to get over the Bobbin excesses.
Or serving up roasts or spag bol in Lentworth while the WFRP group settled down for the next session.
Your post made me think of them. I wouldn’t want to go back and live in any of those times or places. But it would be nice to go and visit those feelings again sometimes.
I think I’d be quite happy to go and live in Showa in a flat for a year or so. See how the International Residents Society was doing, check in with my Japanese teacher, that sort of thing.
I felt that way about Victoria, BC, Canada. For the first few years I was frequently sick with longing to go back (and that really explains some of the bad stuff that happened in my life in those years) and even now I sometimes catch a scenery, a scent, an image… and I am ‘homesick’ all over again.