the itch to be elsewhere

Funny how the smallest things can trigger nostalgia. I'm wearing a sweater I'd only ever worn in France, and the sky is grey as it was most of my time in Cambrai, and if only I could walk through the grande place, past the bakery and the perfume store, smelling the baking and the sweet oils and the damp cobblestones, then life would be perfect. That was always the best part of my walk home, and it didn't matter about the rain and the dog droppings and the weariness of twelve hours in school. Instead I'm in Fayetteville, which has its own charms, but this is the longest I've been home in five years and it's making me twitchy. Out of the past 26 months, I was out of the country for twelve. A year out of the last two years. That's an odd thought.

Missing India is easy: Rani is there, soaking up all the sunshine I'm missing, eating dosai and chutney. Jaya has a new host daughter, no doubt, and I'm not sure if she got my letter at all. All I can do is watch Indian movies and eat the occasional dish of dal. There's no one to practice my fragments of Tamil and Hindi on.

Missing France is even easier because it's so fresh, and so much more similar. I'm not likely to turn a corner and find a Krishna shrine or a water buffalo here, but I might find a little narrow street, or a section of the highway that reminds me of the fields of the Cambrésis, or smell the rain on the air and slip back to Cambrai in my head. I almost miss waking up to the sound of cars on cobblestones clattering down the narrow alley between my window and the row houses across the way.

I do appreciate America. I love that I can get vegetarian food fairly easily. I love the broad open highways. I enjoy the fact that at least America tries to subvert its racism, instead of the open disdain the white French have for the children of the Maghrebain immigrants, and that the fairer North Indians have for the darker South Indians.

But I miss waking up somewhere else. I miss the sense of history of Europe. I missi sitting in Starbucks in Odéon, looking at the prow of the building where the streets come together at an odd angle. I miss the solemn stone corridors of the temple in Madurai, and the tiny aarti lamps in all that gloom, and the smell of camphor. I miss the sun on the rocks in Italy, the lazy self-importance, the freshness of the food.

I suppose the price of travel is knowing what you're missing, and the dissatisfaction that comes with that.