For the past week-and-a-half I’ve been visiting my mother and sister at their home in the Milwaukee area. This isn’t abnormal at all since I usually visited them during breaks from classes or anytime I needed a break.
What is abnormal is what I keep thinking when it comes to leaving on January 4. I keep thinking that I’ll drive home to the tiny studio apartment I lived in for two years in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood. I keep fondly thinking of where everything I own was placed, from the mirror above the tiny, old 13-inch TV, to the two large bookcases sitting side-to-side, to my bed placed up against the large windows that gave me a view of the L tracks that ran behind my building.
There are two problems with this thought, the first being that I never drove to my mother’s house from Chicago. I always either took the Metra train to Kenosha, the Amtrak from Chicago to Milwaukee, or she would pick me up and drive me from Chicago to Milwaukee. The other is that I don’t live in Chicago or go to college in Chicago anymore. I live in a township in Michigan and go to Michigan State University.
Of course, this thought that keeps going through my mind is understandable since that was habit. It is also completely understandable because I have come to accept that I miss Chicago.
I have become homesick.
Fragments 