Missing people is so natural.
Every single time I have left my parents at the airport whether it be for a weekend or for a semester I have walked away crying. I try so hard to keep the tears inside and snuff my nose in silence suppressing these feelings because I often think to myself, I’m twenty years old, I shouldn’t be this upset. Realistically, I should be thinking I’ve spent twenty years surrounded by my family, my parents, what I know to be my home.. I am lucky that I get to miss them all so much.
It’s so natural to let the little things upset you like seeing a photo of your younger brother at a baseball game that you previously reluctantly attended over the summer. It’s okay to want to be back in the house that you felt so trapped in these past six months. It’s justifiable to miss someone’s presence even though you overlooked and took advantage of the magic they brought our lives when they were around.
Small triggers create large emotions. All it takes is a step off the plane, a single glance at that particular place you spent so much time, hearing a song from a simpler time, waking up from that one reoccurring dream. Immediately, you’re swept up by the memories that once brought you home in a feeling of peak happiness that you swear has never been matched and quite possibly couldn’t be again. Because maybe now, that home feeling isn’t what it once was and your step off the plane is only to get to baggage, that place is just a building, that song is just a haunting tone, that dream isn’t your reality. These memories are just that, a sweet reminder of a simpler, more comfortable moment in your history of home-feelings. These feelings that once brought you home are often simple and small but overwhelming in that they’re hard to chase after you walk away from them.
This is why missing someone or some place is so valid because that is what makes your home. Whether you are home in your house with your family, or home while late-night laughing with friends away at school, or home in the embrace of that special person, or home in the personal conversations that used to consume your nights. These all provide a sense of importance, comfort, a resemblance of the warmth in mom smiles and dad hugs that made up home for so long. Allow yourself to miss him, or her, or them, or that, and acknowledge that you are constantly creating your home in the people and places and feelings that you allow to enter your life.
It’s always okay to cry at the airport.
What keeps you up at night?
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