The first time I came home from a contract I stepped into my back garden and started crying…and I don’t think I stopped for several days.
Not just because I was so relieved to be home, not just because I ached from the airport and the travel…but because I was sad to have left.
The ship becomes a part of you, the life becomes a part of you, and that can be a very difficult adjustment to leave behind…
So many people assume you can just slide into your old life like you would slip on a comfortable jacket. But that’s not exactly true. In some ways it is, and that layer of security is comfortable and warm and you’re used to it and you welcome it more than words could say…
But at the same time, everything seems to fit not quite right when you first come back. You want to see you family, you want to see you friends, you want to spend every waking moment with them because you know your vacation time is short…
And at the same time, you crave being left alone, because you’ve lived in a world that’s so very very loud that it takes you time to adjust to the silence. You want company, you want solitude. You want to take that phone call, you flip at the person who asks you to. You feel terrible afterwards. You can’t quite explain how it is that you want to see everyone, but also want to see no one at all, that you just want to shut the door on the world.
It’s a complicated, tangled, always wonderful weave coming home.
I am, as I so often realize, utterly blessed; my loved ones are well conditioned to the ups and downs of my job. They are perfectly content to let me curl up in the living room with my embroidery and my disney movies, or leave me for two days to blitz through unpacking and spring cleaning (which are one and the same thing in the world of me) and not trouble me for a week except to make sure I eat something. After that first week I’m expected (and I expect myself) to get up and do something…and honestly I end up feeling quite terrible if I don’t.
But I am – and so many of us are – ever grateful for that precious, sacred, first week…