Coming Home!

I’m home! I’m home!

I am so excited! I’m home!

I can talk, talk to all and sundry! The loneliness of being so far away for too long is gone!

I can hold my little daughter! I hug and hug her! I’m home! Her touch, her smell, holding her so close! I’m home!

I feel alive and well, energetic in spite of the long journey to get here. The journey, normally so long and tiring, is but a vague and fussy notion that it must have happened; I have hardly any recollection of it.

Thus I decide to go for a run and without further ado I am running down the familiar road.

Now it was suddenly dark. How sensible would it be to run in the dark? I decide to turn around, but had been away for so long that it suddenly dawned on me that I may not recognise my house. I run along, very much alive but now a little concerned. Nothing looked familiar. A thick mat of fallen leaves washed around my feet. A policeman came past.

“Hello. Hello.” He says, familiar, friendly, home. Feeling safe now, and more confident, I decide to continue my run. My legs felt light, feathery; strong. No longer concerned with finding my home I run, turn right, then, after a while, right again.

On my right an abandoned building, a huge open space, a car wash and a workshop, offers the opportunity to take a shortcut. Yet the short, steep hill straight ahead seems inviting so I carry on. There is an intersection that I had never seen before, yet is familiar. It is now also light again.

There are a number of people standing around here, speaking a strange language but safely I run past all of them, back onto the road and down the hill.

This part of town is all dense buildings; a labyrinth of narrow alleys winding through it. It is also dark again.

The road is potholed and wet, I am running strongly and happy. This road continues as a very narrow, winding ally. I do not I want to run along this in the dark.

An old man, with whom I am acquainted, even though I do not know his name, waves me aside.

We hug briefly and talk, he promises to come and see me at home.

Running barefoot is so much fun, I have not done that since a child.

I ran past parks, shops, buildings where I had worked at various times. Strange, familiar, comfortable feelings well up inside me, the immeasurable pleasure of being home again.

Down my own street, things are now looking familiar once more. The trees are gone and so are all the fallen leaves on the ground. I am running along comfortably, breathing well, my legs seemingly working by themselves, the pain from which my overworked joints had suffered in the past few weeks completely gone.

Slowly, slowly I started realizing other small inconsistencies as well.

Why would everybody speak such a strange language?

Why can I not remember the journey home – the flights, the intermittent waits in airport lounges?

Why is it sometimes light and sometimes dark?

Slowly I realise that soon I will wake up, wake up far, far away, wake up in a cold, wet and distant city, there to pull on my shoes yet again and run for several hours, the excruciating pain in my joints as a result of this obsessive compulsion, beating the same slow rhythm as the intolerable, lonely ache in my heart.