reflections on home

Its 3:50am in Reykjavic. or maybe 4:50am, i'm not sure. If I set my computer's clock to "reykjavic" time, it tells me 4:50, but the clock on the wall says otherwise. Maybe they dont do daylight savings time here. not sure. I am sitting in a fluorescent lit youth hostel, alert in the way you can only be at 4ish in the morning after about 4 hour's sleep. My immediate, spontaneous, and very temporary companions are an American talking loudly to his girlfriend on skype, and a white dude with a prayer rug who I assume to be a Muslim, silently completing his morning prayers. Do Muslim prayer times allow for time zone changes? not sure. Ben Harper drifts over anonymous speakers.

I feel as though my internal organs are twisted and and crumpled into an amorphous concentration of weight which alternates between my throat and my stomach. A physical sensation, but resultant from my mixed emotional state.

I never really understood the concept of "longing for home" until this year. Yet leaving your home stirs deep affects, a steep longing to see your homeland. Perhaps I extrapolate excessively, but I believe these feelings to be related to those of Jews and Arabs longing for Palestine, of soldiers fighting in faraway wars, of a homesick child at summer-camp. I fully expected to miss people in my year away, but I did not expect to miss the land itself.

I do not delude myself into thinking my homeland is special or unique. I have seen enough of the world in the past year to know that my homeland is neither. Many would say that my homeland is nice, but very few would say it is one-of-a-kind. But, it is unique in a very particular way; it is mine. My hands have touched its soil, my feet have thrown up its dust, my knees have been skinned on its rocks, my hair has been tousled by its warm winds.

I find myself thinking of my grandmother, who grew up in Pakistan, but left for the America of her people at age sixteen, never to return to Pakistan. I remember her looking at pictures of her school in Pakistan, about seventy years after she left it. Did she feel this same longing for home? For America, or for Pakistan? How does one make a home? Is it where you are born, where you grow up, or where you have been the longest? I have been relatively few years in California, and only a year away from California. Will I ever feel this same longing about another place? If I stayed in Reykjavik for the next seventy years, would I still long for California?