Homesick

This is my home.

Well, actually this is Harvard Square. But it's part of Boston, and Boston is my home. Where the Red Sox play, where Red Sox Nation began. Home of Fenway Park, and Sullivan Square, where we park the car to go into the city, and Haymarket, and the red line, and the green line and all the history. This is home.

Interestingly enough, so is Seattle, now. I love to make jokes about living in Seattle and loving coffee, or being green, like I've been here forever, not just a year and a half. I have a feeling, however, that Seattle will never quite be home like Boston is. Of course, everyone feels this way when they move away. Where you grow up is always part of your, whether you live there when you become an adult or not.

I moved 3,000 miles away from my home. If I was from Florida, I could have moved farther, but just barely. I love it here, but I miss home.
Usually my homesickness for Reading, where I grew up, is a dull ache that I often can ignore. Like the headache that isn't bad enough to take medicine for. But sometimes it's a migrane, and it hurts. Any mention of home, Boston, Red Sox, even the Bruins brings a sharp stab of sadness. That's my home, and someone else is there, enjoying it. Someone who isn't me.

For some reason this pain is hardest when people who are not from Boston go there. When they post pictures of familiar sites, my pain grows. It's a welcome sight, but a painful one. They are there, walking the streets I want to walk, seeing the things I want to see, the sites I long to see more than anything else, some days.
They are in my town, watching my team, enjoying, but maybe not appreciating things that I took for granted for 24 years.

Selfish? Mean? Maybe. Or maybe, just maybe, I just want to go home.