::alio!::

home again, home again

The modern conveniences of air travel, despite their many annoyances, have the overwhelming positive that they allow people to travel great distances in a short amount of time. I'm not being facile here. Remember it took me a full week to drive from Ottawa to St. John's. On a plane, I can get there in three hours. From the centre of the country to the edge of the world in three hours. That's pretty incredible, if you ask me.

The astonishing rapidity of this superhuman feat, however, while it is easy on the human body, kind of messes a bit with the human mind.

We left Ottawa on Sunday night, in the middle of a blizzard. We woke up Monday morning in a different province, a different bed, and to the sound of the pouring rain. There is absolutely no snow left in St. John's, so it doesn't look or feel like January in the least. In addition to traveling 3000km, I feel like we also managed to travel back in time to September, because that's what it really looks like here. It's a mite disorienting.

In addition to the sheer physicality of long-distance travel, which is enough to overwhelm anyone, there is the additional confundus of mental attachments to places, things, and people.

When we first arrived in Ottawa for our Christmas holiday, Andy and I experienced the sensation that we were in some place that was very familiar to us, but that was no longer a home for us. Over the course of two weeks, as we managed to settle into a routine, that impression changed. I think it changed more for me than it did for Andy, who doesn't know when he will be back in the city. I, on the other hand, am planning to move back to Ottawa temporarily in the fall, and I will live there for eight months. So I was already seeing the city as a potential living space. I already have 'stuff' in my parents' house in readiness for my arrival. Essentially, the place just started to feel like home again, and then we left.

We nearly didn't make it home, either, due to adverse weather conditions, but here we are. Everything was just as we'd left it and everything was where we wanted it to be, but I felt a strange sense of detachment about the place. Over the past few days that has changed somewhat, but it's still there to a certain extent. I think that part of it stems from a lack of sleep and also the absence of any real time for me to sit at home and resituate myself in my place, as I have been working these days to catch up from the holiday. So perhaps tomorrow it will be better.

But it is very strange, living in two places at once. Kind of like when I lived at my parents' house during the week and Andy's apartment on the weekends back when we were dating. But this time it's 3000km apart.

Posted by Ally at January 6, 2010 09:49 AM