My levels of homesickness are going through the roof lately.
It's very weird, because for most of my 15 years of life abroad - my entire adult life, I was never once homesick. Even as a kid going on trips with school, I remember friends getting so upset from homesick they had to be taken aside or go home early even. I never felt such a thing.
And to be fair, I don't realistically have a 'home' to return to. I don't have any such physical home, a house or apartment. I vaguely have a hometown in that I was born around there, but I hold no allegiance to it, and any friends still there have of course moved on, kids, their own homes and friends etc. We haven't spoken in a long time, only meeting briefly whenever I make trips back.
I have basically no family save for my mother. My dad abandoned me because he didn't want to talk to me in any other method other than emails (yes, it really is as nonsensical as that - a story for another day), and my uncles and aunts and all that are either dead or were never really in my life even growing up.
So I essentially have zero ties to my own homeland - why would I be homesick?
I don't 100% know. But anybody who lives abroad will probably agree that no matter how well you integrate into a society, you will never feel like you truly belong. Even in similar cultures, like moving to Australia. There's still something people can't always quite put their finger on. They stay there for the vastly superior quality of life, but there is still a pull home that they have to fend off (because it's so objectively worse in England...).
Some of it might be thinking that the grass is greener on the other side, but I'm very aware of the decline of the UK, perhaps more than the average local brit, since I am always staying on top of the news cycle and economics and all that. The country is in dire straits. It's crumbling into a third world, it's becoming uglier and more destitute, and worst of all, it only has a downward trajectory from here on out.
And yet, I am being pulled to it. I'm being pulled every day by the gentle hills and the scruffy little forest walks. The cold, grey beaches and crumbling infrastructure. The old churches hanging by a thread of the remaining old people left alive still attending.
It's fair to say, I don't miss my home town per se - Leicester. I could take it or leave it. But when it comes to the very Tolkien-sian Shire of the countryside upon which Hobbiton was based, I can't seem to escape it.
It's not like our countryside is particularly remarkable, either. It's nice, but just look at what you can experience a short drive onto the mainland; German, Switzerland, France. These places have by far some of the most beautiful landscapes the earth has to offer. The Alps. God. And then look upwards to Scandinavia. Holy fjord.
In England we have... farmland. Miles upon endless miles of farmland, broken up by shitty bankrupt towns designed to depress entire societies.
In fact as I've mentioned here before, England is one of the most nature-depleted countries on earth. Even China has vast, vast oceans of untouched land. China has like 12 deserts, including the Gobi. It has the frickin' Himalayas. The Tibetan Plateau. It doesn't hold a candle to the ecological heaven of, say, the USA for comparable size but even so.
England is largely just full of people, and the agriculture required to stop them starving. Even Scotland, a land of ultra beautiful landscape, is called beautiful with a kind of strange undertone: Desolation.
The landscape is stripped bare. Many centuries ago, it was once covered in thick forest. Now that forest comprises something like 5% of the landscape, if that. The rest was stripped bare, especially during the world wars. And what we call natural beauty now is actually an utter wasteland many initiatives are trying to very slowly restore back to its former glory.
It's still beautiful when you compare it to, say, Birmingham, but if that's the best our Island has got then... It's a bit sad.
Bleeding nostalgia
And yet I find myself expressing my emotional need to England in ways I don't even recognise at first. I've been building a music album recently and it was only four songs in when I realised, these songs are very clearly a call for help. Help me find my way home.
The overall theme is about technology dominating and taking over, our loss of nature and beauty and tradition. One song focuses on the sound of birds, while another depicts the gentle rolling hills. A third represents the media during my time of youth (the kind of lo-fi Vaporwave, VHS dynamic). Once I realised this, my albums purpose transformed into my sole outlet for my nostalgic pains.
After all, the literal meaning of Nostalgia comes from the Greek nostos- ‘return home’ - and algos - ‘pain’.
Not to get TOO personal, but reviewing the most recent track on my way home from work yesterday, I found myself welling up beyond my own control and had to quickly turn it off and put myself back together before the public noticed lol.
This is an extremely strong sign that
A) I'm frickin' home sick
B) This album is becoming extremely meaningful beyond my original intention.
Well, I drafted out an album cover with AI, which got my name 'Mobbsidian' wrong but whatever, close enough.
I think I'll get my artist genius wife to make a proper version of this general vibe. I'm thinking of making the text a bit more... leafy. Like one of the 'I' letters is a tree, or a dying tree depending on my mood. I'll work something out.
I'm not so keen on the wispy S-shaped things but something similar would be sweet and I really like the VHS vibe of the horizontal lines and the very subtle but effective red-green distortion (I'm sure it has a name) on the lettering.
This isn't marketing
I'm just trying to show how these feelings are expressing themselves in interesting ways without me even noticing. This album may never be finished, certainly not for a while. And when it is, I don't know the first thing about promotion so I'll probably just keep it to myself unless anybody specifically asks for it XD
Will I ever get what I want?
Probably not. What I yearn for no longer exists. I think we all suffer that to some extent. We want to be our childhood selves again and start over with all the knowledge we now know. The consequences of our irresponsible youth is written our in our bodies' pains and aches. Our life problems can so easily be traced back through the years to this or that singular point in life we wish we could have done better.
I may go back to England any time from next week to 5 years from now, depending on how difficult they make it for me to go. But realistically, I won't find what I'm looking for. Only faint whispers of it. LIttle tastes here and there.
The world has moved on, become colder and uglier. I guess I was just unlucky to be born during such a time, while also being so lucky to be born where my biggest problem is nostalgia, rather than everybody I know dying from Dysentery.
Expression through music
The nice thing about all this is that one thing I always struggled with music is that no matter how talented or knowledgeable I was, I could never really use music to express, well, anything really. I could never be like the greats whose hearts you can physically hear through their music. I could never make anything that anybody would find emotionally relatable. I always just make music that sounded kinda cool.
I'd use filler lyrics like 'Can you feel the light from the Toaster during May? You don't have the right to eat a piece of Kimchi anymore' . Yes. Actual lyrics in my song 'Toaster Final (2)'.
Because on paper of course I can write something 'meaningful', just by mimicking all the greats, but it was always artificial. Telling a story about a lost love, or telling everybody to put their hands in the air like they just don't care.
But if I were to put a percentage on how much of me gets written in my music, it hovers around 0%.
This album is the first time ever that I feel like my heart is actually being listened to and written down, even though the intention at least for now is to not have any lyrical elements.
That's kinda cool. A little exciting.