The Ache of Leaving, The Ache of Return

I started missing home before I’d even left the driveway.

Happy was waving from our apartment balcony, Arash beside her, both getting smaller as the taxi pulled away toward the train station. The trip was only three days—a work conference in Sylhet that I’d been looking forward to for weeks. But already my chest felt hollow, already I wanted to turn around.

This is the strange mathematics of departure: we’re homesick before we leave and homesick after we return, as if the act of going anywhere reveals how much we have to lose by going anywhere at all.

The homesickness before leaving is anticipatory grief. It’s your heart practicing for absence, rehearsing the ache of not being able to touch the people who make you feel real. Every familiar sight on the way to the departure point becomes precious because you’re seeing it for the last time before it becomes memory.

I watched the city change outside the taxi window—the narrow streets of our neighborhood giving way to wider roads, the small shops where everyone knows my name replaced by anonymous buildings. Each mile felt like losing another layer of myself, another connection to the version of me that exists only in relation to home.

But the homesickness after returning is different—more complex, more confusing. You’re home, surrounded by everything you missed, but somehow you’re also missing the person you were while you were away. You’re grieving the temporary self who navigated unfamiliar places, who experienced things your stay-at-home self never will.

I came back from Sylhet with stories that felt important while I lived them but shrunk in the telling. The sunrise over the tea gardens that brought me to tears seemed diminished when I tried to describe it to Happy. The conversation with a fellow passenger on the train that kept me awake thinking all night became just another anecdote that couldn’t capture its actual significance.

This is the homesickness no one talks about—missing the expanded version of yourself that only exists when you’re displaced. At home, you slip back into familiar roles, predictable routines. The person who felt capable of anything while watching that sunrise gets filed away with the photos on your phone.

Arash asked me if the trip was fun, and I realized I didn’t know how to answer. Fun feels too small a word for the mixture of longing and discovery, expansion and contraction that defines even the shortest journey away from home. Was it fun to feel homesick for people I’d see in three days? Was it fun to realize how much of my identity is tied to specific places and faces?

Maybe homesickness is just love made visible. The ache of leaving proves how much we treasure what we’re leaving. The ache of returning proves we’re capable of finding meaning beyond our familiar boundaries.

I think about nomads, about people whose work requires constant travel, about refugees who carry their homesickness like permanent luggage. How do they navigate this double longing? How do you live when home is always somewhere else—either behind you or ahead of you, but never where you actually are?

The answer might be learning to find home not in geography but in the capacity for love itself. Home as the ability to miss people, to feel connected across distance, to carry the warmth of belonging even when you’re far from the places and people that make you feel like you belong.

Tonight, back in our apartment, listening to Happy move around the kitchen, hearing Arash practice reading aloud in his room, I’m homesick for the version of myself who missed them. Homesick for the clarity that only comes from temporary absence, the appreciation that only emerges when you’re reminded how much you have to lose.

Maybe the point isn’t to solve the homesickness paradox but to honor it—to understand that the ache of leaving and the ache of returning are both forms of love, both ways the heart marks what matters most.