Missing Missouri at 6:27 p.m. in Paris...

There's this feeling welling up inside me that can only be described as gray.  If I had to dissect it, it would be made up of loneliness, homesickness and nostalgia.  There is a bittersweet longing that I possess.  It is beautiful yet dull, complex yet simple, so far and so unattainable.  I say gray because when I close my eyes, I see the gray streets of my city, met at the horizon by a gray and billowing sky.  In between both are specks of color.  They range from the brilliant - the red and gold and brown of the trees, the crisp white All-American house set off by deep burgandy brick and ivy green - to the dull spectrum of colors that make up billboards, chain-store fronts and moving traffic.  But gray is everywhere you look, the air is gray and charged with rain and the lit up interiors of ordinary suburban homes, nail salons, grocery stores and restaurants call out to you and your need of shelter. 

I can't stop thinking about college.  My professors, my homework, the classrooms, the chalkboards, the uncomfortable wooden desks, the odd combination of cleaning product odors and the scent of dust - these sensory memories create such warmth in my mind that they too draw me in, as though they too were shelter from the rain.  

I moved to Paris for this?  To feel homesick over what I used to consider my prison, a shithole, the last place on earth anyone should spend their time in?  My hometown - I keep forgetting that the difference between it and every other place on the planet is the word "home".  

Perhaps the soul grows weary after too much travelling.  When we travel to another country and our only visible form of identity is our passport, it's psychologically fatiguing.  But so is the fact that this gray that I long for, this image I wish to enter in to, is no longer real and no longer attainable.  I can travel back home, I can drive the same streets, I can even re-enroll in the college and go to the same classrooms.  

Knowing that the shining present can never compare to the soft glow of the past we have construed is enough to make you lonely.