Coming home.

My friends Melanie and Jay have been traveling around Southeast Asia for the last three months (you may remember them from this wedding) and I have missed them like you wouldn't believe. Today they return to New York and I can't WAIT to see them.

I know coming home can be bittersweet, and sometimes it's hard to adjust back to your old routines or try to make new ones. This post by Erin from Vivian's blog put that adjustment period so beautifully into words, that I wanted to share it with Melanie and Jay. Erin's time abroad was much longer, but the sentiment translates for anyone who's ever spent time traveling. Here is an excerpt:

The return, I think, is the most startling part of living somewhere apart from friends and family. And for me, being apart from my friends and family wasn’t half as difficult as coming back to them. It wasn’t because I didn’t want to come home, or that I didn’t miss them--I did, sometimes terribly. Rather, it was that I had existed in a world that, try as I might, I couldn’t quite manage to share. They could not conjure the smell of the small épicerie that I frequented on my walk home from teaching—a combination of fresh produce and dusty boxed crackers and stale cigarette smoke. They didn’t know how the plastic bus seat felt as I made my way to school in the morning, or how the gravel crunched under my bike tires on my rides through the vineyards. They didn’t know the weight of the skeleton keys I carried in my pocket, or which way to turn the key in the lock so that the portail would finally open, couldn’t hear the squeak that my shutters made as I pushed them open each morning, or watch the way the reflection of the morning sun in my neighbor’s window changed with the seasons. Returning home brought the realization that as much as my life was shared with the people around me, the experience, ultimately, was singularly my own—perhaps not a true revelation, but one that I hadn’t fully grasped before.

Welcome home, M+J. xo

Image from Jordan's beautiful blog.