Posted by Laura Kelly on May 22, 2014

It is May, and I’ve been away from Flagstaff for five months. It is our longest separation since I moved to town nine years ago.

Most days I move through this yearlong decampment to Kyrgyzstan bustling with purpose and the rational understanding that this time away from home is temporary. I remember why I thought it was a solid idea to leave my community, my friends, my little outpost on the hill.

This is not one of those days.

And this is not a Letter from Home. It is a letter to home. A big, gooey love letter.

Scrolling through my Facebook stream a few weeks ago, I clicked onto a photo gallery posted by a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend. The post displayed about two dozen images of someone’s trip to Flagstaff. I couldn’t read the German captions, but I enlarged every photo and twitched with satisfaction when I recognized the usual line-up of locations.

I stared at the pictures as if the force of my focused eyeballs might magically transport me into the scenes. I was alone when I did this, but I spoke out loud, as if narrating my own slide show for a group of daft relatives. “That’s Macy’s, a coffee house downtown. And there is Lockett Meadow in the spring. Those are the San Francisco Peaks, and this is a view of the city from Mars Hill. Ponderosa pines! Some people say they smell like butterscotch, and some say they smell like vanilla. When I come up the hill from Phoenix, I get a whiff of the Ponderosas, and that fragrance telegraphs that I am almost there.”

As I listened to the words I chose and heard the pride and nostalgia infusing each description, I spiraled into something so big and wide it should have its own ZIP code: missing home.

Before I left Flag in late December, I had dinner with a friend. He asked if I planned to return after my year away. Accepting this grant and leaving temporarily is not a gateway drug, I told him. My decision to go doesn’t portend an escalating appetite for awayness.

In Flagstaff I have found community in its deepest colors, opportunity for reinvention and discovery, a tribe of like minds and wondrous places to play. Not returning was never part of my calculus, but I did foresee that there might be a fair amount of missing home. I told my friend that I was curious about how that might feel. I know what it feels like to be proud of Flagstaff, to work for Flagstaff, to have woven myself into the fibers of Flagstaff. But I did not know what it felt like to miss Flagstaff.

Missings have their own forms and textures. Missing friends, missing a sweetie, missing my book club. What I have come to know is that missing Flagstaff is a kind of internal fog that fills my inside rooms like one of those smoke machines in a nightclub: dramatic and noiseless and sudden. It billows, clouds my heart with its curious oxygen and releases a low-grade melancholy. As I grope my way out of the fog, I see in the perfect vision of my mind’s eye all that draws me to the city I have come to know as home. I am afforded the opportunity to remember once again all the magnetic powers and people there. And when the fog dissipates, I am left knowing home will be waiting for me with a more potent sweetness when I return.

T.S. Eliot says it better than I: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

The dining hall on the lower level of the small university where I teach in Kyrgystan is a narrow corridor dotted with tables and chairs. A mounted TV flashes Russian pop music videos. Bulletin boards on one corridor wall advertise study abroad programs, a karaoke bar with cheap drinks, and notices of roommates wanted. The other corridor wall holds one ornament on its dingy wall—a faded poster of the Grand Canyon. Time has leeched the canyon’s colors to a palette of beige and more beige. I make a daily pilgrimage to the poster. I stand in front of it like a good Catholic girl before one of the stations of the cross. I have chosen to believe the image was put there for me. I have come to see it as a letter from home. A big, gooey love letter.