Finding home away from home

I have this, very important, very serious, promise to myself: I will visit my friends at least once per year. To note: I will travel to them. With the exceptions of the pandemic years –when my friends got trapped in my city because US closed the border– and the year of my wedding –because saving money– I've been fairly good on keeping my word.

Every year I do the, more or less, same ten hours of roadtrip to them and, while it's tiring to drive that far and for that long, I find myself catching the same feeling when I arrive: "I'm home", I think to myself; and everything is well and good and bright. Having done this trip just last week, I noticed the same thing happening every night when talking in front of my friend's porch before going to bed. It was, simply put, overwhelming. More than ever. "I like being here. I want to be here." In classic mexican macho fashion, I was too ashamed to admit that the feeling moved me to tears every single night and I struggled to find a way to put it into words and share it with them. Maybe, I just didn't want to share it completely with them... so I just said "I know I always tell you, but I love your house", aware that it will happen next year, too.

Of course, the feeling is not caused by the house, it encompasses the whole experience of being in his house, meeting my longtime friends once again, doing fun stuff together, getting drunk in the porch or backyard, sharing breakfast and coffee early in the morning, listening to music, cruising the highways together, going to bars or restaurants, cursing each other and calling out how stupid we all are... Friend's stuff. Fuck, I miss it already.

And don't even get me started on trying to explain this pause / unpause shit that happens when we see each other after a long year. We meet again and time start fucking moving again. We say our "see you later"s and it all pauses until the next time. Yeah, stuff happens in our independent lives and it's not like we're texting every day about everything that happens to keep tabs on each other –we're men, we're stupid– but those days we get up to speed on everything and I get this feeling that we're not catching up... We're back to somehow creating memories together. And that's not something I can say about all my groups of friends...

Anyways, today I just wanted to pay tribute to this feeling I cannot explain. I thought that maybe writing almost 500 words about it would help me make sense of it. It didn't, of course, but I feel more at peace with this fucking weird nostalgia of being away from houses that are not my house but still feel like home.

Miss you, guys.