fear of return

I don't want to go home. Our date for departure is more than two weeks from now but I'm already upset that I have to leave. I am dreading a return to New York City, the town I once loved more than any other place in the world. Every visit to Austria is usually accompanied by home-sickness come week two of my trip. Not this time.

Because this time I will be returning to an apartment without J but full of things that remind me of him. I haven't been able to dispose of his clothes, his shoes, his toothbrush, his inhaler, his USB sticks, his mail, his stuff. I don't want to see any of these reminders of his beating heart but I also don't want to lose any of it. It makes no sense. It's like this desire of wanting to look at his pictures and not at the same time. I want to see them because I miss him and his face is fading in my memory but when I look at them, my stomach is instantly full of butterflies and my chest aches as I simultaneously experience the sensation of love and loss.

If my older daughter wouldn't be so attached to her father, I would look into returning to Austria for good.
Just coming here to vacation was hard for the kid. She is eleven years old now and, I suppose, leaving her Dad so far behind made her feel as if she is losing a father all over again. She cried for days before I finally got to the root of all the pain, which I had originally thought to be mere home-sickness. "I'm afraid that Daddy will die", she admitted sobbingly and so I fought my inner urge to tell her, we can never know when someone will die and that there is no point in worrying about it, and instead responded the way I had to: "Daddy isn't going to die. No way. Not gonna happen. I guarantee it."

And just like that - she stopped crying.