Inflight Slippers and Homelessness: What It’s Like to Come Home After a Long Time Abroad

Ryan Farley | May 11, 2016

Heading “Home”

About a week before Christmas day, I took the long journey home to spend the holidays with my family. The flight went by quickly and easily and I continue to question why everyone seems so bothered by air travel.

During my layover in Seattle, I grabbed one of the things I missed most about home: a Pacific Northwest microbrew. Sitting in the airport bar, trying to savor my first quality beer in almost a year, I began to feel more and more unsettled. There were so many things to take in all at once. More English was being spoken within earshot at that moment than I had probably heard in all of the previous month, people were wearing clothes and haircuts that I couldn’t recognize, and strangers were asking me which beer I had ordered and how it was.

I felt overwhelmed and confused — like all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room, but I was the only one who noticed. Being a backpacker, I had read a handful of blog posts about what it feels like to come home after prolonged travel, but nothing prepared me for the anxiety of feeling like a foreigner in my own home. It’s like waking up from a tense dream only to find everything looked different than when you went to sleep.

Henry Burrows

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