Separation Anxiety

I have it, and it’s terrible. 

I left Michigan at 10 o’clock at night back in June because I physically couldn’t stand to stay another minute in the home I’d grown to love. I was attached. I would have stayed. 

I have a thing for lakes. 

I still fall victim to my own crippling separation anxiety more than a month after the separation actually occurred. It sneaks up on me, invoked by anything from the rare cool evening breeze, to the thought of a winter without piles of snow. My perfume did it to me the other day. The memory attached to that perfume was so profound I felt a physical ache in my chest; the perfume is now in the very back of my closet, but the memory and the ache won’t go away. I’m not sure if I want it to.