Not-missing: obnoxious bartenders, really-really-needing to pee every time I have to use a map; the grit of a city's incessant sweating heavy on my neck and arms; the fissures of a relationship straining under mass miscommunication; my little toe asleep on a too-long flight; the homesickness of an only-English reader, browsing in a bookstore where the first few lines of any given book can never-ever be fully understood.

Missed: scorched coffee and greasy hash browns at the Makris, the sounds of many English dialects fornicating recklessly in my ear, flea-bitten Beast, the usual attic melodrama, me on my bike, brother mooning over a new girl, tipsy girls in a taxicab on Unter den Linden, dangerously fantastic playgrounds, tapas in a tiny alley restaurant in San Sebastian, the custom of kissing both cheeks goodbye, au revoir, auf wiedersehen.

...

Sorta missing, sorta not-missing: a peculiar sort of aloneness, the sort that occurs when I haven't written towards anyone else for days and days. Inside me would rest so many layers of sediment, dimpled with the impressions of ancient insects and flora, their delicate mysteries--particular color, style of movement, the sounds made during a prehistoric autumn--rendered unknown by an aloneness/maybe-loneliness/ that doesn't have a language to call its own (it only borrows, and borrows inexpertly).

...

Sometimes, stumbling awake in a city whose name I am at first unsure of, I still feel it, that aloneness, quiescent and meditative, something akin to the sensations experienced before the necessary task of excavation begins.