Stay, but only if you want to

It's hard to say whether it's because of the season or because of my greediness that I've been missing my parents' cooking this month, and the feeling is getting stronger.

After several failures in the kitchen, I tried to persuade my mom to come to Beijing for a while and cook for me; but she doesn't have the time.

The feeling of homesickness rises every now and then and has haunted me particularly often recently. Each day after I finish work, I feed the cats and sit on the couch - the apartment is big enough for me to live in by myself and even too big for one person. The heating hasn't come, it's freezing - the feeling of being so far away from home just comes over me from every direction. And each time my thoughts lead me to wonder: why do we leave home?