There will be some cities you live in which won't feel like home. Until it's time to say goodbye. You'll probably return, but only as a visitor. Someone with return tickets reserved, someone who has things to do and people to meet- all in a few days. Never again will you languish in the enormity of time that the city has to offer to you.
Perhaps you moved here with big dreams and a broken heart. Maybe you left your family and friends behind, your dog behind. Only to sleep on a single bed which is too springy for you, and a carpeted floor which doesn't have the usual sight of your dog sleeping on it. The first few months will obviously be spent grappling with the whirlwind of nervous excitement mingled with homesickness. You'll approach everything cautiously, trying to find your way around, learning names of roads, making mental notes of landmarks. You'll buy yourself a potted plant and name it Sally, only to make your apartment that you share with four other grown people - probably a decade older than you - feel more like home. (Don't be surprised if you find yourself talking to Sally on a particularly grey Tuesday afternoon, asking her if you made the right decision to move halfway across the world.)
You'll miss your food, your tongue, your cotton shirts - and your shoulders will protest loudly at the switch you made from your colourful tropical country to this one right by the Atlantic. You'll miss your television and your cinema, all of which was so inane that it all makes sense right now. You'll realize just how valuable the walls of your house were. They represented something that seems overwhelming - the solidity your father stands for, the certainty only your mother knows how. And the years they've spent in making sure you know you're loved.
But this story is not about them. It isn't about home. It's about that little place inside of you which has grown up that tiny bit - the part of you which has learnt how to console itself every time you miss the warmth of familiarity. It's the same one which brought you here in the first place, which stood by you as you battled the weeks where you cried yourself to sleep. But when you finally accepted the distance and found your place in the labyrinth of this chaos, it was the one which came out of you, assumed a life of its own and started to exist outside of you. And that's the one that's saying to you: you don't have the slightest clue just how much you're going to miss all of this hard work and loneliness.
Perhaps you moved here with big dreams and a broken heart. Maybe you left your family and friends behind, your dog behind. Only to sleep on a single bed which is too springy for you, and a carpeted floor which doesn't have the usual sight of your dog sleeping on it. The first few months will obviously be spent grappling with the whirlwind of nervous excitement mingled with homesickness. You'll approach everything cautiously, trying to find your way around, learning names of roads, making mental notes of landmarks. You'll buy yourself a potted plant and name it Sally, only to make your apartment that you share with four other grown people - probably a decade older than you - feel more like home. (Don't be surprised if you find yourself talking to Sally on a particularly grey Tuesday afternoon, asking her if you made the right decision to move halfway across the world.)
You'll miss your food, your tongue, your cotton shirts - and your shoulders will protest loudly at the switch you made from your colourful tropical country to this one right by the Atlantic. You'll miss your television and your cinema, all of which was so inane that it all makes sense right now. You'll realize just how valuable the walls of your house were. They represented something that seems overwhelming - the solidity your father stands for, the certainty only your mother knows how. And the years they've spent in making sure you know you're loved.
But this story is not about them. It isn't about home. It's about that little place inside of you which has grown up that tiny bit - the part of you which has learnt how to console itself every time you miss the warmth of familiarity. It's the same one which brought you here in the first place, which stood by you as you battled the weeks where you cried yourself to sleep. But when you finally accepted the distance and found your place in the labyrinth of this chaos, it was the one which came out of you, assumed a life of its own and started to exist outside of you. And that's the one that's saying to you: you don't have the slightest clue just how much you're going to miss all of this hard work and loneliness.
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