I woke up early today, much before most of the town even begins to move. With a coffee in my hand, I stood on the grass, still moist from last night’s rain, and then I walked back inside and sat at the desk with no words to write. The quiet hour was all I wanted. Well, as quiet as quiet can be. The ceiling fan added its piece to the background, and the birds had some urgent information to broadcast. Just then, my need to talk things through with people to arrive at many, often erroneous, conclusions stared at me from some corner of the silent room.
I wonder if it was the exhaustion from the lack of sleep or just a moment when we walk too far into the depths of our minds, unknowingly, like how we often walk around someone else’s house, partly out of curiosity and partly due to not knowing where things are, that I thought about my life in this city. Not my entire life, no, but just this bit, this leg of it.
Three years have passed since I came back to the city. For all intents and purposes, this is where I live now. I tell myself I will move out again, find a new place in a new city in some corner of the country or even outside. Yes, it can happen, but it will not happen anytime soon, and I have no plans to even begin planning such a move. For now, I carry this feeling of temporariness with me like I have been carrying a parcel in my bag, with a present for a friend, intending to ship it day after day, and always failing to do so.
It is only today, groggy, having slept about four hours at night, that I found my conscience pliable enough to internalise this—that I live here now. But then, in my heart is a potent homesickness. Why?
Perhaps, it is the possibility that I miss, that things have gone a certain way already, and that they can never be how they could have been. In what way? Not in some grand chasm of difference, but the tiny, little things. A habit or quirk that is now absent from my life, which I do not even know about since I will never have it!
There is a damning permanence that comes along with time. It eats away at you, like the scratch behind your throat after getting drenched on a rainy day.