I finished my 4th class for the day and opened my to-do list only to see a stack of pending assignments gazing back at me. “I’m so tired I want to go home, “I screamed as my voice broke. My heart pieced together what my broken voice, scattered mind, and tired body could not agree with – which home?
My home of 18 years in Mumbai? My new home 2 hours away from Chennai? A person I miss? My best friend? My double bed in a single room or my single bed in a double room? A teddy bear gifted to me on my 10th birthday that I cannot sleep without or my roommate who I wish goodnight to after a long day? My mother’s food and my father’s jokes, or the ten happy faces that I met a year ago? The familiar school lanes or the broad highway leading up to my college? The mountains where I am instantly at peace or the city life that keeps me going – which home do I wish to go to?
How could such wildly different, contrasting situations make me feel the same emotion — “homely.”
I spent a long time combating these thoughts while simultaneously trying to rank them in order of preference – “I want to go home” meant so many things to me now. It took me a long time to grapple with the idea that there is no single answer to this question and, most importantly, there is no right answer.
It is beautiful yet daunting to accept that once you leave your childhood home, you’ll always be a visitor when you return. When you go home after a long time and see that the arrangement of chairs in the living room has changed, and there are new curtains in the house, you realise that you are not involved in the tiny decision made at home anymore, and that is a feeling that I haven’t made my peace with yet. I reckon that the act of moving away from one’s childhood home adds a free-flowing, dynamic aspect to our definition of ‘a home.’ Now, home to me is not just the 3rd floor of my building, but instead, it is a never-ending, ever-present longing to make unknown places my own; to make them my home.
Leaving home gives a sudden jolt to our foundational understanding of a house, a society, family and comfort, but it also allows us to step into an entirely different realm of opportunities, with the liberty to constantly be in search of places where we can create a similar feeling to the one we felt at home.
The beauty of having many homes is that you leave a part of yourself in each of these homes. They are all distinct versions of you, but as authentic as they could be at that time. If you truly want to know a person — know their homes. The bare essence of our personality is made up of tiny pieces that represent the people and places that we call home. Every person is a combination of these tiny, oddly shaped pieces of a huge puzzle that only makes sense when they are put together.
Looking at your homes, you are reminded of growth, and of the places that you once found comfort in. This introspection helps you distinguish between the homes that have the capability to grow with you; timeless, and a home that was perfect only for a certain version of you, but not for any other. It is bittersweet to accept that there will be more people and places that you will outgrow than the ones that will ultimately join your eternal list of homes. This multitude of homes also shows us that there is an abundance of things in the world that possess the ability to make us happy, and there are abundant ways to achieve that happiness. Different people, foods, and cultures have the magical ability to make a place home, and the second we think that our happiness is exhaustive, a new person, place, or situation is waiting to comfort us, if we allow it to.
At this age where we’re constantly meeting new people and exploring new places, I have realised the importance of the people, places and spaces that you go back to after a long day, a tiring month or a difficult year, that bring you true, unfettered joy. There is peace in recognizing your permanent homes, comfort in living in your current home, and hope in realising that if not in sight — there are so many more homes left to create.