Home.

The past few weeks have been more than amazing, and quite frankly, I was surprised it turned out to be so. Coming home for the first time after a long break of about half a year for my first ever university spring break, I thought, would turn out to be an uncomfortable gap of discomfited thoughts, filled with awkward silences, unintended pauses of a very gauche nature, and spaces of time when you wanted to sink into the earth under you and disappear.

But it was not. In contrast, it ended up in being a long and cheerful number of hours, days and weeks, filled with reminiscing about the good old times when we were young and free, filled to the top with nostalgic inner warmth. Weird as it may sound, friendships get cemented on stone, and bonds become stronger than ever before, when two people haven’t seen each other for a very long time. I finally came to realize the worth in metaphorical gold each person around me weighed; I believe that without them, my life would be an incomplete puzzle. People change as the sands of time get carried by the wind in soulful carpets of dust into the distant horizon; nameless faces appearing and disappearing into the sands. But the ones who do stay solid, well, those are the ones that you genuinely remember forever.

Nowhere else on earth can you feel as comfortable and completely satisfied as possible with lying on a couch, a novel lying open next to you turned to page 151, a half empty can of soda lying somewhere around the corners of your vision, some good old 70’s Brit Pop playing in the background, the warm sun shining mildly through the half closed drapes, and well, your mind at a comfortable state of peace and content. Flipping through your old notebooks filled with writing and designs and songs and everything else, looking through old letters from past flames, and smiling at how young and stupid you were back in the days; nothing ever feels as good.

Sue me, for sounding like I’m on the brink of turning into an old man when I’m just hardly even eighteen, but I tell you, a lot does change when you leave home for the first time in your life and come back to visit. Brings back old fond memories it does, fills you with a pleasant sickly sweet sense of nostalgic reminiscence it does, leaves you craving for the good old summers at home it does. But then, you come back to reality, and you sigh, and your heart fills with longing to relive those days again. Your first girlfriend. Your first break up. Your first lessons of life. Your first dawning self realizations about your true self. Your first ever encounters with the realities of life. Your first ever memories of feelings ranging from dreary depression to nirvana. Your first ever steps towards yourself. Good times.

And now, it’s time to leave, as I write this. A flight back to real life waits for me. I bear no regrets at the thought of going back; a different life with its own unique set of people awaits for me back there. But I tell you, the days you live at the place you call home, those days; you’ll never ever get them back. Time goes by way too fast. Fuck time and all its intricacies. Fuck you. Fuck everyone else too.

And, just for the sake of telling you this, I once wrote down on a piece of paper, a list of things to do, to erase out all the regrets I have ever had back home, by a series of apologies, showdowns, venting out of well concealed frustrations, sorting out misunderstandings and the sort. But now, I tear that piece of paper to shreds. And I write a new note on a fresh new piece of paper extracted not so economically from a random notebook:

“To whomsoever may concern, go fuck yourself.”

*Grins to himself*

Home, where my thought's escaping
Home, where my music's playing
Home, where my love lies waiting
Silently for me