On Coming Back Home

It’s gonna be a drastically slow summer this year. I’m back at my home my parent’s home. Each day that’s going by feels like a capsule, isolated from the events of the previous day. I’d say it’s more like a snowglobe, and there’s a flurry of events, not always in a flurried motion. flurry, i like that word. There’s so much work. There’s so much heat, always (ow the north indian summers...). There’s redundancy to my actions, I find myself slipping back into some of those actions of my redundant 17yo’s body that used to inhabit this room.

I think about being seventeen. When I was seventeen... i was somebody i am unable to recall or even recognize. at 21 (soon turning 22) (im trying not to think about it), i remember my 12 yo self vividly. today on that phone call we were talking about our fourth grade experience. maybe when i am 32, seventeen will make sense. things only arrive when it’s right, not when I want them to be. but i cannot sit, I have to keep runningdoingchasingbuildingcreating i have to be -ing cause I cannot sit, sit with the rigidity of those past versions weighing down on me, there’s so much to do in future that i will have to bear... that i get to bear I correct myself. and you can do nothing but watch — a helpless audience. and that’s who we are for each other — helpless, audience.

I feel I’ve entagled myself into a chain of events, without thinking too much, events that I don’t necessarily know how they will turn out, and I am yet to reach the reactive end of it all, the burning core. It’s weird but I’m kinda looking forward to that burn?

I’ve been flipping through some burning pages lately. Some friends not friends anymore, lovers not lovers anymore, I am not me anymore, turning into something i don’t know... There was enough at stake over the past few months that should’ve terrified me of everything, but it didn’t? why? Instead I just find myself curious to read the next page, fascinated by whats gonna be in that next chapter in this book... this buring book. curiosity kills the cat. Why do I not feel this burn?

disparaging... yes! that is the word for this emotion that seems to be striking on that hot metal plate of stability I seemed to be trying to build... once... in hopes of what? that I could carve words out of it later? i don’t know. do I need stability though? is stability good? comfort? good for growth? I ask

The afternoons are getting a bit bland & thin. The soreness in my neck & back, from finally starting the gym back again after almost the 3wk pause, don’t let me lie down on the cool marble floor anymore, so that’s one thing lost. I lie down on the bed, my favorite yellow floral bedsheet tucked over this old mattress that still overflows the bed frame, some imprfections stay the same i guess. I got the curtains removed cause the shadow of the sun is all that enter this room now, and I feel like.... im in this sort of dusty afterlife, people things and some memories I loved exploded into minute particles scattered over this room. I can see it in the sunbeam, some of them.

I think of what else is lost to time - my tiny 3000 song mp3 player, tv channel subscriptions, jokes in newspapers, connections I should’ve & could’ve but didn’t, that summer love, nana to covid, grandma to guilt, a girl to motherhood and marriage, a man to manhood and responsibilities, everthing contained inside this house trying to exist.

As I collapse into my dying of a beenbag, I let the brick of memories that I built in these 4 walls fall on me, one by one. I study the cracks that have formed in the walls while I was away from home (it feel weird to call it home for some reason) (i don’t really feel like I have a home in the sense) (perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition of being).

I look at those paint stains on the walls now painted over, the newly partitioned room on the ground floor, the old clothes in my cupboard that fit me no more, the folder behind them, of old class photos, of people who if I look at now, id probably not recognise, everybody has got a glow up... funny. maybe I should have kept in touch, maybe its better I didn’t, i look at the plants I had grown that now mom has taken usurped from my room for her new office. I look at things, oh so many things. It is true they say, you never really move out. I am now stretched over cities. Mom says I’ve become thin, but I’ve grown in size. I am eating people up. Eating people places memories experiences.

How did that conversation with her end btw? i don’t remember. i just tend to laugh. laughing louder than everybody to drown the aftermath. I tend to exaggerate. I laugh. loudly.

Dad & mom are out for office, lil sis hasn’t come from school yet, aahh no one to annoy. I feel like a ghost in the house rn, unseen, unfelt and... free. I pretty much spent the day slouching on the beanbag, working, unless I wanted to go out to that Starbucks on the basement of the apollo hospital. It’s a weird location but I like it, im productive there. I have weird spots in this city that I like frequenting to. But not today I think. The bricks have blocked my door.

Nights would be frequented by me going through that same old paths in the colony. The same building, still under construction, the same 3 stray dogs (they stopped barking at me after yesterday, I think they remember me now), the same young couple in the park, - still fighting, the same uncle & aunty on walk, holding hands (they remember me) (will I ever get to have that?), that same dark dingy alley (oh so it’s here I developed that habbit from)... everything feels the same.

I remember that F. Scott Fitzgerald quote: Its a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You've realized what's changed is you. very well. have I though? he said I’m still that same harami (bastard), she said I’ve changed so much, the hair, the voice, the chapri jewellery, the {REDACTED}. How have I become so different but still that same Tanmay.

It’s the middle of june now, the summer heat melting into the monsoons. There’s wind. There’s sun. There’s breeze, There’s heat and then there’s me, the same different me. Nothing feels amiss, nothing feels empty, yet I feel suspended in time and space, in the same place, just getting streched, streched thin. The past I can’t let go off, the future I can’t stop chasing after, the present, well it never existed... I laugh.

What I love right now is already over, the wheels of time turning my life into a train of memories that I didn’t catch and I can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles. I’m five hundered miles away from home. “I need to keep walking” I repeat it until.

I don’t think I had any solid reason for coming home, yet I came. How could I not? I laugh again. I spend the days running around, escaping, the walls, the roof, the voices, the old me. Yet every night without fail I seem to return to fall back on that same bed the 17yo me would fall on. Foolish, I think. The only difference? He would never sleep... but now I’m half a man, like dad said.

That sadness and anger in me seems to have turned into something more quiet, perhaps turned into a part of me. I cannot bite back, I cannot cry, I don’t get teary eyed, I am not stoic. I have grown soft, she is right.

Parents get harsher as they get old, unable to scratch the surface, their actions and words grow pointier, like a knife. As their image of god-like, all poweful, looming, scary figures fades in your heart all you’re left with is two people who are there in the same house as you, trying to do what they think is best. You listen, let go, you tolerate, you shake your heads even, like they are naughty misbehaving children. My sister and I laugh now. Yes, things are better at home, I laugh.

It’s my tenth day here today. I haven’t even unpacked the small suitcase fully. Mom keeps nagging. I know I know. I am eating the lychees, probably the last of seasons, mom left a plate, she just won’t stop feeding me. It’s annoying. It’s mom’s love. It’s still annoying. Plate is empty now. I will not sleep tonight I say. About a couple of hours ago I went to that corner shop to pick out something sweet to eat. I earn now, I can finally pick the more expensive cadbury I tell myself, yet I still go for the cheap one. I laugh, hate how much you want, everyone slowly turns into their parents.

As I sit on that rock in that dark alley, eating my 20Rs cadbury, craning my neck to see as much as I could of the moon through the branches, through the clouds half covering it, I feel drop of water on my cheek, one more, one more, it’s raining, I take cover under the tree, the moon, it now seems to be spreading into the lake of the night, like thick circular white chalk in water.

I felt teary eyed and stupid and lost. i’m not crying. it’s the rain. How will I go back and be? Will I? Be? Be What? Who is going to be there for me? When nobody is here for me, it’s a comfort. But when I am away, it is merely me being alone.

I think of Rilke, who I have been lately getting into bc of Nerdwriter1; but your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.

I think of Bruce Springsteen, and how I felt his words reverberate inside of me when I saw the scenery from the car ride yesterday and the song was playing “I was slipping over the streets of my childhood… No longer a painful player in my, or my town’s history, but a passing and impassive observer.”

I think of the poem from that movie:

Jab jab dard ka baadal chaya
Jab ghum ka saya lehraya
Jab aansoo palkon tak aya
Jab yeh tanha dil ghabraya

Humne dil ko yeh samjhaya
…Dil aakhir tu kyun rota hai
Duniya mein yunhi hota hai

Yeh jo gehre sannate hain
Waqt ne sabko hi baante hain
Thoda ghum hai sabka qissa
Thodi dhoop hai sabka hissa
Aankh teri bekaar hi nam hai
Har pal ek naya mausam hai
Kyun tu aise pal khota hai
Dil aakhir tu kyun rota hai

Pighlay neelam sa behta hua yeh samaan
Neeli neeli si khamoshiyaan
Na kahin hai zameen
Na kahin aasmaan
Sarsaraati huyi tehniyaan, pattiyaan
Keh rahi hain ki bas ek tum ho yahaan
Sirf main hoon meri saansein hain aur meri dhadkanein
Aisi gehraiyaan
Aisi tanhaiyaan
Aur main sirf main
Apne honay pe mujhko yaqeen aa gaya

The moment flows by like molten sapphire
Deep Blue silences
No Earth below
No Sky above
The rustling branches, leaves
Are saying that only you are here,
Only me
My breath
My heartbeat
Such Depths like this
Such Aloneness like this
And me only me
I now believe I exist

Existentially yours,
Kay.

_#111