Home Diaries.

A few broken beer bottles

And just one broken heart

A song that keeps playing forever

Memories, many, that keep welling up once in a while

A starry sleepy stony night

But no restless reveries

Only a poem that doesn’t rhyme

And  ramblings that make sense to the one it should.

 A half full beer bottle and a plate of sliced stir-fried pork on the table with Take it Easy playing behind should have made me happy. More so, for I was home, with one of my oldest friends, in the city I claim to love and long for, near the river I thought I missed so bad, in the bar I had taken the first reluctant sip of a beer. But I was not- the dark smoke filled bar was starting to make me feel strangely suffocated. A mysterious melancholy had swept me over in the most unforeseen fashion, the beer was cold but refused to go down; the pork did not quite melt in the mouth as it usually does. The experience of feeling rejected by someone whom you have always thought as yours is an oddly eerie one- the blue hills, the great river for that one moment seemed to denigrate into mere cold physical entities, which had turned their backs on me, and I was all of a sudden an outsider. An outsider who no longer belonged to the place, and its people.

 

Being blasé is an important step towards being happy; I have sadly never been able to be. Blasé that is, I do not know and do not wish to either if that inevitably also disqualifies me from being happy. And it  pinched me somewhere it should not have, when just minutes before stepping into the bar, I  received a call from someone, who I’ve often vehemently  claimed to be unimportant in my scheme of things, to be informed that she was going home and was, as she put it, super excited, about it . When I asked her, what the super excitement was about, the answer was an exasperated – Well, because I’m going home!

 

I’ve been away from home for a fairly long time now, almost half a decade. And the idea of home’s altered over time. Initially, it meant family and friends, and slowly it has changed into more abstract memories of places, people and proceedings. The originally nostalgic notion of coming back to a place, which was yours has, almost anticlimactically, worn off into a more sedate affair of returning to a place where life is just easier, not necessarily natural. It’s a tragic transformation though; one that makes me feel extremely hollow from inside. The small town I live in and the other big city I often nibble at to escape life don’t consider me their own too.  I can’t even call myself a vagabond for I hardy do anything unrestricted by the practicalities of life. The whole ritual of watching the lights on the river from the hills, and dreaming of the good things that have passed by and will probably come again has become exactly that- a ritual reeking of times that never will be again. The city has changed; I have changed. And both of us cannot come to terms with each other’s changed selves.

 I’ve held on for too long, so long that I should be called clingy. Held on to an illusion of permanence in a universe where change is the only constant.  Held on because having a home and being loved and cared for was important for me. It still is, but, not that I have a choice. The bubble has burst somewhere and I couldn’t even hear it or as she says, refused to hear it. The pink woman in the red car honks at me for she’s getting late and I should drive faster. The city, I see, has finally learnt to move fast. I should learn too lest I must be mowed over by the midafternoon melee of a city in motion.