Homecoming

It was during a conversation with a friend at a fancy cafe that I realized the unthinkable has happened: I am homesick for a place I only just left. I have imagined my homecoming many times—hell, I lived for it—but now that I’m actually home, I miss home more than ever. Lately, when I allow myself to open up, I realize I speak of my time there as if it were my "real" life—a narrative currently on hiatus while I play a part here. It is a disorienting, circular grief; ironically, I spent my years in America with the exact same feeling. I fear that my repeated narrations of those stories have become unbearable to those around me—repetitive ghost stories told by someone who hasn't quite realized that life has moved on.

This is not an unfamiliar feeling; I have always been haunted by where I am not. When I was in the States, I once dreamed of myself on a swing, arching over a cool, green pond. After one long, gravity-defying swing, I fell, and I could almost feel the phantom touch of the water on my skin. At the time, I made the most rational assumption: I was so starved for home that I had begun to dream in stereotypes.

But now that I’m home, the dreams have changed. I dream of walking down the streets of Tennessee with my friends while it rained. I dream of the frantic, laughing nights we spent playing charades, and that final, bittersweet night in New York where I stood small beneath the glow of the Empire State Building. The cruelty of these new dreams is their weight—unlike the pond and the swing, these things actually happened.

That weight feels strangely familiar, pulling me back to the afternoon the gravity of that life first took hold. The building of Busch Engineering Science and Technology (BEST) Halls North loomed over me as I waited outside with a laundry basket filled with “essentials,” two big suitcases, and a carry-on to get moved into what would be my new home for the next ten months. It was day two of me breathing foreign air, quite different from the humid, higher 60s AQI air of Mavelikara. Everything about the building was foreign to me—carpeted floors, drywall, switches that worked in reverse, locks that turned the other way, and the quietness—all completely opposite from what I was used to in my eighteen years of existence in Kerala.

After I unpacked my carry-on, the silence got too eerie for me. In my home, right by the side of State Highway 6, there was never really a moment of silence. Even after 10:00 PM, when the vibrant social life of Mavelikara died down, there would always be a solitary truck, an annoyingly loud motorbike, or at least the hum of my somewhat crappy air conditioner to fill the silences. It is on that first day at BEST Hall that I probably decided that my real life was back home.

It seems that my solitary island met some other wandering islands of existence. We built a world out of that eerie quiet. We filled the drywall rooms with the scent of late-night takeout and the echoes of movie nights until the foreign air felt tolerable. The force that pulled us together was simple: we were all thousands of miles away from where we started. Back then, I made a restlessness my religion. I turned "home" into a phantom, whining to anyone who would listen that life would only truly begin once I stepped off the plane in Kerala. My friends were patient anchors; they tolerated the constant static of my longing.

There is a safety here I didn't have then. I don't have to worry about deportation in Mavelikara; I don't have to worry about a hundred other things that keep a person awake in a foreign land. But there is a specific, hollow ache in that safety. Even between all those worries, it was wonderful to have people to share them with. Now, I find myself standing on the very ground I prayed for, only to spend my days mourning a life I spent so much time trying to leave behind.

It is remarkable, really—the ability of people to lay down roots wherever they go. To quote Fernando Pessoa, I feel time go by with enormous sorrow, because it is always with an exaggerated emotion that I leave something behind. Whether it was that "miserable" dorm room in Jersey where I lived for those months, or the quiet wait for a bus in the cold, I realize with painful clarity that I will never have them again. That is what aches—the irretrievability of moments. My sorrow is metaphysical; a chasm has opened up in my soul. Now, I’m back where the switches turn the right way and the air is humid and familiar, yet I’m still flipping switches the wrong way. I’m home, but I’m still waiting for my homecoming.