Home
Home. Where renditions of childhood lingered within the rooms, where the history of our family lay dormant within the walls, and where the serenity of winter and the loneliness of summer are captured within every nook and crannies. My solitude, my solace — my very past.
The boxes strewn around stored trinkets, electronics, and bits and pieces of furniture. Plushies and toys my younger self used to play with seemed so foreign as they sat in crates next to a disassembled bed, staring at me with empty button eyes. Carpets were absent within the hallways, paintings and pictures removed from where they once hung. Now the rooms felt too small to have once contained the tables and shelves and wardrobes that belonged a few nights ago. All that remained was the dense silence hanging in the air, resonant and almost tangible.
June became July and so I became a junior, though I still felt the weight of phantom assignments with non-existent deadlines looming behind me. Perhaps this was because our household had been so fixated on the process of moving for the past month that the last few weeks of school was just a blur. Nevertheless, the stress of academics had been lifted off my chest and I was free to pick away at summer, one day at a time.
Whenever a friend came over, they would stop and look around — wide eyed and mouths gaping — and eventually they would all stumble upon the same question, “Are you moving?” to which I would answer “Yeah,” with an almost apologetic smile. “This place looks so empty,” and “I can’t believe you’re going” were lines that would often be heard following my reply. I’d treat them to a drink and a candy and suggest that we go hang out somewhere outside, saying that there’s not much left to do here now. Home felt like a shell of what it used to be.
Our new apartment was nothing like our previous place. The neighborhoods were quiet. There was an empty basketball court right outside our complex, as if mocking my newfound desolation. Every now and then an elderly couple can be seen snoozing in the sun on one of the benches, but that was about all the human contact I would run into. Yet, oddly enough, I liked the lonely silence.
The new view outside my room was not the one I was used to seeing. The sky looked like patches of paint upon canvas, shades of red and blue combining at certain places with violet tones. Floating above were fluffy clouds, reminding me of cotton candies forming in the sky. But it was the brilliant golden sun that was the most stunning — it looked like a gold-coated ball decorated with ruby stones.
A major change in one’s life can feel agitating, but it allows for a change in character as well, like the ploughing of old soil. And although ‘home’ was physically gone, it’s a good thing our whole being doesn’t consist of only the physical reality. Turns out that memories make up the majority of our past, and later on, to my pleasant surprise, I found out that ‘home’ comes along with us no matter where we go.
