John Denver makes it so easy to miss home when he sings “Country roads”. Although my home is nowhere near West Virginia, it can make my eyes tear up a bit, because I don’t feel like I have been at home for a while.
The summer of 2019 brought quite a few difficult Goodbyes, and a bunch of lucid disappointments that I may or may not have anticipated the year before. When I realized that none of the “last”s for them were “last”s for me, and that there wasn’t going to be a monumental shift in my lifestyle like theirs, I didn’t break down, but I did wonder, “If this ain’t the last for me, what’s next?”
While my friends and former peers were discussing moving out and moving to a different continent, I was evaluation how I needed to get home before sunset because the commute and social norms in Dhaka aren’t reliable.
While my best friend was crying in my arms about how much she would miss home, I was dreading the idea of going back home just to sit in bed watching shows on Netflix or scrolling my phone for hours, until my mom calls me for dinner and then we do it all over again, everyday, like always.
Am I in denial of my adulthood?
The other day, my phone went *bling*, and a notification from Imagine Radio read, “Exhausted from the qualms of adulthood? Here’s a playlist…” and I stared at it for a long time. Being an adult isn’t really forte, when I am still suffering from the problems that a fifteen year old would have.
I love how we all lie about finding our true selves in our university applications, as if by some miracle our lives would go from Huckleberry Finn to Harry Potter! At least on the first day of school, we were a trail of ants headed in the same direction; on the first day of uni, however, I was handed a compass that kept revolving at supersonic speed, “here’s your future”.
I still need my mother as my alarm clock and someone to guilt-trip me into making my own bed. I still fuss over things like how the coffee would burn my tongue. Even on my 20th birthday, I got a cartoon cake, tons of novels and handpicked chocolates to comfort me.
I wasn’t ready to be handling bank accounts, salary dates, class schedules or riding buses on my own. I wasn’t ready to feel guilty for asking lunch money or transport fare from my parents, and then a cruel realization hit me:
If I couldn’t handle changes to my routine, while living off of my parents’ home, what would I have done in a different continent?
“Distance makes the heart grown fonder”
While it is true that not much around me has changed apart from the fact that I need to learn to take responsibilities, a long-distance call from my friend stranded in the city of Brighton really helped me put things into perspective.
She was learning to cook “butter chicken” at the residence kitchen because the lack of Halal restaurants and the disturbing negative publicity of those made her nauseous. Back at home she was never allowed to step foot in the kitchen lest she burnt herself, and now she regrets it. I wondered how, being in the same stage of life, I still had the privilege of having my food served right on the plate, not having to put in any effort but to raise the spoon.
Maybe we only see the importance of things when we no longer have them; maybe I am not lost, or a victim, but just privileged and to some extent deluded. The distorted sense of home, is apparently an extended version of not wanting to let go of our naive days. If that’s true, adulthood, so far, looks like a question mark, and I guess it’s going to be that way for a while.