A Place Called Home
Ever since I moved away from home, it was as if invisible strings were always pulling at me some 10,000 km away- one for both my sisters and another to the X block graveyard where the scent of roses guide me to my ami’s grave. Yet another to my friend’s home where she lives with her family - our mutual love for gup chup and chai manages to bridge the distances that growing up inevitably brings. The rain in Lahore calls to me - the quiet drizzle that invokes the earth and paints the world deeper in color, and the monsoon rain that roars- it is unlike the rain here— flat and uninspiring.
I have always been someone who is easily attached to people, places and things and so, moving has never been easy for me. The first move of my life was from our childhood home- a second floor flat on a bustling street that brings to mind nothing but chaos- to a two story house in a well-reputed neighborhood where tree-lined streets and gated homes felt more appropriate for a family of six. I would have my own room but rather than being excited, all I longed for was the familiarly of the cramped bedroom where my three siblings and I held shared laughter and fights but never a moment of silence. I found myself mad and confused - how could the rest of my family not see the value in the nooks and crooks of our home and the memories they held. To me, it was the only place I ever knew and leaving somehow meant abandoning myself. This feeling stayed with me, bubbling up every time I packed my bags and I would settle for “one last look”—taking it all in, letting the walls imprint themselves in my mind before I closed the door behind me.
When I flew from “home” in Pakistan and landed in a cold dorm room at college in the suburbs of Philadelphia- as always, I resisted the change the move demanded- clinging to my roots, my family that I dearly missed and my friends whose weekend calls were more important to me than any new friends I made. Somehow, the places I left held infinitely more value than anything I could experience in the current moment.
I didn’t understand it back then, but I am moving again and I see now that what I held onto was the comfort of familiarity mixed with a sense of self that those places held for me. A move is not just simply a change of environment. It challenges you, a well-defined person, to be something else. To redefine, to discover— to mould yourself to fit in this world and that world until you become You.
Without you realizing, there will be many times in your life when you are a product of your environments and the people around you and so, to move is to thrust yourself in the unfamiliar ocean and hope you’ll learn to swim. The bigger the move, the bigger the stakes. But your move will teach you a thing or two about yourself. Not the version of you with your sisters or your friends, or the version of you that carries photographs from the past or wears her jhumkas because they remind her of home. It will be the version of you that finds herself in prayer at night because there is no one else to turn to. It will be the version of you that walks to the riverside when your thoughts get too much. And the one that makes new friends, not because your old ones aren’t enough but simply because your heart can afford it. And the version of you that wakes up in bed, in a house with no one around but still thinks you are home.
The strings that pull me are a little bit lighter these days. They shift in my hands as I look within and beyond. When it snowed the other day, I appreciated it. No, it wasn’t like the rain back home, but it was something special.
Archive
This was beautiful 🤧