Growing up and leaving home

You know, as a child, when you grow up with your parents and your school, your friends and you find that you are the center of their world – you feel that you don’t want to ever change that. When you fall in love with your own self, you fall in love with your daily grocery store, the dairy where you buy milk from, the street vendor from whom you buy vegetables, the hawker from where you eat an occasional street-food delicacy, a coffee shop, a theatre, a road a tree – all these become part of your growing up landscape.

I had that too – a favorite of everything; even a Lord Shiva temple where I would go sometimes to just sit and talk with the Lord on the other side. It is a great way to unwind during difficult times. And then when college started, we all left homes. My older brother had done it and he was so homesick he had ruined the first year of his college just because he could not stay in a hostel. I, on the other hand, would bite down my bile every time I had to leave home. Nevertheless, I would do it.

College life does as college life says it would do. Submissions, assignments, exams, educational fairs, fun fairs, parties, study group hangouts – you name it and it is all there. Earlier I didn’t want to stay at a hostel and by the end of the third year, I could not even imagine how I could have missed out on this experience at all.

That was when I realized. I would probably never return home ever. The safe place was just a myth that helped when we grew up. Now that I had grown over my childhood home. I realized I would never be the teenager and the little girl of that house anymore. There was no way of returning and feel the same ever again.

That is a regret I still live with. There are so many times I go home to visit my parents. I realize how they have grown old – they are no longer those young, energetic youths who were my parents when I was a kid. They are growing old, we have grown up and life is moving on. And the home where we once were most comfortable – though exists – doesn’t hold the same feelings anymore.

When you know that growing up and leaving home, you are excited – never to realize that you probably will never come back home.