Ramblings #29 - Maybe Home is (Part 1): Building a Broken House

 "I can't help but think how wonderful it is that you don't find loving me hard."

- Lauren Levi

It is a strange sensation - finding home in a person. A strange and wonderful sensation to clarify.

It wasn't always like this. It became absent over time, the definition of home as you learnt it growing up.

Home was warmth, security and being surrounded by love. I took these meanings on it's face as a child, then as a youth before the tragedy of a consistently increasing aimlessness hit me. I realized with growing horror that neither your definition of what home meant stayed the same. Not did home itself. 

And one day, you woke up to learn that you cannot find it where you grew up.

You changed. And even if the place didn't, how you saw it did. And so, after one more argument with your parents, you realized you were a nomad.

Travel. So I did. Not in the glamorous way to exotic nooks and scenic beauty amid serenity - but to often smog laden lanes with the sky darkened by monoliths containing people living day to day.

Was this home?

Could I find it in my cubicles, on my desktop, or maybe in the conversations with colleagues? So many false dawns, as I struggled to discover it. Maybe home was a concept my childlike brain conjured.

Maybe it never existed.

Hiraeth is defined as a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return; a home which maybe never was. And somehow it struck me.

So after my first job, I decided to build my own home. Secluded away from flatmates, in a new city living alone - I thought this was home. Where I went to work, kept to myself and came back to my solitary. And for a while it sufficed.

Sure there was the odd moment of tear laced stains of the pillow as I kept having episodes of self loathing. Every mistake, tiny or big, would bring it. Soon it was a matter of habit to have these moments after every meeting, after every call.

After every moment of self reflection. I looked inside me, and found something unlikable.

But it was enough. All I had to do was hate myself and I could sustain. And I was quite good at hating myself.

And so time passed. I met with friends, changed jobs, had teams, read when I could, cooked when I needed to and time passed.

But I did not find home. No matter how much I fooled myself, I hadn't found it. So I reached a stage of contentment - work was my bible and it would be so till the day I did. Human company was for lesser minds.

And I certainty was not a lesser mind. That would have been an upgrade.

Then something happened. Something I had not planned for, not expected. I reconnected with a friend and we found companionship in the unlikeliest of ways. Through books.

But it was friendship. Nothing more. Then as the months passed, and autumn turned to chilling winter, friends became colleagues and then 2022 arrived.

And I found home. (contd)