As we countdown to leave this place, I actually have a lump in my throat. I never thought I would dread the day I would leave. Is it the feeling of stepping out of a known ecosystem, a known routine and having to embrace a new one? Or is it the fact that our life ahead has more unknowns than known and we have no idea what we are about to face? Or perhaps what we are leaving behind, the tangible and the ethereal? All of them, and perhaps many more.
Why should I feel this way when I’m after all going back home? Perhaps somewhere between being a kid and being independent, running a family, the meaning of home changed. Where the rules are ours, the routine custom made, where clean has different coefficients and the word noisy no longer exists. Where home turned into a place where each of us looked forward to getting back to at the end of an agonizing or ecstatic day. Where we are not always huddled, but a place where each of us have our spaces, our escape holes.
What we have conjured around us all these years here is much like a Fidelius charm. The Fidelius charm here is made from a bit of every person who touched our lives all these years; a bit of the sound of laughter from each of them; a bit of every feeling we felt - happiness, sadness, anger, desperation, loneliness, joy, passion, comfort; a bit of each of our secrets the four walls entrapped; a bit of us, that perhaps no one knows about and a bit of us that everyone does. Soon, we are going to break it, knowing we are never going to come back, much like Harry leaves The Burrow the last year.
As I think of breaking the Fidelius Charm, there is a lump in my throat. We are no longer going to get back to the comforts of this place, to the myriad emotions the walls hold. The only thing we take away are the memories, of the boys growing up, of the man of the house reaching new milestones at work, of finding bits of love amidst chaos, of the way our lives changed, the last five years. We will have a new norm, or perhaps a new charm conjured, but the lump in my throat signals denial.
Denial. Denial of wanting answers, explanations. Of having to let go of perhaps nothing? But then we have to move on, and soon the lump in my throat will be a way of life. We are starting afresh, the pieces of jigsaw astray, no clue where to start or end. I try to breathe beyond the lump, and brace myself. Maybe I should look forward to the unknown ambush waiting behind a camouflage. Maybe I should push myself into limits so I no longer feel my existence, and perhaps one day the lump in my throat will cease to exist. Or be ever infinite. Like today.
No comments:
Post a Comment