BlogMas 2016 Day Thirteen - Somewhere, Not Here

Hello. It's Day Thirteen.

Every time I go out for a vacation, or a getaway, my first feeling is of thrill. I like arriving someplace new. Where you know close to nothing about everything. Even a few hill stations I've visited multiple times, I've had to hustle against every fibre to leave certain nooks untouched so that I could come back, tasting the familiarity, yet titillating for the new. But it's not for too long before the need to return hits me, or the elation to barge in somewhere new sinks in. I've been very restless about being in new places. No place other than Delhi felt like home, neither did it make me fall so irrevocably in love with itself as Delhi did. I came a lot close to loving Dalhousie, just all the same, but Delhi calls to me at an incomprehensible primal level. I would occasionally presume that one is bound to love the city they grow up in. Unless it's in the wilderness of Chhattisgarh - then you don't love home. I dropped anchor in Bombay five months ago. Like always, I'd been elated to arrive here. A couple of months living along with this city, I realised I was a person of roots. Or maybe I'm not. Maybe I still haven't found the city that I truly makes me fall for it, which instantly feels like home. I kept looking for something to touch in this city, something to hold on to and be held back in return. I fathom that this is the first city I'm living in out of home, and hopefully there'll be more to come. But it's like a siren's call for me. Things I'm bound to love, I quite instantly do. I know if something has touched me in a way, it's going to be there forever. Maybe, when I pick my next city, Bombay will be in my heart considering I laid the footing of my career in this city. I keep fighting with everyone about there being absolutely everything incomparable to Delhi, which is true. Heedlessly, though, one thing I've never denied is that Bombay is beautiful. In it's own run-like-clockwork amazing, but it is. I think I still have a lot of years to figure out and fully understand the pull of a city I could call home. But for now, I miss home. Post studio, I was walking till the nearest drugstore, and I saw this family decorating their house for Christmas. And the nostalgia that hit me like a ton of bricks was not what I'd seen coming. Fairy lights in my room every year, my house looking like a flea market of candles and Bublé, Chris Rea and Bing Crosby blaring out of speakers. Somedays I wake up, and mindlessly walk in a direction that was the balcony from my room at home, thinking only about the growing fog everyday. Only when I see towers and jailed windows outside, do I realise I'm also missing my snug robe and woollen slippers.

Habits are a dangerous way of withholding you from falling in love with something different but beautiful nonetheless. Delhi is comfort. Delhi is moody. And it suits me, because it gets me. I'm the Rapunzel that might someday want to return to the tower.

Until then.

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.

Ak.