i sit with a hot cup of chai, ready for a conversation. three are seated at the table. mind, heart and body.
a familiar ritual when a decision waits to be made.
that day, my mind asks why i still yearn for home. why i hesitate to remain in foreign lands that offer not only promise, but reinvention. a second chance. a wider horizon.
i pause.
i wonder if it’s because it’s easier back home due to the ties i have on invisible threads of days gone by. the familiar smells, streets, and voices that tie my childhood and the woman i’ve become, and ones that i call my own. or if i’m just less ambitious than i used to be, and i want to set roots in places where times are simpler and seeds have been planted for me.
i sip and contemplate. i don’t answer yet, because again, i also don’t know.
perhaps it’s the scent of my mother’s biryani on a friday morning, mingling with bukhoor. maybe it’s the summer holidays, when everyone familiar gathers to laugh away old memories while making new ones. perhaps it’s the way light spills across a home where we’ve shaped our personalities in little cozy nooks, each corner familiar to me as i’m familiar to it. these small fragments of home stick to me in ways i cannot unload, reminding me that no foreign land could ever feel this intimate.
my mind sits there, eyebrows raised, judging me. “wasn’t it you,” it asks, “who wanted to escape so badly? to leave the familiarity of home, to go to open lands for opportunity and meet like-minded people?”
even the act of sipping chai takes me back to the girl i used to be. a reminder of the woman i could not become. although i am far from the meek little girl who never questioned anything that was handed over to her, it makes me wonder if i ever will become the person i imagined to be- bold, reckless, unafraid. of unknown cities and the unfamiliar.
and the pull of home, its simplicity and warmth, stands firm. sometimes it feels like comfort. sometimes it feels like a quiet cage.
“i know more now than i did then,” i tell my mind.
“and what is it you know?” it presses.
“i know there was never anything wrong with who i was. maybe i needed distance to see that. to realise that wherever i go, the only version of myself that matters is the one i can live with.”
silence from heart. but it looks sadly at me. as if i’ve finally realized something too late.
my mind persists.
“but do you not want to meet the person you could become? the growth that waits beyond comfort?”
i take another sip.
“and leave my mother as she ages?” i ask. “chase ambition while time quietly erases the hands that raised me? what is power worth if it costs presence? is that what it means to live?”
silence settles at the table. my mind shrugs, not convinced. but refusing to argue anymore.
“maybe yearning for home and the simplicity it provides doesn’t mean weakness anymore. at least not for me. perhaps some of us will never feel anchored in the storm unless we sail the ship home. choosing home does not mean growth but simply redefining it.”
my heart has not once argued.
it has always known where it belongs.