I find myself often saying “I want to go home”. Over the years, its meaning has become more complex. More complex than just simply being at home.
Why do I want to go home when I am already at home? Being at home has become more like a state of mind, beyond a physical concept. It’s a very vivid and misconstrued concept to me. It’s been very messy from the start, mainly since I was a child who moved around a lot. I moved to Singapore almost 10 years ago from India, so the distinction should have been apparent in where I consider home. Yet, home is everywhere and nowhere.
Home is Everywhere and Nowhere
Singapore is very different from my hometown. My hometown is a small but rather populated city, just a seven-hour train ride from Delhi. I never really lived there, but it’s always been a city where we travelled to every holiday. My earliest memory is of my grandma’s house, playing with our pet dog at the time, pretending she was my horse. It’s weird how every time I visited it, I changed a grade or had a monumental change in my life, and yet the city seemed like it was at a standstill, constantly waiting for me.
My hometown is not an escape from city life. It is chaotic. The people are sweet but familiar. This familiarity is home. I feel at home while eating the simplest foods, the ones that are exclusive to my hometown, and especially when I feel the need to preserve them with me.
I guess home is also a collection of stories of places where my parents grew up. Drawing similarities to my own, in a quest to decode and understand them better. But home is also where I grew up, where my grandpa came to pick me up every afternoon after school or the parking lots where I played with my childhood friends every evening.
Homemade by you
Apart from nostalgia, home is majorly what you make of it. One that you create and choose for yourself. I felt closest to home when I slept in on this Sunday morning. It was slightly raining, almost freezing for the Singapore weather, my mum had made chilas (Indian savoury pancakes), and I had nothing particularly special to do except rewatch my favourite season of Jane the Virgin. That day home was a state of mind, this sense of relief, peace, or perhaps the feeling that I was safe.
For now, Singapore is home. The one with my room that I decorated, the routine that I chose, and the people I love, is the home that I created. A few years from now I know all of it will change, but I know I will be able to find it anywhere in the world until I know that home is within me.
This is what home means to me, what does it mean to you?