looking at it in a different way makes it look different
in 2020, the start of my gap year coincided with the start of the pandemic, and so while for everyone else quarantine meant serving a surprise term, i'd already planned the long isolation months in advance. it should therefore be safe to assume that i'd pre-planned, lived, survived, and made peace with solitude. but no — that wasn't the case. even a year later, i've been grumbling all summer about being stuck at home. i never got used to the agitation of being trapped, the anxiety over being excluded from the world outside. the intense six months at uni only served as a distant contrast to the monochrome of this summer.
it's usually really hot abu dhabi. still, in dhaka, the summer is much worse with the ungodly humidity, at least to me. but in abu dhabi, it barely ever rains. i don't remember hearing the sound of rain or smelling the condensation in the air in abu dhabi, and dhaka has started to redeem itself in that respect with its august showers.
in my room, there are two windows. each of them face a building, but one less than the other. i've moved my study table against the wall adjacent to the second window. i can now watch the rain.
you can often tell the colour of rain, and it's not always grey. sometimes, if you get to look out your window, you can see blue, yellow, or even pink.
something has washed over me — i can feel it. something is **washing over me. i can feel the slow ebbing away of an internal tension. the blue within me has started to lose its brilliance. it'd be a sweeping statement to say the world had changed for me, but i can safely say that i have changed for the world. a conversation happened a little while ago, and it kind of carried me to a different place than i had been in this whole time. i can look at things a little differently. if you look at a great number of things even slightly differently, you've got yourself in aggregate a lot of new dimensions to absorb.
new understandings are so difficult to trace. it is so rare than you can work them out backwards, reverse engineer them. i know i'm not the only one who thinks this way, even camus had said of absurdity, "at any street-corner the feeling of [it] can strike any man in the face." he doesn't spend much time investigating how it came about, but rather devotes the rest of his essay, the myth of sisyphus, to examine the remnants of an encounter. in order to align myself with camuscore, i will do the same.
i've started to realise the intimacy bound with the idea of home. home is so much different than what i thought of it when i wanted to get out of here. this place is not a transient corridor. it cannot achieve the ephemeral quality i wanted it to have when i have already spent a quarter of my life here. home lays claim to almost everything i own, my memories not excluded. i'm very glad to realise that this space is exclusively mine in a way no other place can probably be.
i've been conditioned to think of myself in relation to others. always comparing myself, always cognisant of my image, always keeping tabs on people i've let down. but at home, i reflect on myself for my sake alone. i'm not excluded from the dealings of the world in the same way an onlooker is not entirely independent of the art or music or literature he relates to.
i've come to terms with a few things over the past few days. i hope i can keep up with the new ways that i've decided are better for me. i can't help not thinking about myself in relation to the world, since im going out there anyways, but i have renewed my place from which i deal with the world. i'd rather not list out the new realisations here because no one wants to read that and maybe that's going on the journal im not letting u guys read, but it wouldn't hurt to admit that, at least for now, home looks like a friend to me.