I am sitting on the floor of my bedroom - my actual bedroom, not the room I rented for 9 months at a University Hall where I didn't bother to really decorate because every next moment brought me closer to when I would have to strip it bare to it's original state, my actual bedroom that holds basically everything that I own, from letters written in Primary School, to birthday cards and presents in the form of stones with drawn on smiley faces, to a weird collection of bargain books to hastily put away pictures that are now inappropriate to have around plain sight. I am sitting on the floor of my bedroom and I am getting ready to leave home for the second time.
There is a huge suitcase opened in half and filled to the brim with clothes, food and knick-knacks; a hasty attempt to bring a little of the self that I have spent almost two decades collecting and forming across the globe to a city that has already found its way of becoming a part of me.
I was in this exact position less than a year ago, not quite gone but far along enough that I'm not quite here anymore, either. So much has changed in the short course of one year that it seems quite ridiculous when I look back on it - how the decisions that I made have completely steered me in a different trajectory altogether. The nine months I spent in Manchester have truly changed my life and led me to do things I never dared imagined that I'd be capable of, but somewhere along the lines of finding how to not feel like a complete alien, trying not to drown from my perceived mediocrity in a sea of genius and making genuinely heartbreaking decisions, I lost touch with parts of myself that I always took pride in and struggled in getting them back.
I felt like I couldn't talk anymore, every sentence I uttered was processed one, two, three times in my head to make sure it was clever enough, I lost the cocky overconfidence that I had in how I looked and how I thought. I felt like I was having to relearn all the things I had taught myself when I was 17. Even with an amazing person who truly cared about me and constantly reassured me that I was a good, a negative reaction from one random person was enough to completely throw me off.
Coming home and immersing myself in old friends and family who knew me, whom I didn't have to go out of the way to show my personality and seem interesting and worth talking to all the time, who I didn't have to pick and choose the stories I told to make sure I was constantly being listened to because they have lived through all those stories with me, big and small - it really gave me a sense of how I fit into the world again. It was not until a few nights ago when I was sitting in my parent's room belting out to an old Cantonese song that I realised how hard it was going to be to leave home again, to not be able to hug my parents goodnight whenever I wanted to or to take a five minute drive to Cecilia's house for a three-hour long conversation.
Last year, I felt like I was leaving everything I had behind me. Now, half of my heart is waiting for the rest of me to catch up with it in about two days' time. There were times where being away from the home I spent most of my life in threw me off center, but I spent so many days in Manchester being caught in wonderment by the things I was learning, the music I was hearing, the people who were throwing up on my shoes, the hidden streets that I discovered and the unexpected late-night conversations that I had, so much so that it has become a home as well. I have one person in particular to thank for this, for helping me love where I was, even when it was driving me a little bit crazy.
Here is to my second year of university, and to home, where I will always belong.
No comments:
Post a Comment