I accept all the affection everyone is giving me at home with caution. Somehow, there is so much care and thoughtfulness, I am only a few minutes away from tears most of the time. I laugh to my family about my ability to cry-on-demand but it runs a little deeper than that. But I know that when I leave this bubble of familial love and foibles and hopes and hurts carried together for years, I will be back to my reality. Friends ask me to articulate my reluctance to give into my new life, to embrace it for what it is, and I am not able to do that well. I do enjoy it, it has made my world much richer and full of more hope and repair than it ever was. But I don't know if this is my eventual life. I am only just realizing that I am actually traveling through life. I used to wake up in Vietnam and realize with a surge of excitement, always tinged with incredulous wonder that this is my life, the one in which I get to explore.
***
Adulthood has meant making peace with occasionally cutting corners. There was a time when everything had to be just so (for me, for folks at home, in general in life). It was all full of discontent, irritation and the opposite of calm days. Now picking one’s battles feels like the right philosophy for life. Some things are more charming when worn out. I tell myself the smaller disasters, like the things I left behind or lost, are better than the bigger ones. Who is to know what is true.
***
Adulthood has meant making peace with occasionally cutting corners. There was a time when everything had to be just so (for me, for folks at home, in general in life). It was all full of discontent, irritation and the opposite of calm days. Now picking one’s battles feels like the right philosophy for life. Some things are more charming when worn out. I tell myself the smaller disasters, like the things I left behind or lost, are better than the bigger ones. Who is to know what is true.
***
Emails have in them so much power to affect us. Just like letters did I
suppose but I have never received an important message in my life via letters.
I remind myself that even as I feel old (and remember dial-up modems with
nostalgia tinged with relief at not having to use them any more), I am
relatively young. I am happy to be in the 21st century. Some people
have other eras, decades they would like to go back to. None of that for me. In
which world could I have traveled and built the life that I have now.
***
On some days, it feels incredibly hard to be away from home.
I am not one for rose-tinting my view when looking at life or people. I have
had strange conversations about how much I love my country where I have had to
explain: I cannot be absolute in my affections,
but to my mind that does not make them any less valid. But I remind myself of the
moment I made the decision to leave, a beautiful light-filled Diwali evening,
where I sat waiting and realizing that this could not be the life I will live
any longer. Who is to say I chose rightly or not, only time will tell.
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