This week in life

(this is an old piece from the time when I was in the right city but wrong house)

There is something to be said for evening skies that look like the Camlin ink spills of my school years, for the breeze of a pedestal fan built from a scratch. I can hear the city moving on the highway, the muffled roar of the city train rolling by. Occasionally a helicopter lands on a helipad in the middle of a park; after all we are close to a hospital. The Internet connection is patchy, always patchy, it breaks every few minutes. A middle-aged man is doing yoga in a park and I see lots of families sitting in the park. The corridors of this building smell like the hidden parts of a bad restaurant. I ask about recycling only to be told 'we don't do that sort of thing here. Don't worry, you don't have to separate'. What if I want to separate? This has started to feel too much like the parts of home I tried to leave behind. I know in two days that this is untenable. I am starting to feel the invisible shackles again. I look and look and look until I hit jackpot. I am mostly moved out but can't afford rent in two places. So I sit, in this dimly lit room, watching the sky turn black, streets lit orange. I have given up frugality for this weekend, my latest splurge is a pillow that I lean against. I can't lie, it feels good. I miss my four pillows. By some magic, Netflix has finally started to work. I need those conversations in the background, the long weekend looms and I find myself wishing for plans and company. This place makes me stand out, not in a good way, but as a malfunctioning misfit. I have done that for too long in this life, I defiantly refuse to do it anymore.

Moving, moving

This is it. The first phase of Chicago life is over. I have a second phase and that is great. But summer is almost over. I can't believe that I am moving yet again. Not once but twice. Once in Chicago and once from Minneapolis. It is heartbreaking.

Bittersweet

I am slight denial about moving, as if that would change anything. The weeks have flown by. Too soon, too fast. Same as ever. Life.

Schrödinger's cat

It is time to move, once again. Only temporarily though. I would both like to and not, a bit like Schroedinger's cat I imagine. To avoid the usually chaotic outburst that is my suitcase on arrival, I have been packing things in trash bags and labeling them. "Miscellaneous", "Socks", "Scarves" are some of the categories. There is an entire box full of supplements too. Adulting involves a healthy diet and then some. It involves moving alone, yet again, yet again. M has left town and it feels strange, surreal. I think this is the weekend where I am in denial about my trepidation about moving and sadness about people leaving, graduate school and other things ending. I've been really good at keeping it under control, putting out all the fires. But not this weekend. I have spent most of my time in bed this weekend.

The Last Lap

This is it. It is the last lap of my Master's degree, of my time in graduate school (or so it seems at the moment). It is impossible to believe that in May I will graduate. the years have both ambled along and whooshed by. Some days, I remember in great detail. Others, they have sped by, leaving no memory but a blur of faces and voices and places over weeks and months and seasons. Hurtling towards graduation is my stock answer to every time someone asks how things are going. Hurtling is an appropriate word; it captures the speed and intensity of the feeling of this semester.

Leaving and arriving

This one is about 'feelings' so you are warned in advance! Specifically about home and homesickness. I wrote this a while back and while I am right now in Vietnam, it still holds true!

There is nothing new or unique about the loss and longing associated with leaving home. It has existed since forever and has been captured in beautiful words and images by authors and artists alike. Some of my favorite books are those about the experiences of those who left or were immigrants (one that just popped into my head was The Prayer Room). If you are reading this, you perhaps already know that I left (a suburb of) Delhi to move to Minneapolis to study last year. It wasn't the first time I was traveling, it wasn't the first time I was going to the States but it was the first time I was going to live away from home and in the Midwest. I think I was as prepared as I could be but it was still a hard, tough first semester in so many ways. I have spent the months after thinking about it, wondering what I could have done to make it better for myself and can I make it better for someone else. I have tried to decode how much of my experience was because of who I am, in terms of character traits, being an international student, being brown (:)) and my gender and how much of it just a rite of passage that any move will always involve. It interests me tremendously and is one of my favorite topics to talk (ad nauseam).