Tired of Being In Transit

I left home when I was nine. I’ve not been back ever since. To live that is. I was in boarding school till the end and then went to the corn fields of Indiana for college and now I’m writing this from Amman. I don’t plan to ever settle down in Kolkata so that’s it for home and me. It’s now never going to be more than a holiday destination for me. I’m going to have leave Indiana if I want to go to grad school and if life goes the way I envision it, that’s another city and another continent. And while I love this wandering lifestyle, this independence, this ability to just pack and up and move and not be tied down, I think I’m tiring at the prospect of doing this for another 10 years.

I sometimes wonder what it is like for those who are born in the same community, grow up there, marry into it and are eventually put to rest there. That sense of rootedness, that knowledge that you belong, that you’re home could almost beat the feelings of stagnation that I’m sure I would feel. Your life is where you are, not split across continents and countries. You know where you belong. I wake up some mornings and for a brief second, right before the morning actually dawns upon me, I am unable to tell where in the world I am. I open my closet to pull out a stole I really want to wear that day and realize I don’t know if it’s here in Amman, in a storage box in Greencastle, in a musty cupboard in Kolkata or with one of my many friends who could have taken it back during the days when we all had a communal closet in school and never knew what belonged to whom. If the last one is the case, then God Alone knows which corner of the world it is now draping itself around a slightly neck in need for cover. It’s a beautiful thought that I could potentially be leaving my mark in so many parts of the world but sometimes, just sometimes, this suitcase existence begins to grate. I want to finally be done with living out of suitcases. I want to know what it is like to actually live in a home, for real, one that is yours and your life is there, in that one place. I want to be known at the grocery store, I want to have a tab somewhere and subscriptions that need to be suspended for 3 weeks, not 8 months. I don’t want to be a seasonal flavour anymore. I want to be a regular. I don’t care where, just somewhere. And I want to know when. How long till I reach someplace? How much longer in transit for me?