Prose I Navya Agrawal
The city is new—alkaline tastes, acidic smells, new carbon, new smoke, new buildings, new roads; the city is new, and I am still old. Not old as in folds of skin hanging loose on me, ashen hair demanding attention for the wisdom it promises, but old as in I am an attic in that single moment, once birthed never grown, cheap smiles are thrown around—fresh bloom, but still stuck in the old dirt— old gloom – kind of old.
The city is new, and the city never smiles. I sip my chai at the footsteps of a local Domino's while the four-lane road in front of me screams, and I can almost feel the energy—the emergency—the panic. It surges in me – but I hold tight to my kulhad; the footsteps though bare, are warm. I see the smiles, so many smiles, but I never feel them. They exist for the sake of existence, they are not tangible, I can’t hold on to them. Wouldn’t you rather take a frown than a detestable, unfeeling, dirty cheap little smile? Wouldn’t you rather take indifference than an all too smiley, uncaring existence?
The city noise rents in my brain. Loud. Impassioned. It slowly strips my brain of all the peace it contained, and I’m learning to love it. I’m learning to let it grow over me, wrap its roots around me, and leave its mark on my skin—so red, so shiny. Your eyes adjust to the darkness, and your brain adjusts to the muddy fog. That’s what I feel. Lack of clarity actually makes thinking easier; no time to brood; to churn and chew your thoughts into cud. You have to pick your card. You have to make your move. And you have to be quick.
Loving is difficult in a new city. I feel hollow, absent, distant. I think I just need to fill myself in with a story. How can a person live so many lives and still not have a story? I know that I’m lying. I’m faking it, courtesy of society. I do have a story. I talk about love like it's an odyssey. I repeat it and repeat it until it amounts to nothing; until I can repeat it like a routine; until it loses all its value; until it becomes for me—just a story.
What is it about the city that you came to—so hungry for an identity—that makes you lose it? Lose everything you know about yourself? What is it about the city that makes you search for a home?
I went back to my parents' place after a year of living alone, looking for my home. I jumped at the sight of the rooms I long recognized—a long-searched comfort. Only something had changed. The door handles for my room felt unfamiliar in my hands. My muscles had lost the memory of my house in the dark. The food tasted prepared, fancy, not like a cozy routine. The temporariness of the place was so loud in my brain—it never offered me the promised peace.
I missed home.
I live in a new city now. To escape the suffocation of my room—there’s a park bench I always read on. Within its public anonymity, it allows me a certain privacy. A place of my own. Only that the place is never my own and is continuously floundered by every vagabond who can get a hold of it. I know it’s selfish, probably overly dramatic, but it almost feels violatory for someone to steal my bench.
They say physical structures do not constitute home; people make home. But what if every physical structure defies me and people are no longer the same?
My childhood best friend who has made little parts of me no longer knows little details of my life. Is she not home? My little sister will grow up without me, and I’ll never be the one to map who she becomes. Is she not home? My mother doesn’t wake me up anymore. Is she not home?
I live alone in a new city now, surviving on the kindness of strangers, and no one no longer knows me. Every friendship is a fleeting one born out of necessity. My old school friends gather in a college lawn and pass a cigarette around, to find within its smoke, at least some fleeting warmth.
All I return to is my pg room bed, which suffocates me and my favorite park bench taken by someone else. I want to hold something and call it my own—call it my home. New city, new life, new people, but who do I go back to?
What is this city?
Where is home?