on abu dhabi, on missing home*

(*edited)

It’s weird, missing what you used to long to one day miss. The gray streets littered with sand always begged for stray grass and wildflowers to my young eyes. I guess the only place I found them was in the forests of a different kind of place. Don’t get me wrong, this place is fantastic: smooth and efficient, green and comfortable, a place that will call me by my name. Growing up has been the burning of vanity to make way for responsibility, and along the way, the childish innocence that used to bore us becomes a treasure we spend the rest of our lives searching for. We may find shards of it in the people we meet, the places we go and the skies that we drink, but never will it be as alive and as resplendent as in the touched-up memories upon our youth.

I have now come to sail these seas on my own, grappling with the pressures of adulthood while hugging the proud and restless child within. To me, she speaks dully and remorsefully, regretting and thanking in a combined chant. The uninhabited skyscrapers, materializing in the light of the early morning over the artificial canals, the buzz of cars crossing Sheikh Zayed street in a frenzy like a stampede of staggering oxen, the restlessness of ageing, of burning ice to fire in your core. The cavalcade of voices young and old as the school gates opened at 3 pm every day, all wondering and making plans - see you at my place this afternoon? The anxious relief at the end of last period English, tired from a drawn out day but determined to pay enough attention to get by. The unmistakable feeling of being tangled up in the dimensions, good and bad, of a localized life in a localized place. When we leave, the parts of ourselves drawn to home remember the smiles on the faces of strangers and the melancholy sweetness of the vapid, mundane days, making shrines and statues out of these. That feeling resurfaces in wavering gusts like an albatross following a ship, cruising at an altitude just above the real and just below the fictional. That’s nostalgia.

I hope, wherever I go next, I fall just enough not to forget this place, but not enough to break anything.