Home and what lays beyond

Well its been a hot minute since I've posted anything here.

I will elaborate with due reason of course though I can't lie it's also been me just slacking off a bit. Board Exams returned, its a miracle that CBSE actually got  through this with minimal screw ups this time and just like that I'm done with 12th.

It's a strange feeling to be certain, to be considered an adult(not legally one yet though) and to suddenly be done with 12th. In some sense I suppose it was sort of anti-climactic in nature, what with school being online for the vast majority of the past two years.

All those people who said that 11th and 12th were the most difficult years of school life were now suddenly changing their tune to a "yeah but" stance, about how it was the last few years at your school, about how it's your last chance to spend meaningful time with your friends and so on and so forth. Strangely I don't feel much regret at this supposedly 'sad' state of affairs. I had my expectations set lower than the ground for my final years of school.

I'd seen my brother slog through entrance prep and vowed to never join entrance prep myself(yeah, gottem hehehe). I never thought of 11th-12th as time that anything of meaningful enjoyment would arise from, more just a slog of gargantuan proportions and indeed to a great extent that was right, though whether that was due to online classes is something that I'm not privy to and probably never will be.

It would certainly be understandable if one would deduce on reading the aforementioned passage that I'm depressed or unhappy, and yet they wouldn't be right, or well at least to my best knowledge of myself they wouldn't be right. I'm not depressed nor am I unhappy, rather it is a general feeling of listlessness that pervades my mind. I find happiness and joy in the little things in life of course but they are usually fleeting and give way again to this pensive state of mine.

In some regard, I suppose it is a characteristic feature of the age I'm at, I've reached adulthood, and perhaps that could have something to do with it. Much like the poet Robert Frost I stand at a metaphorical fork of a road, though in my case, I can't really see forward to what awaits me.

Another significant change that has occurred in my life and in some ways insignificant, is that I've moved back home. My family has been moving from place to place ever since I was born. I'm sure that others may have had more turbulent home lives in relation to stability, and in that regard, I'd say that my mother and father never made us want much. 

The strange thing is, I've never known this place that I now stay at as home. I know it as my father's hometown, my grandmother's house and yet not as my home. I could say the words with a fair deal of enthusiasm, and yet it doesn't sound right.

It almost seems absurd to attach the notion of a home to a place to me in some strange sense, where my mother, father and brothers are, that's where my home is. What of when they or I inevitably move away or pass away? Is my home no more? These are difficult questions that I'm afraid I don't have the answers to.

I wouldn't say that this place feels any less homely than the other places I've stayed at, not even the places I've lived in in the Gulf. Perhaps as a result of us constantly moving, we've gained the ability to adapt and assimilate into a much larger variety of situations than otherwise, and in return, we have lost the ability to make meaningful long term relationships(of course, I refer to all of this in the past tense because now we ARE 'home').

I've made many friends and acquaintances. Indeed it is hard not to make some when you've studied in five different schools, and today I can, in good faith, only say that I talked to a number of them that I could count on my hand, which isn't particularly great.

The strange thing is that my hometown weirdly feels like it's frozen in time or something like time goes slower here or something. Unlike the previous places I've lived in, this place has a relatively low restaurant and shop density and the ones that are there are pretty mediocre. 

Ironically, I'll probably be the first to shift again to a college hostel or take a drop year for NEET, so even though I'm supposed to feel like I'm home, I guess that I know, subconsciously, that this is just a short stay(for me at least). Ironically, I'm going to leave the nest soon after reaching it.

Guess the ball's in my court now.