Home
I’ve now spent that awkward amount of time abroad. I’ve lost sight of my solid definition of home. It is a vague and abstract concept now. It didn’t happen overnight. When I first moved to Texas from Bangladesh, I didn’t like it. I would always say — I’ll call you when I reach my dorm, when talking to family back home. I’m not exactly sure when, but a year later I found myself saying — I’ll call you when I reach home. For whatever reason, It felt natural to call my dorm room my home, although the idea would disgust me at first. I guess it’s not all that strange. We develop a liking not for glamour or beauty, but for familiarity.
My house is Bangladesh is a pretty big house. Multiple rooms, carefully placed artifacts, childhood pictures and psychologically pleasing architecture. There is the rumbling of trains passing by and persistent winds on the 5th floor. It’s exciting. The weather is allowed to change inside the house because there is no central air conditioning. The environment keeps your brain on the edge of its seat. I grew up there. It is more homely than anything I’ve ever experienced.
In contrast, my dorm room is boring. Mundane walls and no real furniture. No pictures that speak to me, and a narrow bed that requires me to be careful when I turn to the other side. There isn’t any scope for any architectural masterpiece to take place. A monotonous window scenery that remains stagnant, almost like a poster. But even then — my dorm room is what I call home now. There’s a beautiful thing about physical spaces — they grow on us. We design the buildings, and our buildings return the favor. We design them in physical space and they design our emotional spaces. They possess the capacity to invoke emotions in us, and to have us like them, despite their flaws. They are eerily human-like.
I like my dorm room more than I ever have, and it is inevitably a product of the time I’ve spent inside it. When visiting Bangladesh from Texas last winter, I would say — I’m going home. This time around, I caught myself saying — I’m going to Bangladesh. That is not to say that Bangladesh is no longer home, but that it is not my only home. My home no longer seems to exist in the confinement of concrete structures. I only cling onto the feeling of homeliness. Home then is not a place, but a feeling. A place that demands us to be our best selves. A place that reminds us of not only who we once were, but who we might become in our best efforts.
