Sometimes it feels like my whole life has been an awkward game of musical chairs, except the music never stops and somehow I’m always standing. During university, visits to home felt like slow suffocation. I’d sit at the dinner table, nodding through conversations, counting the hours until I could flee back to campus and pretend I was my own person. But the minute lectures started again, nostalgia would creep in like a thief, and suddenly even the family arguments felt like warmth disguised as chaos. Love wrapped in barbed wire. Safety with expiration dates.
So I did what every coming-of-age movie trains us to do. I pulled a 'Bunny' from 'YJHD', convinced that salvation existed somewhere with colder weather and better people. Cinema kept telling me that running away is how you "find yourself", that adventure is sexy and homesickness is just a montage scored by nostalgic music. Nobody mentions the part where you start craving background noise because your own thoughts keep jump-scaring you lol.
This felt like a fresh page at first. New country, new number, new version of me. I thought distance would turn me into someone cinematic, someone who thrives in solitude. But solitude is only poetic when there’s someone waiting on the other side of it. Eventually, I became the background character in my own life, eating microwaved leftovers while staring at walls that don’t know my name. Independence, it turns out, is just responsibility dressed in drag.
And lately, the loneliness has gained weight. I got ill and my body felt like it was made of expired batteries. I lay in bed rehearsing the heroic act of standing up to drink water. Not a single person knew. I wasn’t scared of death, just of being found three days later in my room by housemates who’d be annoyed about the smell. (Honestly, iconic final act, very on-brand lol.)
Then the flu shot appointment asked for my emergency contact, and the screen just blinked at me like it knew too much. My mind flipped through every name I’ve ever known and none of them lived even on the same continent, close enough to care. It’s strange realizing your life could fall apart quietly and the world wouldn’t even flinch. I used to think adulthood meant having answers. Turns out it’s mostly just having no witnesses.
Movies promised that leaving home would make me bolder, wiser, freer. But I’m starting to suspect those stories were written by people who always had someone waiting at the airport. Real life is choosing between being brave and being held, and sometimes bravery feels like a punishment.
I keep thinking about how I’m not built for the wild the way I pretended. I’m domesticated in the heart, craving routine, familiar footsteps, a kitchen where I don’t have to ask if I’m allowed to exist. I’m not a wolf. I’m a house cat that occasionally wanders outside, sees a raccoon, and immediately asks to be let back in.
But regret is a luxury I can’t afford. It’s too heavy, too loud. So instead, I move through each day like someone waiting for weather to change, hoping the universe remembers I’m still here. And every night, before sleep drags me under, I send out a small, silent wish into whatever listens.
Not for escape. Not for reinvention. Just for something familiar to find its way back to me, someday, somehow, without asking why.