Homecoming

Eshna Sharma

1.

You are twenty, and your Instagram feed knows you better than anybody else in the world.

It keeps track of your feelings, forming a constant feedback loop between your world and the world in which you are a data point. On most days: it serves you cooking reels, dogs, then the lifestyle and travel influencer slushpile telling you to work harder so you too can one day travel to Bali and eat edible flowers off a floating breakfast tray. It shows you clothes you cannot afford, men and women kissing each other in the streets of countries you cannot yet dream of visiting.

Times when you’ve been feeling particularly affectionate towards your partner, there are more babies and toddlers somehow (the comment sections always full of young women saying “imtooyoung, imtoo young”) , there are more surprise proposals and videos of people-in-love slow-dancing or playing pranks on each other.

Times when you’ve fought with him, which is often, therapyjeff arrives. An Instagram therapist: a white man with large, droopy eyes and a soft, wrinkling face. How to tell if somebody is depressed? You googled it one night, nobody knows it, not your parents, not your boyfriend. But therapyjeff knows. And the next day, he pops up on your feed and answers: Lack of sleep, or a lot of it. Disinterest. A lack of curiosity. Food tastes like nothing.

Then, a couple of days later, you’re wondering if you should stay with your boyfriend. And therapyjeff responds again. This time, he gives you a list of signs to watch out for:

How would they react to flat tires? How are they like when assembling a piece of furniture from scratch? How are they at their parents’ house? Would you like their childhood self? Stay at their parents’ house, he says. Watch them unfurl.

No shit, jeff. You think to yourself, even laughing a little. You realize you’ve never been to his house.

2.

You are twenty, and you are home. It hits the minute you arrive, that you never really think of home until you’re already there. Sure, there are video calls, and exchanges on Whatsapp, but it always feels so far removed. 

The minute you step in you feel the ticking of an invisible clock. Your dog greets you, and you register the fact that his eyebrows have turned grey with age.

You wheel in your suitcases, take off your worn, dirty jacket and hide it quickly because it smells of smoke. Your room is empty but clean. The sheets smell fresh, like they were changed yesterday. It looks pleased with itself, prim. It does not look like a room that could have missed you. The posters on the wall, the bedsheet and the books, all of them feel like relics from an ancient time. Your dorm is what feels more you, somehow, not this strange place that shifts in and out of your memory.

Nonetheless, you welcome the initial change of location, the accompanying fuss and extra attention. You await your inspection: Has your weight changed? Your height? When was the last time you exercised? Have you been taking your vitamins? You have a boyfriend, don’t you? Don’t lie now, we know you very well. You cringe at that one question, at the fact that it has not become easier to answer over the years, even though you’re so much older now.

These are the easy questions, the ones you wanted to be asked, the ones you will gladly answer.

It’s the ones about your future that really take you by the throat. That you can’t answer well enough, no matter how hard you try.

You came here to escape from the way life has been moving lately: brutal, unrelenting, speedy, but your future plans are up in the air, vague, abstract, unconvincing. And everybody wants to know.

For dinner, your mother has cooked so much for you, it feels as if she is feeding a guest.

You expected the fridge lined with all your favourite childhood snacks, even the ones you no longer like. You can buy them on your own now, but you expected them to remember. Their appetites have dwindled, but when your mother cooks there is almost always enough left over to keep for later.

3.

You are twenty, and trying to fall sleep in your childhood bed. You seek the shape of your own body in the mattress, but you don’t find it. It is as anticlimactic as that. You twist and turn and you scroll till a TikTok song is ringing in your ears.  The internet says you feel sleepy in safe spaces, that when the body has been hypervigilant for very long, it welcomes the sweet release that accompanies the sensation of perceived safety. Yet, you are wide awake in the same bed you would fall into right after school, from which you would struggle to get up even on the brightest Sunday mornings.

The next day, you watch the past versions of you shake themselves loose and walk out of the walls. They’re always looking, assessing, taking notes of the things that have changed. They approve of some changes, disapprove of others. They follow you into the kitchen and watch you in the bathroom.

The initial enthusiasm of your return has died down, and there is a kind of defamiliarization that has set in. Everything feels familiar, but far removed, like a distant dream suddenly pinching into focus. You realise that the household machinery has learnt to function without you, if you intrude now you will only jam the cogwheels. You almost forgot that the sugar has always been in a jar labelled salt, and the salt in a nameless bottle on the third shelf. You almost forgot it used to be kept on the third shelf. 

The dog used to play with you when you were a baby. Remember when you hosed it down in the garden and then watched as it ran and ran in crazed circles around you? You can no longer recall the scent of wet dog.

Your childhood friends are so different now, the ones who are left after everybody who moved away. You really wish this could be better somehow, but you realize there is little commonality left, little solid ground upon which to hoist some kind of connection. There are some sparks, but they are fleeting. Reminders of an older time, the bones of another life.

You’re self-aware to the point of self-sabotage. You notice the faults, the inefficiencies, the oblique ways of living and thinking and being in your little hometown.

Days go by. Your primary interactions become your family, and you notice the ways in which you speak to them, the things that have to go unspoken for you to keep the peace, to assuage flaring tempers. They are angrily worried about your future at breakfast and lunch, proud of you when wine-drunk at dinner. You try not to pick fights like a teenager, making sure to never bang the door behind you.

There's so much that has changed, so much that keeps changing every time you come and go and then come back.

4.

You are twenty, and you no longer fit in.

In the poem ‘Feared Drowned’, Sharon Olds writes from the perspective of a wife waiting at shore for her husband who stepped into the sea but who she fears may have drowned. She holds her breath, watches the dark swell churning, clutching her beach towel like a widow’s shawl around her. And then, he emerges, slick from the water, his swimsuit a black shell that sticks to his body.

“Coming closer, he turns out/ to be you – or nearly/Once you lose someone it is never exactly/ the same person who comes back.”

Once you move out into the world, you shapeshift, you transform, perhaps you try on a few different versions of yourself to see which fits better. You are not who you were when you left home. You can slip back into the old skin once in a while, but it is an old skin—brittle, more susceptible to damage, if you wear this skin for too long it will begin to itch, to hurt you with its old teeth.

Reminders of your other life float in and out. Your boyfriend is on a trip with his parents. Playing football with his brother. Mostly offline. College friends from other parts of the country post pictures of sleepovers with their hometown friends, the ones you know they get along better with anyway. Therapyjeff drops by with more advice, but most of it seems irrelevant: workplace stress, how to confront somebody you don’t like, postpartum blues. Even your algorithm is losing track of who you are. What are you? A schoolkid? A teen mom? A middle-aged man with anger issues?

And what do they say time and time again about human adaptation? That with time—and sufficient exposure—you can get adjusted to most things. Back at college, you had gotten adjusted to the bathroom you shared with thirty other people on the floor. You got used to pretty much everything: bad sex, spiked beer, even wet socks. What you cannot become used to is being home, no matter how long you stay. Here it feels like childhood is marching away, and adulthood is drumming in the apartment below, reminding you that you too will become your parents, or at least, some version of them, that like them, you will pay bills and work late night shifts and feel tired and alone.

In this no man’s land, you are your worst self, somebody who finds themselves pacing about in the waiting room or at the bus stop, waiting, waiting, for the dread to pass. 

“Have they forgotten about me?” you think to yourself.

“Will I ever get home?”

5.

You are twenty, and you have a curfew here, just like when you were a teenager, except it is more unspoken now, and now, just like then, you must hide your condoms and cigarettes when you return home. The freedom feels guilt-ridden, unearned, somehow. There are no trumpets, no champagne showers, just reminders that you have to start figuring it out. 

They wanted you to grow up and you did grow up, but not nearly enough.

You’re never grown enough for your parents. Your mother doesn’t like how you make your tea anymore—even though you haven’t changed anything about it. Your father doesn’t appreciate how stubborn you’ve gotten about your politics, when all you’ve gained is a little courage—and the vocabulary— to articulate your beliefs. You sit in the backseat like when they would drive you to school or the shopping mall, and you let them argue over the route.

But now you’re starting to sulk again, like a child, and to smoke secretly, like an angry old woman. Your mouth feels dirty, your throat scratched up. You’re starting to forget things. And some nights, especially the nights when you’ve stayed up past what was once enforced bedtime, you feel a cool breeze on your feet as you walk past your parents’ bedroom, hear the quiet hum of the air conditioner inside. You wish you could crawl into their bed and lie down in the space between, justify it with a mumble about some nightmare or a roach in the room. You’re not grown enough. You could fit if you tried.

 ***

About the Author

Eshna Sharma is a writer currently living in Pune, India. She was shortlisted for the Toto Funds the Arts Award for Creative Writing in 2022, and was a part of the Write Beyond Borders fellowship in 2021. Her fiction and non-fiction has been published in the Himal SouthAsian, Spacebar Mag and The Alipore Post.