Realizations

I recently underwent the realization that I'm not 'home'.

Yeah, it took that long.

I woke up yesterday morning (or afternoon, if you'd like to be precise), dreading the 2 pm exam. The sun's shining outside, some light filtering through the gaps between my curtains. A little bit bleary eyed, I grope around for my handphone to switch off the only tune I can wake up to. Then I sit up, look around my Romanesque (i.e. Romanesque post-Vandals, Huns, and what-have-you-nots) room, take a sip from my water bottle and softly clear my throat. It had to be that morning that I realised it's almost exactly the same thing I've been doing for every morning in the last 8 months. The novelty of living in a new place seems to have worn off some time ago; I'm by no means jaded, but it's become so much a part of me now that I don't see it. Now that I've decided to return to 'home', where the family is, things do seem a little different. The skies, the smell of fresh grass, the fact that the majority of people I see here at any given time are Caucasian...things I've started to simply accept as part of it all.

To be honest, I miss very few things about 'home', excluding family and friends. I miss the food, the sounds of a bustling city, things not closing up at 5 in the afternoon, and being somewhere where the people are physically similar to myself. Well, maybe not the last part. Oh, and being somewhere that has less drunken teenage yobbos/blokes/idiots/etc. on the weekends. Other than that, I'd say it's better to be here. I don't miss the polluted _____ (insert object of choice), the highly visible poverty, the stupidity (especially of public transport drivers), and the sheer mass of humanity that lives within the city's boundaries. Yes, you'd be correct to say I'm sitting on my high horse for this one. But it's truth (or semi-truth). If I'm a rational person given the choice to live and work back 'home' or some exotic country (which may or may not be similar to 'home'), I'd go for the exotic country. Why? Just because there's that hesitance to return home.

But it's not that I don't ever want to go back home. Much as I dislike the notion, I do feel a sort of 'homesickness' for the familiar climes. And there's that whole looming-over-the-horizon thing about repaying the country for the opportunity I received (well, more like the opportunity my parents received, and me through that proxy). As much as I'd like to, I don't really have good reason to turn my back on the country which I grew up in and claim citizenship elsewhere. And since the ethnicities of which I am part of are within that country (not that it matters, I just want to ramble), I guess I can't really escape what I really am.

Meh.

That was a rather long and meaningless rant. Screw the ending, I'm going to bed.

[End Transmission]