Fifteen Months...

A/N- Not related to the prompt. Just something I wrote in my diary and then decided to post with a few modifications. Based on real life.

The moment I reach home, it feels like I’ve stepped into vintage memory. Pale objects that don’t belong to the present, are left untouched, exactly as I had left them fifteen months ago. The floor is laden with dust - layers of it - and the balcony is strewn with pigeon poop and feathers. 

I’m just eyes and ears, neck swiveling around to have a good glimpse at everything. I can’t even register everything at once, and it takes me a few seconds to comprehend each fact. 

I’m here. I’m really here.

First, there was this surprise of returning from the village where we’ve been docked the past year, then packing and rushing and bading goodbyes, and then some conversations. A nine-hour car journey, topped with my first scoop of ice cream in two years, peppy songs, and reading some Jane Austen. But those hours are past, and right now, I’m standing here, real as life, rooted where I’ve been longing to come for so long.

And the house feels so tiny now when I stand against the walls and look at the ceiling. Of course, it isn’t the house. It’s just me. I thought I’d stopped growing, but turns out I must have put on an inch or two while I was not here.

In 2020, we moved to a village to escape the worst. I was all smiles then, thinking of adventures and roaming free in the wilderness. Why wouldn’t I be happy? I’d been going there twice every year since I could remember, and here I was going again, when I thought I couldn’t, because of the pandemic. 

Initially, it was three months, going from October to February. But with the weeks that passed, it grew clearer that returning wasn’t the smartest option. That we would have to stay for a few months more. Only a few months more. No harm in that, right? 

February turned into May and May flipped to August. September. October. November. And then 2021’s done, dusted with. And that entire year I haven’t been outside the state, outside the village. 

How interesting. 

Growing plants and living the laid-back rural life sounds like just the perfect vacay. I loved it at first. But then, it’s only for so long. Soon you start longing to head back, to go back to the old way of living life. 

I reached that point months ago. 

I step into my room, my breath caught in my chest, and the first thing I remember seeing is the four volumes of 'A Cruise and A Celebrity' lying on the bed by the window, with a gentle blanket of dust, and my old volume of short stories, and my very first try at writing a proper novel. 

It was just the way I had left it, and I pictured my thirteen-year-old self, sitting with the books she so adored, flipping through them, rereading words penned in blue ink, talking to herself about her writing, her old ways. And this person, this young girl who sat in her room with thoughts so different from mine, feels like another human being. A sister maybe, or a really close friend. Definitely not like me in all likeliness, not at all this nearly fifteen-year-old. 

And then the height chart I’d drawn - the same one I had gazed so longingly at whenever I streamed songs from Alexa - do you know what has happened to it? All the blue sucked away into lighter colors, the sketched colors fading, my captions and markings botched, but everything else the same way. And it looks delicate - so delicate as I run my fingers over the paper. My fictional characters look just the same though, and that is something I can hopefully cling to when everything else keeps changing. 

My bookshelf has so many books, so many tomes and novels I’ve either read multiple times or never opened. So many! Oh, so many! How I’ve missed everything, and how I never realized that to its full potential. Till now. Thirteen copies of my first book, The Mystery of the Haunted Hill alone, and then dozens of half-filled notebooks lying haphazardly on the shelves. 

I scoop the diary into my hands in which I used to draw and begin leafing through it, with my mask still on and my travel clothes draping me. The first thing that strikes me about my old drawings is that they’re so small, so minute, with tiny faces, heads, and arms. Not like the ones I draw today. 

I still can’t believe that many of them look so different than what I remembered them to be. That’s the human brain for you. Over the course of fifteen months, I’d reformed many of those memories, shaping them up, alerting them, filling up the empty bits with fantasies of my own, all unconsciously. And now I realize that: gazing at these books, the actual copies, and not just fragmented dreams.

The written work? Reading it makes me feel bittersweet. I want to see it, especially to relive the bits I’d written in early 2020, and observe how different my writing style has become, if it has changed at all.

I open the books and start poring over them. To say that I’m overwhelmed would be an understatement. I am completely and absolutely baffled, struck, and bamboozled.

(Okay that’s enough with the Adjectives.) 

I read through pages of my old writing, and I have missed feelings. On one hand, I’m surprised by the kinds of words I’ve used in my writing, and each time I only think, "How did I know all these words? Maybe I’m not so stupid after all". On the other hand, I see so many things I could have done differently, and I’m perfectly content. Why not? How else would I be able to jog my eyes over these words and wonder at everything, if everything was perfectly the same? 

A part of me feels envious when I see everything. Why? Is it because I’m not that young and will never be? Is it because I know I will probably never do the same things, follow the same schedule, or think the same thoughts again? 

I still remember how it was, living in this house and going about my day, nothing dampening my spirits even when I stayed indoors for seven months. But then, the memory feels far too distant, far too misplaced. There’s something I can’t lay my finger on. Whether it’s because it has been fifteen months, or whether it’s because things really have changed without me knowing it, I can never know. 

I might easily believe it’s my memory messing up again, but the longer I stay, it only grows clearer, that this, all this work, is mine and no one else’s. 

I guess that’s what makes it even harder to believe. 

Am I really here? In the city where I’ve grown and lived all my life? This place, which feels like a dream, distant and shimmeringly unreal, unattainable? 

The thing is, I don’t know. It could be another dream, for all I know. Another one which I think is real, which lifts my hopes, but which, as soon as I wake up, ceases to exist, shattering, blown to smithereens.

But no. It’s real. I’m real. I’m standing here, mask on the face. I’m there, and I’m in this place, and that’s all I care for.