Of My Moleskine Notebook

It’s my last night in the UK, and my first and final attempt to write.

Lying awake in bed fighting off the vestiges of jet lag nearly three weeks ago, I knew I felt odd; yet I couldn’t put my finger on it.I lie awake having words form at the back of my eyelids, never finding them again in the morning. And tonight, like so many other nights before, the frustration takes me in disgust.

A holiday is precisely a vacation. A moment in time where one vacates ones routine in order to embrace things beyond the confines of daily life. This trip has been about vacating the mind. I wake, I talk, I eat and sometimes, if I feel like it, I read.

It’s so beautiful how comforting it is to arrive in a foreign land and stock back on creature comforts that make you feel like you’re home. It’s self-reassuring when you go to the news agents knowing exactly what paper you read, or political magazine you align to, and which flavour crisps you love.

Or even something as simple as going back to the estate where you spent a good part of your childhood. Having clear kodak memory of what tree used to be where, which slot opens the door; and as you run through the barns and private rooms, that you know the exact overlay of the land, just as you have years before.

Yet the current affairs section of the paper -while it may interest you terribly- covers a domestic issue that doesn’t concern you in the least. The political mag you got  fights for the advancement of a nation in which you have no right to vote, and while you support their effort, the MPs that catch your attention are continents away from the constituency where you live.

Admittedly, some things remain constant. Nothing much gets in the lay of the land; and architectural fortitude has lengthened the permanence of buildings.  Yet we always fail to see that the people that we relate to to these buildings are more evanescent than ever. People age, people settle, people then will pass.

Just as, while people roughly stay the same, the mind of the growing young adult does not.

So does it surprise me how much it hurts – or how it doesn’t really – feeling so fascinated and belong, in a place where you know is not yours to call home.

Home is where the heart is. I love this city, and hopefully, someday; it’ll love me back too.