Picking up the pieces once more...

Its good to be back! It seriously is. A friend said this was the final crossover, if I have returned from a trip without the ritual attack of homesickness that comes in its wake. Maybe I have. I knew this time felt different when we set out on the trip.

Still sentimentality never does leave fully. The day I left my parent's place, I opened my Dad's cupboard to look at all his clothes lines up there, feeling a rush and wave of affection. I even kissed a shirt of his to seal that love. And then I pushed all those feelings back down, for it won't do to indulge and immerse and get weepy on it. To think I am finally getting more practical after all these years! :)

Air travel is surreal. You are in one place one minute and in another in what feels like the next! The transition is so drastic that there is quite a bit of disorientation from the process. And this time, both happened simultaneously, the slight disorientation as well as the sweet settling, familiarity of being back home. It felt really, really nice to see the house again. Because it hit home that this was purely our creation. A space we had carved out from the separate lives we had lead to cohere into a family, with its own distinctive tastes in life.

The boxes are still unopened, save for one. Mild jetlag still prevails. The house is still blessedly clean from all the hours of spring cleaning I had invested in it before I left. And our life here has been so welcoming and warm, giving us back the threads to pick up from the last point. Family is again a phonecall away and even though that hurts a bit at first, it is what we are used to and hence claim as normal.

I am still taking things very, very slow, unpacking at my own pace, still waiting to distribute the boxes of sweets, and still trying to figure out what my priorities should be now that I am back. One thing I realise is that I have unlearned a lot of the good things that I had started off on while becoming a mother. My patience and creativity are at an all time low and the degradation began long before this vacation was decided upon. I shockingly realise how much of effort it is going to take me to re-learn those things, which once seemed more natural to me. I sometimes wonder whether I have it in me still. Some days, even the thought of reading them a book, seems like a far fetched concept to adopt. There is thus a lot to aim for and struggle towards and I must find my way to it.

Makes me almost smile back at what I've written, wondering if there is any clear connection between all these haphazard thoughts, induced by a wonderful cup of coffee, on a very wet and rainy morning...:)