“All Is Found: A Homecoming in Time”

7:15 PM

The sky outside isn’t dark yet.

The sky is still undecided like it can’t choose between holding on to day or gently falling into evening.

I’m home.

Not just a house but home.

The one that holds all my past versions&my silent milestones.

I’m alone for a couple of hours, sitting with myself and kind of watching a self reflection.

Almost 18 now, and somehow I feel wise.

More responsible than ever, more self-aware. 

The series -Owning Manhattan- plays on Netflix, a rare break from my studies.

With each glittering frame, I feel ambition stir maybe the kind that stretches far beyond this room.

I think of my dreams.

The places I want to go.

The life I want to live.

The people I want to carry with me, my family, maybe friends if I have them.

Then I pause. Literally.

The remote in my hand stops the screen.

I love this television now, but somehow, I don’t love watching things anymore.

I’ve become more used to the stillness of news articles, documentary narrators, and the occasional cartoon while eating.

Softer sounds. Slower life.

How much does it cost to chase our dreams?

What do we leave behind ~ soft moments, familiar corners, old selves

 when we reach toward something greater?

The world tells us to go, to grow, to run toward what’s waiting.

But it forgets to mention that change comes quietly.

You don’t notice what’s gone until you sit still enough for your house to speak.

So I asked Alexa to play All Is Found — the same lullaby from Frozen 2 that I used to play in this very room, back in 2021. When the first chords came, something cracked open.

Same room. Same hour. Same me, in a sense.

Back then it reminded me of home. My mother. My roots.

It still does.

~“Yes, she will sing to those who'll hear

And in her song, all magic flows…”~

Suddenly, I'm not just here anymore.

It’s like I’ve fallen through a crack in time.

It’s 20 September, 2021.

I’m lying peacefully under the soft breeze, the digital clock blinking red, the night quiet and fed with a perfect supper.

We had just moved in here.

This place didn’t feel like home yet and yet somehow, it already was.

Maybe I stepped into a tesseract.

A fold in time, where memories play on loop in secret dimensions.

I see myself:

Sitting at the entrance, sipping tea with my mother, Ed Sheeran humming in the background.

Crying quietly on the living room sofa on a winter evening.

Watching the sun bounce off the balcony railings with summer flowers in bloom.

My father scolding me for not eating enough fruits in the hall.

Laughing with both my parents on the floor of the balcony, power cut evening, sky full of stars and asking them about my future.

Listening to the faint cries of children and murmur of alleyway crowds slipping through the window grilles.

The gentle beam of sunlight sliding through the ventilation gaps.

My thoughts used to be so cleanly divided.

Books, poems, school, music, family, dreams and lots of friends.

Little boxes in my mind I could open and close.

So safe.

So unaware.

So untouched by responsibility.

Dreams existed in dots, scattered. I hadn’t drawn the lines yet.

I look at photo frames now:

My parents on the day after their wedding —

Their eyes so light. So youthful.

Less burdened. More alive.

Me in kindergarten, short hair pinned with tiny clips.

My father beside his mother, in a grainy blue old print.

My school trophies, medals from olympiads,

Dusty stage lights from old stage performances,

The table where I studied too long —

Even when my mother asked me to take breaks.

There’s an old miniature doll on the shelf.

The curtains wave gently — and suddenly I feel it:

That homely calm.

The quiet whisper that says:

"This is where your people are. This is where the sun stays."

Because the sun…

that’s me, isn’t it?

For them 

Today I feel the cost of wanting more.

The price of dreaming beyond these walls.

There is a grief even in ambition no one warns you about

 the soft kind, not violent — the ache of detachment, the quiet guilt of evolving.

How does one explain that to grow is also to mourn?

To become is to bury.

I miss every version of myself I had to abandon to become this one.

But I still love this change.

“What a strange thing to grow up! You know....

To move forward carrying pieces of all the rooms you’ve ever called home.”

“Maybe growing up isn’t about leaving your childhood behind. Maybe it’s about walking through the same room — and finally noticing the light and the light is You ”

Oh! I need to get back in my present.

What are the co-ordinates to come back in time?

Always

C.P.