As I stated it before… you always appreciate what you have/had after you lose it. I used the two forms of present and past tense because sometimes you can’t take back what you have lost, sometimes you can’t click “undo”.
As I’m sitting in my old room back in my hometown (where I’m spending my brief Easter Holidays), I can’t stop thinking of all the things I’ve lived here. It’s hard having to know you are thousands of miles away from home, away from family and friends, away from the places so close to your heart and mind.
There’s not a day that goes by, without me thinking of how my life would had been if I was still here. This is the place where my grandfather told me hundreds of bedtime stories, stimulating my mind and my imagination, where he taught me how to read and write, this is where he opened my gates to the universe. He gave the most precious gift: the thirst of knowledge. This is where I’ve first learned that life is made of changes which we are obliged to accept when I cried for leaving kindergarten to go to school. Here, I felt the first butterflies in my stomach when I had my first kiss and here I have drowned myself in tears when I had my heart broken for the first time! It’s here where there are the persons most sacred to me who have raised me and the mirrors where I have watched myself grown. This is where I was born and these are my roots.
Can you tell me if there is any possible way to forget your roots? Can distance cut out your roots? We know roots go deep… they disperse in width and length… but what do you do when there are so tightened and the pressure is so high? Like an elastic band that you keep trying to enlarge… and you keep trying… and you pull harder and harder… you know the elastic band is strong… it can’t brake… but it becomes thinner and thinner with every pull… you can’t let go, even if you know the tension gets higher and higher… you know that if one end will give up, the other end will get hurt…
I’m afraid to let go of my end… even though the tension and the pressure is high, the feeling that I belong somewhere is keeping my head sane. I need to feel that I belong somewhere. I need my roots. I need to know that I have one place where I can always return and feel safe no matter what. That’s why home is irreplaceable.
When I first left home for the Big City, at 17, I thought I was gonna live in Paradise. No one to control me, no one to tell me when should I get home, no one to tell me what to wear, no one to go talk to the teachers, no one to wait for me at 5 a.m. in the morning threatening me never to go out again, no one to tell me clean my room, no one to push me eat my soup… but instead… there was no one to care for me, no one to guide me, no one to advise me, no one to convince the teacher that I was skipping school because I was sick (and not that I was gone in vacation), no one to make me a tea at 5 a.m. in the morning when I was sick, no one to help me clean my room, no one to wait for me with a hot soup.
The illusion of freedom was fading fast as I was trying to cut out my roots, intentionally. Freedom comes with responsibilities, as the basis of democracy states. That is way you need way more time to be well cooked before we set out to go on your own. How do you know you’re ready to take off? When it’s the hardest thing to do! When you realize how much you will miss your nest!
Years have passed and destiny wanted me to go farther and farther… and I left in search of my destiny. I know it’s out there, that’s why it’s called destiny, it’s a sure thing you will find it someday… but I think the search is the greatest gift of all. The adventure, the unknown, the thrill of a new clue, the hopes and dreams, the failures and the dead ends, the new routes to discover and the thousands of possibilities. And the strengths comes from your roots. That keeps me strong. Sometimes I feel them like the rubber band that keeps putting pressure on me, but sometimes there are like the wooden roots of an old oak tree supporting all my weight! My roots are my spinal cord. You can’t live without your spinal cord to support you. Once broken, you’ve lost your stability. You lose yourself.
My roots are my inspiration, my background, my past, they have made who I am today and they keep growing to support the woman of tomorrow.
beingroma 