homesick need not apply; why be homesick when you could be lawsick?
“The house,” my mum had once said to me when I went back home to KL for a weekend. “Is very clean without you here.”
Wait, what? Here I was thinking she was going to say something along the lines ‘I miss you’ or something equally sappy and the likes. I’m the eldest, the first one to leave the house. Where’s this empty-nest-syndrome I keep hearing about? I’m disappointed, mum.
But then she continued and said, with a grin on her face. “It’s too clean. It’s not the same with you messing around the house.”
Well.
That’s a roundabout way of saying it. But anyways, I love you too mum, and I miss wrecking about the house just as much as you miss me doing it.
But I’m not homesick.
Really, maybe it’s way too late for me to write this seeing as I’ve left home for about two months already, but by God, I feel like writing it and so I will.
A housemate of mine confessed that she cried the first few nights she left home. As did a couple of other friends I talked to about. They were all girls, which should say something but if I ever asked a guy if he was homesick and have him reply that he cried the first few nights I shall be very disturbed and question his apparent masculinity. Because it’s an almost unspoken rule for men to never admit that they cry to the womenfolk. The balance of the universe depends on it.
Doesn’t mean that they don’t cry but I digress.
I never really felt the way they said they felt; overwhelmed and a little frightened. I’m not saying that I’m independent or anything, it’s just that I never really felt that way. It could be that the decision to go to Multimedia University had been a last minute thing; we arrived in Melaka with nary a plan but to get me registered correctly in time for the first class of the day and hope that everything else would work out by itself. It did anyways. I got a place in the dorms, found my class (after running around like a worried chicken and asking every single person that looked in my direction) and life ran on smoothly afterwards. Come evening my parents helped me sort my things out in my room, asked me if I was okay and left. No tears or pleas or anything. I went to sleep at night thinking about my classes tomorrow and woke up feeling at home.
But it isn’t really home really. Home has a kitchen and a fridge I can use and a perfectly functioning washing machine in which I do not have to deposit RM2.50 worth of coins to wash clothes in. Home has a wireless that doesn’t lag and could be used to download and access songs, videos and doujins to my heart’s content. Home has cats that try to push laptops off dining tables and little siblings that monopolise the telly when you want to watch. Home, as the cliché goes, is where you heart is.
This isn’t home; it isn’t where my heart is but it has a roof and a bed that I could sleep in so it’s enough for me.
(Besides, it’s good practice isn’t it. No good getting homesick now if I’m planning to move to another country later.)
Wait, what? Here I was thinking she was going to say something along the lines ‘I miss you’ or something equally sappy and the likes. I’m the eldest, the first one to leave the house. Where’s this empty-nest-syndrome I keep hearing about? I’m disappointed, mum.
But then she continued and said, with a grin on her face. “It’s too clean. It’s not the same with you messing around the house.”
Well.
That’s a roundabout way of saying it. But anyways, I love you too mum, and I miss wrecking about the house just as much as you miss me doing it.
But I’m not homesick.
Really, maybe it’s way too late for me to write this seeing as I’ve left home for about two months already, but by God, I feel like writing it and so I will.
A housemate of mine confessed that she cried the first few nights she left home. As did a couple of other friends I talked to about. They were all girls, which should say something but if I ever asked a guy if he was homesick and have him reply that he cried the first few nights I shall be very disturbed and question his apparent masculinity. Because it’s an almost unspoken rule for men to never admit that they cry to the womenfolk. The balance of the universe depends on it.
Doesn’t mean that they don’t cry but I digress.
I never really felt the way they said they felt; overwhelmed and a little frightened. I’m not saying that I’m independent or anything, it’s just that I never really felt that way. It could be that the decision to go to Multimedia University had been a last minute thing; we arrived in Melaka with nary a plan but to get me registered correctly in time for the first class of the day and hope that everything else would work out by itself. It did anyways. I got a place in the dorms, found my class (after running around like a worried chicken and asking every single person that looked in my direction) and life ran on smoothly afterwards. Come evening my parents helped me sort my things out in my room, asked me if I was okay and left. No tears or pleas or anything. I went to sleep at night thinking about my classes tomorrow and woke up feeling at home.
But it isn’t really home really. Home has a kitchen and a fridge I can use and a perfectly functioning washing machine in which I do not have to deposit RM2.50 worth of coins to wash clothes in. Home has a wireless that doesn’t lag and could be used to download and access songs, videos and doujins to my heart’s content. Home has cats that try to push laptops off dining tables and little siblings that monopolise the telly when you want to watch. Home, as the cliché goes, is where you heart is.
This isn’t home; it isn’t where my heart is but it has a roof and a bed that I could sleep in so it’s enough for me.
(Besides, it’s good practice isn’t it. No good getting homesick now if I’m planning to move to another country later.)