Rediscovering home

For many international students, beginning university during a pandemic has been a transition in installments: while our first year was geared towards adjusting to classes and time zones, our second year suddenly immersed us into campus life. 

During my first year, I was an overworked, excited kid who was allowed to stay up past their bedtime as long as they did problem sets with people half a world away. I felt very much a part of UofT, attending virtual office hours with my professors for multiple hours at a time and becoming friends with my math TA; however, my mornings and afternoons were reserved for people who had known me for several years. I would wake up at ten and have steaming milk on the balcony with my mother in Delhi’s foggy, mild winter. Even with the pandemic keeping us apart, my friends and I had evolved routines that inevitably required us to be in the same time zone. We did our nighttime skincare together, procrastinated all afternoon because we’d eaten too much food to study, and called each other late at night after everyone’s parents had gone to sleep.

     I did not get to see my friends or extended family in person before I left for Toronto. All we got were video and audio calls that grew quieter and quieter as the stones that had been lodged in our throats began to settle heavy in our stomachs, leaving us with the sinking feeling that it was true: I was leaving to go halfway across the world. 

During the entirety of my flight, I bawled my eyes out every time I listened to COIN sing, “I watched you board an airplane.” But my dramatic desolation quickly dissipated as I arrived in Toronto: I felt like I was finally where I was supposed to be and that I would magically belong. It was true, too—adjusting in installments made certain things easier, like knowing how to write university essays before your friends in E.J. Pratt distract you as you write them. But it also made certain things strange. I had friends in Toronto I’d known for a year, but had no idea how fast they walked or how tightly they hugged. (A grievance of mine on particularly overwhelming days: nobody here hugs properly. They don’t do the squeeze at the end, which is the most quintessential part of making a hug feel personal!)

I knew Toronto as a consequence of the pandemic. I had shamelessly yearned for it from halfway across the world, going on Google Maps and planning the routes that I would take to my classes, to the ROM, and to Kensington Market. And yet, my first time taking the subway alone just made me feel… well, alone. More than ever, I needed and missed the rituals that I had spent months and years developing with my family and friends back home.

But when we tried the rituals again, they didn’t seem to fit right. My friends had not gone through some of the experiences I was going through. Going and living abroad when you’ve never lived away from family comes with the frustration of realizing you accidentally went to the more expensive grocery store, and the anxiety of wondering whether you’ve locked your condo properly. I would talk to friends back home, longing for the comfort they provided during most of my adolescence. But to me, it felt like they just didn’t understand how hard it was to open a bank account alone. Their (very genuine) sympathy felt like just that: sympathy. People who had known me my whole life, whose fingers I used to be able to lace with mine and feel that everything, everything, in this world was fine, couldn’t seem to cure this strange uneasiness. While I appreciated that they were trying their best to help, I felt lonelier than ever each time I hung up the phone. 

I realize now that the distance I felt from my friends back home was due to the flux my life was in. Our roles in each other’s lives are different now than they were when I was doing online school. For a while, I felt uncertain about what I meant to people and what they meant to me. It seemed to me, for instance, that my parents somehow always focused on the wrong thing, like fussing about whether I was separating my whites and blues. The whole time, I would be thinking, no, no, I moved and re-moved residences on my own, slept multiple nights without a lamp in my house; I can manage laundry. (A side note: I absolutely cannot manage laundry! I’ve managed to lose multiple socks in the dryer.) 

One afternoon, I took a nap and woke up feeling so peculiarly alone that the buildings through my window closed in on me, and I was overtaken by the urge to call my mother, to tell her that this city was too big and too small at the same time and that it was swallowing me. Unfortunately, it was three in the morning for her. 

     It started dawning on me then that my life in Toronto didn’t feel like my own because I was ignoring a crucial puzzle piece. In order to reconnect the components of my life here to my life back in India, I needed to get a better sense of myself. I needed to know who I am independently of where I am. Once I figured this needed to be done, I couldn’t believe how long it had taken me to understand it. Of course, rediscovering home would include rediscovering myself. Wasn’t finding comfort in yourself—and by extension, finding comfort in new spaces and cities—an inevitable part of growing up?

But it isn’t something I had to do alone. My friends back home and I have bonded over the same struggles and TV shows for years, but not all people grow up learning the same skills. They don’t have to, either. As I started working on myself, I found that I needed my friends—not to walk me through the transition, but to remind me that I could. 

Back home, I could tell when something was upsetting my mother by the sound of her feet dragging behind her, and whether my friends were doing okay by how focused their eyes were. Knowing that people around me are doing okay gave me a sense of security that was now missing. In finding tranquility, I realized I wasn’t supposed to restore my relationships with my family and friends just as they were before; I had to find different ways to build something new and preserve what I have. 

We knew how to handle distance—COVID-19 had taught us how to bounce ideas and jokes off each other in a Zoom call. But how were we to beat time? The times when I am summoned to group video calls is when my friends at home are unwinding. Their day has passed; there is little else to do, whereas it is a charged afternoon for me. 

Due to an awkward time difference of roughly ten hours, long-distance friendship can definitely live up to its “long-distance” title when you realize that people with whom you hung out for hours and spoke to forever are hanging out with others more than with you. I felt a strange kind of guilt when I realized that I was doing that too, be it my first Thanksgiving dinner, Diwali, or numerous times my friends and I sat in the library doing math until Gerstein’s staff had to remind us that the building was closing. When the memories I made in Toronto coincided with busy weeks that my friends from India and I couldn’t coordinate a time to talk, it felt as if I were cheating on people I’ve known forever. 

I am learning to make new traditions with people back home. Our affection grows in new ways, seeing each other achieve grades and jobs and succeeding in ways that weren’t possible in high school. We spend time together, but the things we do together are different. On one of my bad days, I pick up the phone to hear my friend gush to me about how wonderful her day has been, how she and her girlfriend talked for hours, and how lucky she is to be in love. The reassurance that somewhere, someone I love is okay instills me with a feeling of calm. We even find ways to procrastinate together. Sometimes, I snuggle in bed prematurely after doing my readings and my best friend calls from ten hours away because he doesn’t want to get up. Together, we lie in bed. Together, we drag ourselves to brush our teeth on a video call before he continues the rest of his day, and I collapse into my pillow again. 

It’s taken me forever to realize that the fear of losing my friends because of distance is unfounded. Instead, there’s a very real assurance that I won’t despite the distance. 

Where I’m from, nobody really follows traffic rules until they see a police van. Crossing the road is chaotic and downright dangerous; you look right and left and right again, and still pray for your safety on a busy street. In contrast, Toronto’s traffic signals are magically coordinated. Red lights are punctuated by the synchronous impatience of pedestrians, car owners, and the occasional cyclist—until we all continue walking in the same direction. Something about this assures me of a force larger than myself. Time stops for nobody. A city of strangers stops for time together. How my friends and I have readjusted to our dynamic feels like these traffic lights to me: we halt our steps and hold our breaths until the city tells us to walk again. Half a world away, we re-adjust during the rest we get before we’re together again.

I had one home when I was younger, and now I have several. In a clichéd moment of truth, it has occurred to me that the world is big, but we are getting bigger. As we go through it, we’re making more space for the people worth fighting to keep around.