It was the 31st of December – New Year’s Eve of 2016. At a time when every one of his friends would have been busy gearing up for a great night, here he was, reminiscing about his past with dreamy eyes. His thoughts went back a year – how things had changed in such little a time.
That year had easily been the most happening year for him in a long time. He had changed jobs, switched cities. He had got his own house, his own car. And then he had become a father to a beautiful and healthy baby. Not many would be able to boast of so many accomplishments within such a short span of time. But there was still a void within his heart; an uneasiness too difficult to comprehend, and even more tedious to explain.
He had been living away from his homeland for five and a half years. The City of Dreams had awed him at first with its vastness and complexities, had then made him fall in love with it with its enchanting modernity and lifestyle, and had finally disgusted him with its squalor and hostility.
He had then moved to a neighboring city – a beautiful place – the perfect combination of flair and tranquility. He had taken to the city like a fish takes to the water, and everything had seemed so impeccable at first. But slowly but surely, the realization had crept in that nothing’s perfect. The city had its own share of shortcomings. Little by little, his had dissatisfaction grown, and then one day he had finally decided that this could not be the place he could settle down for life. He had longed for his homeland, nostalgia of his graduation and post-graduation days taking hold of him.
For the next four years he had looked for opportunities for coming back home. But luck was not on speaking terms with him. His line of work didn’t offer many conductive jobs there. Towards the end of 2012, he was presented with one of the most difficult decisions of his life – an option to choose between a high paying job in the same city and a low-paying one at his preferred location. For reasons he understood much later in his life, he had chosen the former, and stayed where he was. He had regretted it like anything in the initial days. But then he had made peace with it, before finally accepting it as destiny. He knew that the chances of getting a good job in his homeland were remote, and had lost all hope of getting back.
Then, on November 13th, 2014, the unthinkable happened. He got a job offer from his previous employer, and his joy knew no bounds when he saw the work location as the one he wanted. The next one and a half months was a blur – muddled in resignation formalities, joining formalities, closing out the lease on his current house, getting a lease on his new house, packing up household things accumulated in four years, transferring his vehicle and so on. But amidst all the chaos, he was happy as ever. God had finally answered his prayers. A new life was set to begin in 2015.
Being an emotional person, he had expected that he would feel at least a bit nostalgic to be leaving a city where he had stayed for the past four years. But to his surprise, there was absolutely no trace of any emotion, not a semblance of wistfulness. There was nothing in this world he had wanted at that moment than to leave that accursed city. And when time came, he left for good, swearing never to come back.
Now, a year later, he was in reverie, dreaming about New Year’s Eve of 2015. It had been one of the greatest nights of his life. A last memoir of the life in that city. Since then, so much had changed. Friends had come and gone; and he had been left in solitude in the very day that no one wants to be alone. It was then that he realized that that city had ingrained something within him – something that could be taken away by neither place nor time. In his haste to leave, he had not gotten closure. He had slammed the door on her face and run away, instead of kissing her goodbye. That day was the first time in a year that his mind had wandered about the place lost in time; about moments buried beneath the bones of fleeting joy; about memories forgotten amidst the chaos of life. It had taken a whole year for him to miss the city. It had taken him seemingly a lifetime to be reunited with nostalgia.
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