the bengali word for remembering someone and missing someone is the same. so, when i’m on the telephone and my grandmother asks me if i miss my old house, i flinch, thinking she’s asking me if remember my old house.

i think i miss it more than i remember it.

we all miss things more than we remember them. because in my mind i miss a time which might have never existed. i miss when my mum used to cook us chicken on sundays because that was the only luxury we could afford, i miss my dad playing catch with me. but i remember my parents bickering over the bills, and i remember my father coming home drunk.

memories don’t just happen, sometimes we manufacture them. because, sometimes what happened isn’t worth remembering, because sometimes you need to believe that you were happy once, because sometimes you need something worth looking back at.

my english teacher once asked what my favorite place was. i couldn’t answer. my favorite place was in my head, a place which might have existed once, or is just something i made up, my favorite place is entirely theoretical. my favorite place is the room i painted bubblegum pink with my father while my mother yelled about it being hard to clean but smiled nonetheless. my favorite place is a memory which has a 90% chance of not being real at all.

sometimes, when i can’t remember important details,i feel like they’ve betrayed me, disowned me. but how can something that doesn’t even exist in the first place be trusted enough to betray me? how can i belong to something that doesn’t exist?

how can i be in exile when i never even had a homeland to begin with?

~mon