Dear house of memories,

I am at that stage in life where only the sweet memories of childhood have survived. I think about my past as much as I think about the future. This is a rare victory for me and only my childhood self would celebrate it with me. Only my childhood remembers the anxiety of future she had lived with. There was a time when she could not differentiate between the pleasures of today and the hopes of tomorrow. I have been revisiting that little girl, she invited me to the places of our past. The house we lived in, the classrooms we studied in. Every little detail is fresh in my memory but something has changed, the scale, the dimension of my past.

As the ocean between me and the memories of my past widens, the physical distance feels impossible to cover. My reach is limited by the laws of the universe, I have my hand stretched out farthest but the past seems to be taking a step back. Lucky for me, my mind is faster than light. I have the memories caged in my mind before they try to escape my touch like the moment did. But something is wrong, the physical distance is unfathomable I agree but the mind is my own, the memories are my own, the moments I created were my own past self. How is that these caged memories in my mind are shape shifting, they are changing dimensions and scales. They are distancing themselves from the true raw moment. They have conspired to make me feel like a stranger in my own personal memory. It was my past and my story and yet I feel like I don’t belong in these places. The closer the memory that was to my heart, the farther it feels to reality. As if the past is trying to isolate itself from my present. How is that even possible when I am a creation of all my memories.

My old home where I have spent the 12 most important years of my childhood, from age 6 to 18. I remember my room vividly, I never complained about it, I was always happy, it was always enough. There was space for every new friendship and new book and new toy and new couch. Everything was new and there was always room for me to jump and dance and simply be awake. The parties had more people each time we threw one, the guests always had enough space to sleep. But something happened, in one flick, everything changed. This world of memories came crumbling down on me when I saw the pictures, when I visited my old home in tangible reality. Everything was smaller all of a sudden, there was no space to move, the cracks and craters that I don’t even remember noticing back then were too bold and ugly. There was hardly any room for two people to stand there. How did I jump and play and dance in that tiny room? Was it big enough for the little me but too small for the older me? What did I collect along the way that can’t fit back there anymore?

Was it the gift of childhood? The memories I have today were painted by the little me, they are not my own anymore. The stretch between me and my past is growing and there is nothing I can do about it. The caged memories are hence not mine after all, they are a gift and they are all I have and I am unable to relate to them even after living through them. If these memories are from the lens of a little girl then how did my lens get so polluted? I can’t see the old true image, I am so engrossed in finding flaws in design and logic in magic that I can’t remember my own perspective.

Sometimes I think it’s the child’s perspective that’s too broad, an adult can never compete. This memory of rooms that can contain anything in them, the more you pour the more space there is to fill. It is from the lens of a child small in structure but the world they see is bigger than the world I see today. Theirs was the sky and I am only left with roofs.

The room she created was bigger because she thought everything is so far to reach, she ran and there was more distance to cover, there was faster speed to achieve, there was always more to look forward to. She danced and there was more music to play and more energy left to dissipate. She played and there were more things to win. Her world was bigger in all senses, her sky was higher, the colors were deeper. Everything was at the highest scale. But my world shrunk as she grew older, the limits I broke and created some more, the boundaries I crossed while building cages unknowingly. Everything I did also brought me closer to the end of wanting to achieve. As the needs were fulfilled, the wants disappeared.

I know where the time went but where did my desires go?

Rooms grew smaller as I grew older. I was hiding baggage in corners that were once free to run in. The memories I was creating in these rooms were getting lost, they were real breathing moments fighting with each other for a little space, how did I not notice these conflicts growing up? I didn’t know who to keep and who to erase. They all stayed and they are all hard to find.

My classroom.

The classrooms I studied in, call me in my dreams. It’s always that one classroom where I spent my 10th grade, no other classroom. Just that one room. The room is always the same, the people are different. The dreams have people from school, college, work, bookstores, malls and every random person I have ever met. It might be the safest I have ever felt, the room had begun to feel like my territory, I was comfortable, I was home and all too soon I graduated and I had to leave that classroom. The memories are vivid and sweet. But I am afraid to go back to that classroom again, I have been to school a few times, the corridors shrunk, the assembly area had shrunk, the walk to school has become longer, the playground has stayed the same. But I’m afraid to enter the classroom, my safe space, I cannot risk shrinking it. My safe haven has to be huge as my younger self painted it. I cannot let the unnecessary act of growing up stain my safe space with logic and awareness of relative dimensions. All that unasked for arrogance and ego that makes me feel bigger in rooms that contained my childhood, that needs to stay away from my classroom. Again I don’t know why my corridors and staircases felt narrower, I had seen the world outside when I revisited them. Back then the world was so big and I was so small. But now it feels like I belong in the world somewhere bigger than those corridors.

It doesn’t feel like growth at all, it feels like damage.

As much as I want to, I don’t think I should revisit my classroom every again. It is the one memory I have of a room with no bounds, a room that welcomed me with open arms, a room that welcomed me with open arms, a room that knew me before I got to know me. I cannot shrink this room with my ugly lens.

All these rooms shrunk relatively, the difference was the lens of my mind and the lens of my eyes. The spaces didn’t actually get smaller but I perceived them differently but there is one thing I noticed around me that I must put in context with these small rooms.

My grand parents house.

I have had fond memories when my grand mother was alive. The house was always rich when she was alive, there was so much to protect, the gold, the magic, the memories, that house had seen it all. I remember when we left the house alone, which was very rare we used to put a huge lock on the doors that wouldn’t be easy to break. It was a symbol of love my grand parents had for that house, they wanted to protect everything in it.

Years later, after my grandmother passed. I watched my grand father use a tiny lock to bolt the door. The house was the same, the gold, the memories, the wealth was the same but the lock shrank. Then what changed?

Were we ever protecting the house or the memories of the people who made it a home? Was it the memories that people took away with them once they left the world? Why did we think that it is less important to protect the house which contains the memory of the first poem I ever wrote? Did my grandmother take that poem with her to heaven?

If I re read that poem now, 20 years later, will it mean nothing to me anymore? Did the meaning shrink, did the emotions lose themselves somewhere along the passage of time? Somewhere along the line, everything shrinks, in size and in magnitude. The impact these shrinking memories leave is painful in the worst ways.

All my memories are ever changing, they go from bitter to sweet in no time. What hurts the most is that I have no one to blame for this change but myself. I was so busy growing up that I forgot to see what was growing apart. Maybe if I could have stopped and recollected my memories and repainted them the way I want to remember them, I would never feel so small in my own house of memories.

Between these walls and the next, the past is no longer mine, but I'm learning to live with that loss.

Yours, In body and dimensions.