what haunts you?

घर / home

Dec 08, 2024

i am haunted to witness the erasure, watching as the versions of you, the ones you loved all swallowed up by the tide, familiar voices swallowed by the sound of the waves and in that silence, the only thing left is to mourn is you.

i often think of a home that no longer exists—not in the sense that its walls have crumbled or its roof has fallen in, but in the quieter way it was quietly rewritten by time. It’s a memory of sunlight on cracked tiles, the metallic creak of a gate that was always left ajar, the dim hum of voices wafting through a kitchen window, half-heard and half-felt like the distant chime of train that’s already left. i can see it clearly, this place that was once my घर, but it’s not the same as it was, it’s not the sight that stirs me. It’s the echo that hums underneath, like the hollow space in a shell when the sea has long since gone.

there was a time when I could locate myself there, find the outline of who i was within its rooms, trace the shape of my own small self along the chipped edges of its furniture. I remember the way the door frame marked my height in uneven pencil scratches. i grew, but so did the door, or so it seemed. i outgrew the marks and then the frame itself, but what do you call it when it feels as though it’s the house that outgrew you?

these days, when i close my eyes and reach for that place, what i find instead is a dimmed reflection, not the original. its the memory of a memory, a faint impression that has been played back so many times that the colours have washed out, like old film exposed too long. voices are muffled now, and i wonder if it’s my own mind dampening the volume, refusing to let me hear clearly because what remains would be unbearable in its clarity. each replay distorts it further, and i’m left holding fragments—bits of laughter, a scent of rain on hot pavement, the silhouette of a loved one against a flickering TV screen. i don’t know if these pieces are even real anymore or if i’ve polished them into stories, given them a shape they never truly had just to keep from losing them entirely.

but what’s most painful is that i can no longer tell if i’m mourning a place or the self i once was, the child who could fall asleep against a scratchy couch with the comfort of knowing they were safe. i can never return, not really, because even if i stood on that same patch of ground today, i’d be a stranger, looking in from the outside.

its funny how the self that lived there is as inaccessible as the place itself. i wonder if this is what it feels like to haunt yourself, to be your own revenant. i can’t escape the shapes of the places i used to belong to—they’ve made a home beneath my skin, and I can feel them pulse when i press my fingertips to my temples, close my eyes, and try to sink back into the person i was. i see innocence, joy, pain feelings i can no longer inhabit, a shape i’ve grown past like a hermit crab abandoning its shell.

I once read that said, "You can’t step into the same river twice," because the river is always changing, always flowing but what they failed to tell me is that it’s not just the river—it’s me, too. You can’t step into the same moment twice because you’re not the same person who stepped into it the first time and maybe that’s the real tragedy of nostalgia, that it’s not just a longing for what was, but a longing for the version of you who existed in that moment. its mourning your own impermanence, your own erosion, the way you’ve been scraped away bit by bit until you’re standing here, in this present moment, wearing the bones of someone you used to know.

In my worst moments, I wonder if this is all we are: layers upon layers of selves that we outgrow and discard, a constant shedding until there’s nothing left but the hollow core, an echo that grows fainter with every passing year.

the phantom limb of memory—something that’s not quite missing because it was never really there in the first place, only my mind playing tricks on itself. I’ve started to realize that nostalgia isn’t about the past at all; it’s the shadow cast by all the things I’ll never be able to touch again, all the selves I’ve buried without even knowing I was holding the shovel. I thought it was longing for a place, but it’s not that simple.

and what haunts me most is not the memories themselves, but the fear that even this grief will fade, that one day I’ll wake up and realize the ache has dulled, and I won’t remember what it was like to feel the sharpness of it anymore. That I’ll forget the laughter and the warmth, not because I want to, but because time has made it so. That I’ll be left staring into the hollow spaces, where even the shadows have abandoned me, leaving only silence and the dull, empty echo of a name I can no longer recall.

It’s longing for a moment in time that’s become a wound, unhealed and raw, because I never had the chance to say goodbye.