breath

It has been raining continuously for 30 hours. All I really want to do is to nurse a mug of tea and idly watch the water coming down. I test the temperature and my breath produces little puffs of air. It makes me feel like a baby dragon, making tentative little smoke trails.

Gazing out from the living room I notice that someone in the flat facing mine left a pair of jeans out. It must be drenched by now. Briefly wonder about the lives other people lead. Somewhere someone is doing exactly what I wish I were doing now, curled up in an armchair with a view of the city.

I like making those little hot air puffs. It reminds me that I’m in a foreign country living a different life. I correct my own thoughts: this country is different, but not foreign. This life is different and temporary. It is an interlude from the real world that awaits me at the end of this degree. The finish line I wish would come sooner but would also postpone for as long as possible. The inevitable return to a country I both love and despise, which I have never felt at home in. I know this feeling of dispossession is hardly unique to me. Others have felt this way.

It might be a diaspora thing, this eternal reaching towards an imaginary homeland. Maybe not. It might be the result of growing up in an environment both localized and foreign. A little bubble on the surface of the water. This country I am in now is not quite home but in a sense it comes closer to being home than the place that is ostensibly mine. I don’t feel displaced here even with everyone gone. But I haven’t gone native either. I’m not quite sure what to make of this feeling of being suspended between two places.

Shaking myself out of this haze, I get up and go to the kitchen for a glass of water before returning to my room. I wish for a moment there was a man in there waiting for me instead of my thesis. Damn thesis.