What a strange arrangement we live in, we leave fragments of ourselves scattered in the places we visit, the people we meet and the memories we create, as if to live were to combust, leaving traces in the world that surrounds us. In our lives, with an end unknown to us until the last moment our breath continues, we, as humans, seek a home, a place we can call our own, a person who shelters and cherishes our soul and memories in which eternity lies.
The urge to run away from life and from everything we know is a sort of reality that seems impossible to understand. We run because we hope to find solace and yet hope is a dangerous thing. It is not the singing of birds or a delicate, beautiful thing. It is a warrior, with dirt on her face and lips stained crimson from the blood filling her mouth, limbs bruised, head bowed down, yet refusing to surrender. Despite life being such a forced and harsh burden on us, we continue, battered and broken in our ways, to find a home. This journey is definitely the most outrageously beautiful and painful one. The once mesmerising fantasies our eyes had dreamt of, burn right before our eyes but in turn, they open our previously occupied minds to reality, and everything the world holds for us. It was hard when Adam and Eve were punished and had to leave the Garden of Eden but it was a thousandfold worth it when they realised that survival on Earth was not the rope around their neck but dependence on God was the cause of why they never had a chance to design their own lives. The garden then transformed into some kind of purgatory, when both of them found a home amidst the chaos on Earth.
When you have nowhere to go, no one to turn to and the only thing you remember are bitter memories, go forth into the world and find something or someone whom you can call home and one who is worth eating the poisoned apple for no matter the number of times you are punished because everything worth risking and hoping for is worth calling a home.
-Akanksha Shah 10D
