put down the blinds

As I pack those boxes and try to remember anything I forgot, Ella Fitzgerald's smooth voice captivated my room and my mind.

Folding my clothes into my lime green luggage got easier this time around. So many things were far more important now than whether I had put my toothbrush in my toiletry bag.

The room's in a mess, but only because I'm packing. As I remove my manchester from the dryer, I set my bed in preparation for my return. I always get too tired to do anything when I fly back here, falling face first into my puffy pillow and dozing off till an hour so weird my body clock gets confused.

I sit here feeling like I've grown so much as a man, yet lost the qualities I once had as a boy. Situations shift, paradigms step foot into a new, foreign land. As the Big Guy up above moves the joystick, I'm forced, in a good way, into things I never really wanted to face.

As my sis wanders around the shop in search of her striking blue Adidas snickers, I handed my mom a simple, black pair, one with a brand I've never heard of in my juvenile life. I sat on her lap and gave her a promise I'll never forget.

"I won't get branded stuff, mommy"

What maturity at this tender age. Yet the focus of pleasing em folks seems to have wavered.

Emotions have taken up a whole new set of vocabulary, even I myself haven't learnt. It used to be a spectrum with joy at one end and sadness at the other. Now it's some kind of 47 dimensional graph, one that a TI-84 can't even digest.

You showed me the way
And if I've learned that love can be a paradise
For you and me
Here's all I can say
You showed me the way,

Ella sings. She's talking about a different paradise but I'm yet to arrive at mine. I lied on Your lap, when You told me everything's gonna be fine. "You're in the safest place", You said. That meant more than the world to me. Yet I was prodigal. Still am. Push me more.

So I'll say goodbye to this land that taught me love and life once again, and get on my jet plane before returning bigger, better and stronger.

Sometimes, words allow space for imagination photographs cannot give. Imagine sometime.