on coming home

It is rather eerie coming home to an empty house after being away for a couple of weeks’ Christmas vacation to what naturally feels one’s home. No one to meet you at the airport. Just a New York taxi driver to bring you home—who could have sworn that the Philippines is part of China. No family or friend to meet you at the front door of your apartment to help you lug your suitcases up a flight of stairs. It’s all you.

coen: crazy dutch friend who's gone back home

No big home cooked feast to celebrate your arrival. Just a surprise present from your closest friend in the city (who, while you were gone, has unfortunately left the city to make his way back home in Europe)—a case of Dutch beer left on the kitchen counter to help get the year started again.

The strangeness hits you. And it hits you hard. Suddenly, you are faced by a reality that is familiar, except different. You find yourself home, except feeling somewhat detached. Welcome to another year in New York—famed greatest city in the world, ever dynamic, ever alive, and ever changing. Setting to easily 10 million movies out there and home to some 10 million people living out the stories of their lives, tragic or otherwise.

The oddness of the situation could leave you somewhat stunned. All of a sudden what were once your everyday rituals like coffees, dinners and nights out with friends no longer exist in your daily routine. Strangers in the streets and subway trains seem to have grown stranger. But surprisingly, people in the office have somewhat become friendlier (at least those who’d survived the big surprise letting go of 14 people mostly in your department at the start of the year). The changes could somewhat leave you wanting to turn back time to what’s familiar only to realize its impossibility.

Amidst all the oddness and occasional bouts with how-it-used-to-be withdrawal symptoms, the newness of the new year slowly seeps in. The old new york as you knew it simply no longer is. It’s time to move on. Coz otherwise that new york minute might just fly by without you noticing it. And oftentimes, it does.

An Australian Aboriginal proverb goes, “We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love... and then we return home.” Obviously almost a month delayed but here’s to a happy new year of observing, learning, growing and all that shit in new york city! Cheers!