One Way Journeys

“Dad, what’s a one way ticket? “. It came up while reading a book and you asked me casually. I explained the concept of the ticket itself and also how it generally meant a person leaving home to live somewhere else. 

"Why can't they come back home?" you asked. 

"Well they can, but by then they already have a home at the new place so really they aren't coming back home now" I tried to explain. 

“ So you would have bought 3 one way tickets when you came to England from India, right ?” you reflected.

“It wasn’t like that” I said, “I came alone initially and didn’t even realise that I was going to stay here forever.”

“Did you marry Mumma after you came here?” you jumped onto the next  series of questions. 

"No we were married before I came here"

"You mean at the airport?" was your puzzled query.

"Of course not ! We were married a few years before I came" I responded and promised to answer all further questions later because we should be focussing on finishing the book and then do your sheet of maths.

We read for a while in your new cosy bed within your newly decorated room. Then you sat smartly on your new turquoise and white chair, at your new study table and started on your sheet of questions adding hundreds, tens and units, feeling pleased with the white, turquoise, violet light that you’ve named ‘Rheya Style’. 
Its barely been a few days since your room graduated from being a toddler-baby room to a child room. We've tried to make it ready for a teenager as well but then what do we know about being a teenager in this century, in this decade? 

You have started sleeping alone in your own room, almost through the night. A milestone in all our lives! A new era. We shall never get back the little baby, the tiny toddler who righteously claimed the space between us and we didn't really mind. Of course you are always welcome back but it would never be the same. We never realised when we issued the one way ticket for you out of our room.

Dear daughter,

Flights, trains and buses have this option to pick one way or return journeys giving us the impression as if we have a choice. We don't. We might make the journey to a place and get back home but it is never the same person that reaches the starting point again. The one making the journey back is always a newer, older ‘Me’ and 'you' – possibly with lesser money but always with more experience. The return therefore is only to the point where we started from, the base. We might pretend as if we never left but it is never the same. 

And then there are the one way journeys that we make in our relationships. We stay around people - friends, family, relatives - but we are always moving on. Often in multiple directions simultaneously. I could be a pampered son and a quarrelsome brother but gearing up everyday to prove my worth as a grateful member of my family. 

As a child we live in our own little world amongst cousins, friends, competitors - playing different roles and yet very casually write them all off at some point in life and just moving  on. We move on to newer friends, circles, struggles, making a new world around us, never realising how each passing day was another step into this one way journey of different looking emotions and bonds - some growing stronger and some crumbling under their own weight. 

We often try to mend our bonds. Talk things through, apply some words of comfort, clarify doubts and rebuild confidence. Reinvigorate the flame that carried us so far. 

At the face of it, it seems like home, the base, but it isn’t really. Unwittingly, unwillingly we do embark on these little journeys on a daily basis, not even realising when the direction reverses. 
These journeys are often prompted on by potent, persuasive feelings that lurk underneath. 

Unlike the additions on your sheet of maths, feelings never come with a place value to have a universally acceptable individual value. Sometimes we value intent more than expression while at other times we judge intent by the force of expression. 

Believe it or not but this simple difference is enough for the journeys of relationships to shudder, slow down and screech to a halt or even derail. That's when the realisation happens. 
Every day is a one way journey and we are always further away from home.