Coming A Full Circle

Given the events recently, I cannot help but feel that life is beyond our control.

It is strange and magnificent how life completes a full circle.

Its just funny how things turn out. I remember the first time I went home. I had been away from home for a LONNG time and the day I saw my parents at the airport, I could just see how they had aged, how tired they looked and how much more fragile.

The next time I went home, it just broke my heart. My heroes, my mentors and my guardians were human. They aged. They got weak. It struck me that they too would fall victim of time one day. And it hurt so bad. It was a physical pain I could not explain. A sense of helplessness. A sense of despair. And it did not help that I am miles away from them.

I miss them. Very much.

I remember growing up, I used to make my father run after me, cos he wanted to hit me and I would just fall on the floor and crawl between his legs, and laugh when he used to get mad.

I remember how my mother taught me independence. At the age of 6, she made me take the bus from school alone. While everyone else' parents picked them up in school, my mother wrote down directions of how to get to the bus stop and at which stop I had to get off at. She would be hiding at the bus stop she had told me to get off at and made sure I was confident to travel alone, at a very young age.

Whenever I fell, or I was hurt or I picked a fight with someone, my parents were there, supporting me.

When I had boy trouble when I was 14, my father was my hero and he warned the boys to stay away from me. When I hit a boy cos he pissed me off, and he threw a muddy cornc at me, my dad fought for me.

When I first got my menses, my mother was there, guiding me, helping me understand my body and the changes. When I first was heartbroken over a failed love, she was there like a best friend, bitching about men.

And today, as I spend my days, trying to establish myself, to grow as a person, as a career woman, it pains me tremendously that I have left my parents far away.

It pains me that as they approach a new stage in their lives, I am far far away. I am not there to hug them, I am not there to cry with them..to talk abt their fears, as they talked about mine while I was growing up.

Life comes a full circle. When I first reached puberty, I turned to my parents for help. As they now enter the golden years, they are turning to me for help, they are talking abt their fears and their concerns, and its a fucking joke that I am so far away..

Will I ever be able to tell them how much they mean to me? I don't think any language has a word that can describe the love I feel for them...(as I am sure you all feel about your feelings for your parents too).

Will I ever be able to bring back those days of childhood when I spent most of my time with them, just so I could be grateful for it, one more day?

Can I just have one more time when Sundays meant swimming with my dad, when monday to friday evenings meant, sitting on the floor in the kitchen and saying the multiple times tables out loud so I memorized what 2 X 16 was, when nights meant my dad will make me a superman by lifting me with his feet?

As I have spent time away from the people I love the most, it has struck me that I was foolish to have been so excited to leave home and start my adventure, find my little piece of heaven.

Its a great irony of life that I now realise that I did not actually find my little piece of heaven, but left it behind.

And life is such that we have to keep looking forward. Or so we have been told. To look ahead. But no. Today, I long for the years I have not spent with them.

One day I will get up, and time would have taken its toll. And no matter how much time I spend with them, no matter how long, I will still look back in regret that it was not enough. It will never be enough. I will never be able to compensate them for what they have done for me. No matter how much I do for them and even as life makes a full circle, I will never be able to be the hero they are to me.