Family: A group of people that miss the same imaginary place
Andrew Largeman: You know that point in your life when you realize the house you grew up in isn't really your home anymore? All of a sudden even though you have some place where you put your shit, that idea of home is gone.
Sam: I still feel at home in my house.
Andrew Largeman: You’ll see one day when you move out it just sort of happens one day and it’s gone. You feel like you can never get it back. It’s like you feel homesick for a place that doesn't even exist. Maybe it’s like this rite of passage, you know. You won’t ever have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it’s like a cycle or something. I don’t know, but I miss the idea of it, you know. Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people that miss the same imaginary place.
Sam: [cuddles up to Andrew] Maybe.
These are the lines from the movie Garden State. The level of connect that these lines had with me, especially at this this point of my life, is immense. The last time I was home, I was coming after practically six months. That’s the longest till now. But home didn't feel like home. Everyone was in another city and I was alone. No, don’t feel sorry for me because I had a pretty good alone-time, you know friends coming over and ‘stuff’ ;). But the idea of home which I had in mind while coming, that home didn't exist now. The place where I was, that was just what remained after all of its inhabitants left it in pursuit of something. My grandparents for the heavenly abode, my father for his business, my sister for her career, my mother for her family. I too was there for just a few days, then I left for another country for another semester. But all of us miss the place, although what we miss is not the house that stands there, its the image of what we call ‘home’ that we have in our hearts. And that is what connects us as a family, missing the place that me and my sister grew up in, where all of us have so many memories, where everyone used to live together.
Maybe that day will come again. Not in the near future, but it’ll come. Or that is what we hope. And that hope keeps us going. Because even though we’re all running after our aspirations and goals that we have set, we know that at the end, all we want is a home where all of us are together and reliving again all those memories. Memories that we connect with when we remember our good old home. And if that doesn't happen, we’ll have do to what the above lines say – develop a new idea for home and foster new memories. It might be a new place in some city with a completely different environment, but you can’t stop memories in the making. Because that’s what is happening when you are busy making plans for life. Routines form and incidents occur at every place which remain as memories in your heart. These then create your new idea for home and push you forward in the eternal cycle of attachment and alienation. The earlier we understand this fact, the easier it will be to adapt to it.
