Home!

They tell me,
That this place,
Where I live is my home.

This place,
Where the walls and windows
Are quite familiar to me
The ceilings don’t seem
To be unknown either,
Is my home, they say.

Till the longest time,
I believed them,
I called this place where I live,
My home.

Home,
Where initially each corner
Reeked of ease,
Now demands answers from me,
To each answer that I come up with,
Is now questioned,
No not because the answer is unreal
But because
The questions need to be answered
And answers need to be questioned.

I’m told when I was a toddler,
I used to colour the walls
With crayons and pencils.
They say the walls,
That I had doodled on
Were not painted for sometime,
So that I could call them mine
For a while,
Those walls were
A part of my home, after all.

When I grew up a bit,
The world map and periodic table
Took over the place
Which was once my canvas.
Those walls then smelled of
Pressure and responsibility
Each time I failed a test,
A new chart was put,
Sometimes of the chapters,
I needed to revise,
And sometimes of the timetable
I should follow,
You see life is not all
Fun and games,
There has to be fear
And maybe a bit of praise.
The home, felt burdening.

Today, the walls of
My residence,
Neither have those
Nasty charts and timetables
Nor are they blessed with my
Random doodles,
They are just a huge sheet
Of ivory colour,
They do not smell of me,
They do not seem to be a part of me,
On some days they seem to be
A dead end on other days
I am too exhausted to give them attention,
How do I call those my own?
Or home?