I remember walking into my apartment in Bahrain after the summer in Kuwait to start off with my final year as a senior medical student in the Arabian Gulf University. I was overwhelmed to realize that I wouldn’t be here on the same day by next year. And for some reason my eyes began to water. A lane of memories voyaged through my mind. A number of good ones and bad ones crafted a fluctuant emotional stir. “This is my home,” I thought to myself, and it wasn’t limited to the one-bedroom apartment, it was the whole package that came along with it. It was Bahrain.
It’s funny how could a small island have so much power and influence on my life. As a freshman, Bahrain was merely the location that held the university that I was going to study in. I thought I’d come to get my degree and leave. But the place crept inside like a burglar that stole my heart away. I have come to fall in love with the people, their exceptional accent (which I can hardly mimic), and their actions. There was once a gas station worker, a Bahraini gentleman, who I caught peaking at my car’s number plate. He smiled and looked at me, and he said, “Good luck doc,” and just like that my heart springs in joy. And just when my heart couldn’t take in the immense bliss of this verbal gesture, he continuous to add, “we love the people of Kuwait.”
Can you blame me if I loved them (it) too much? No? Good.
It feels like a part of me was planted somewhere in here, and the more it dwelled the more attached I became. This is my final year here and Bahrain has become my home, and it’s not my second home, it’s as much as how Kuwait is, perhaps even just a little more.
This is the place where my well-improved me grew. This is where I learned all the means of happiness; more likely mastered all the possible emotions this place (university) had to offer. You see to be happy is to decide to look beyond the imperfections. It was the many factors that funded my happiness and inner peace. It was the simplicity, the independency, the solitude, and more.
I genuinely had the opportunity to understand the profundity of simplicity and the beauty that complemented it. It was the ultimate sophistication the power it bestowed upon me. It was the key to brilliance the tip to luxury. I also valued the independency that I was kindly and compulsorily had to catch up with, though the process was wearying, but the results were satisfactory. I was able to get myself, to catch myself, and pick myself up all by myself.
Looking down at my two addresses, the two currencies in my wallet, and probably the two personalities that will always remind me that I will be part of two worlds. It saddens me to know that I’m a couple of months away from graduating. And even though goodbyes got easier over time, probably because I knew I’d be coiling up like a shrimp in my familiar scented comforter, but this one is going to sting the most. I can hardly even utter the ‘good’ in goodbye, but this is not goodbye, because I know that after goodbyes there are always hellos, and that I’m destined to stay in touch with the place I once and still call my home.
“You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place, like you’ll not miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.” – Azar Nafisi
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