Room Writer

I wake up with my heart racing. It was just a dream, but it felt real. I look at the clock, and it is just 3am. I have three more hours before my day starts. I get up and wash my face. That was not just a dream, it must be a projection of what I am really going through right now. I saw that I was a tree being uprooted by big giants. The blood rushed to my heart as the tree screamed its guts out.

It was early March when I got the news. My boss was moving. He offered to take the team with him. It was not just a different place but an entirely different state. I couldn’t believe my ears, but the panic was yet to set in. In the course of a few weeks, I went through so many emotions humanly impossible to comprehend. I felt sad, angry, exhausted, uncertain, helpless…everything…sometimes at the same time. I felt every other emotion except happiness.

There is one thing we need to understand as humans. We must have lived (and still do) as a travelers and nomads, but in our core we are the species that almost always sought stability. We sought comfort in our designated caves, our designated lands, our designated rooms and homes and even our designated cars. We are known to hold onto things that make us somewhat happy. We grow invisible roots in our world of comfort.

Stability can be found everywhere and nowhere. It can also be found at different places for different people. When my boss told me about his decision to move, he said he is moving for stability. Little did he knew his stability would come at the cost of shaking someone’s somewhat stable world. One would argue that I still have a choice. A choice to not go, leave the only job I have on hand currently, in this economy, in a country that’s not your own, when you are just in a limbo. It’s probably my fault that I let my roots dig deeper, knowing well that this is just a makeshift world for me.

I should have known that it’s a matter of importance. My stability in this case means nothing. I need to have a job to survive, professionally and practically. I go where my job takes me, even if that means uprooting several times. If I want to be stable, I should earn some privilege. What are my privileges now, except having a job to pay my bills? Will I ever have a privilege to be stable and rooted, only time will tell? Till then, I will perhaps wake up in the middle of the night, feeling nothing but being uprooted.