More often than not, I wish I could be in two places at once. I long for the ability to be able to duplicate myself, if only momentarily, to experience two lives — the one that I currently inhabit and the one that I keep leaving behind. How else am I meant to convince myself that I can enjoy New Haven’s first snow of the season without missing the dawn of the new year in Bombay? It’s awfully difficult when pieces of you belong to places that are spread so far apart. 

I long to experience the all-encompassing feeling of being so unquestionably in both homes; to feel nurture and care and yet exercise independence all in the same act. So, for a brief minute, I let myself fantasize about a superhuman ability to form another self — I imagine it as this Hulk-like transformation. If there were two of me, maybe I could conquer the world and be happy while doing it. 

When did I begin to descend into insanity and start romanticizing the impossible, you might ask? I challenge that. I argue that it should be aggressively normal to glorify the unattainable, to daydream about distant realities — for if we do not, wouldn’t life be terribly mundane?

It was a little past midnight on Aug. 21 of this year when I found myself indulging in this fantasy. I boarded British Airways Flight #138, preparing myself for the first leg of the unreasonably draining trip from Bombay to New Haven — preparing myself, once again, to leave one home only to return to another. To leave the warmth of my family and friends in the city that has raised me, to bid adieu to the enveloping comfort of the banyan tree facing my living room window, and gradually come to terms with the idea that my home of 18 years had become a place of visit rather than of stay. I leave behind Bombay, only to return to New Haven, to people who have showered me with more love than I can possibly hold in a once-foreign town that now feels like an old compatriot. 

32 hours of travel later, it was like no time had passed since the spring. The grass on Cross Campus was bright green, populated by vaguely familiar faces sprawled on picnic blankets, and the “Welcome to Yale Class of 2028” banner fluttered in the late summer breeze. I stood there, alone yet so fulfilled by all the memories that this space carried. I picked up my phone and called my roommate, Diana, for what was possibly the sixth time that day. She hadn’t returned from summer break, and it felt incredibly wrong to enter our brand new suite without her by my side. I stepped into our common room, luggage in one hand, Diana on FaceTime in the other, and felt a calm set in for the first time since I had left my home in Bombay. 

Over the course of my first year, I had grown, both intellectually and personally, laughed until I had tears streaming down my cheeks and I was clutching my sides, fallen in love in an initially silly-I-don’t-care spirit that eventually became a crying-my-eyes-out kind of way and discovered parts of myself in places I never thought I would. Suite D12 in Durfee Hall on the edge of Elm Street had remained the same through all of it — a space I could seek refuge in, a space that had been filled with joy in such abundance that it radiated an unusual positivity. 

As I acquainted myself with my dimly lit basement suite in Morse, I prepared myself for a year of new beginnings with people that felt like home — familiar in a way that defied the relatively short time we had known each other.

“I have a self whose heart beats for Bombay and one that belongs to New Haven,” I tell Diana, fighting back tears for the self I just left behind. It is a self I have comfortably claimed for as long as I can remember — one that sources her happiness from walks along the Arabian Sea and late night drives against the ever-animated backdrop of Bombay at night. I am afraid that she would be unrecognizable to the self that derives a deep contentment from the stained glass windows in Sterling Library and the string of lights surrounding Morse courtyard. I had just spent the past three weeks basking in the familiarity of Bombay, relishing the ease of a place that has witnessed every version of me. Barring one — one I found myself returning to as I stepped into the hallowed halls of Morse.

The Bombay that I returned to over break was different from the Bombay I recall leaving behind. The tide had remained unnervingly high, smog continued to obscure most of the skyline and the smell of my grandmother’s homemade biscuits wafting into my room could still make everything better. And yet, I felt like a guest — as if I was merely visiting a space that had been a constant my entire life. Until now. What was once familiar had started to feel strange — the existence of curfews, someone controlling what I ate and when — having to be accountable to people other than myself. In New Haven, I am whoever I want to be. In Bombay, I am who I was before. It’s bittersweet, because everything is as it always was, except me. 

So, am I a fraud then? Crafting selves that best fit the people and place I am in, tricking everyone into believing they know the “real” me, when I am unsure which self I would even classify as more real than the other. Have I been committing a crime of impersonation? And if so, which self is authentic and which one is a mere imitation? 

I walk towards my room, turning the key in my door. I turn it the wrong way at first, and as my Yale keychain sways from side to side, I wonder whether the Alina that exists in New Haven has become rusty. Hours later, my blue crocheted rug, fake plants and trusty throw pillows fill up the space. I collapse on my bed as the exhaustion of the journey begins to settle in, and I glance at the photographs I have just taped to my wall — photographs of my favorite people from back home. My irrational hope of duplicating myself bubbles up to the surface again, as I yearn for moments of quiet reflection at the seaside near my childhood home, unbridled laughter with my very best friends, conversations with my mother on the creaky old swing in our balcony that make me feel like a child all over again. I turn to my side, only to see the earmuffs Diana bought me because my ears always get cold. I see the edge of the “Little Miss Impossible” book my lovely Russian friend gave me with a faded pink card sticking out saying, “I don’t know how you do it all. You are phenomenal.” 

I have fallen in love with where I currently am yet grieve the place that raised me. For how does one reconcile the persisting ache of what once was with untold gratitude for the present? 

Perhaps it was never about duplicating myself. Perhaps it was always about accepting that it is okay to shed certain selves and adopt others. And in an ideal world, I would stop putting myself through the painful quandary of deciding which self I more deeply identify with.

Maybe home was, in fact, always far more than a geographical demarcation. It is less the four walls of a room and more the community and comfort that prevail within those walls. It is the acknowledgment that stories I narrate in the past tense bear the same weight as those I share in the present. Perhaps, to entirely embrace the new self I see forming, I must acknowledge the influence that all my past selves have had in this evolution. 

All this while, perhaps I have been creating a dilemma for myself where one should have never existed. For how lucky I am that I now have two spaces in which I feel so unabashedly at home, so unconditionally myself, that it rips my heart out to even imagine choosing one over the other.