When you grow up in a house filled with cousins running around, aunts and uncles drinking coffee while gossiping, the smells of your grandmom’s cooking taking over every room in the house, the variety of pets meowing, barking, or chirping, and when the music blasting from your neighbor’s house across the street accompanies the chaos of your family’s conversation, you learn to live with the noise, the smells, and the commotion. All of these things become what you associate with a home.
When your two story house, filled with at least 10 family members every day, (some live there and some make it part of their routine to visit) and all of the sudden that home is replaced by a smaller house, occupied by three people and a cat, your entire sense of a home is transformed.
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Your new home is quiet, everyone busy with something, the food is vegetarian and organic, and your cat basically lives outside. There’s no more chaos. No more obnoxious laughter coming from one of your aunts, no more cousins bumping into you as they chase after someone else. No more music coming from the neighbor across the street. So you videocall your cousin every other day, to still be included in the commotion and now all the noise comes from your bedroom.
You watch your new cousins grow up through the screen of your phone. You hear all the family drama from one of your aunts who gets sidetracked with the other conversations happening around her. Your grandma attempts to hold the camera still so that you can see the food she’s making. You find out your cat who used to contribute to the noise got poisoned by that one evil neighbor you used to hate.
You decide that videocalls will keep you connected you to that old home you grew up in, while you build your future in this new, less chaotic, but the new version of a home.