Searching for apricots in the desert

I grew up yearning for a better life. I often looked around my home with a sense of embarrassment. The carpets with old embellishments, the giant floral bowls of fruit, the mismatched plastic bags being reused for trash. And if that wasn’t bad enough, there was the summer vacations. I dreaded this time in the year, because it meant going back to Armenia. It meant endless days away from my friends, from the modern world, surrounded by people who were the total opposite of cool. I was not in the village, but it sure as hell felt like it. 

But I told myself that it’s okay. It’s okay because one day I’m going to have my own home. My own bubble. My sanctuary that will be simple, minimal, and monotone. And so that is exactly what I achieved. I stripped away the color from all my furniture. I studied the Konmari method and applied it to everything I own. I began spending money for things that would send my ancestors into cardiac arrest (plastic storage bins, actual trash bags..etc). Life seemed to be in order. 

There’s something that no one really prepared me for, though. A lingering hole deep in my heart that seemed to be expanding the older I got. If I listened closely I could hear the woodpeckers in the garden of my home, and if I really opened my eyes I could see the golden apricots my grandma would make me pick off the trees I climbed. Somehow, without realizing it, I found myself standing in Dubai - my pants hiked up with a hose pointed at my feet, cooling myself down on a hot summer’s day just like I would in Armenia. 

What a loser I probably looked like, if my teenage self saw me now.

It took me a long time to learn that my culture is neither cheap nor embarrassing. Maybe in another universe where I never left home, I would already know this.