<div class='bc_element' id='bc_element'1 style=' background:#FFFFFF;color:#000000;font-family:Verdana;width:auto;padding:5px;max-height:100%;'><span><p>Each year, at the cusp of summer, airport terminals quietly transform. Not just into hubs of transit, but into spaces of ritual. The lines that wind past security checks and passport counters are not just populated by tourists and business travelers — they are filled with returnees. People boarding planes not to discover new lands, but to revisit old ones. Every summer, a quiet, collective migration takes place: those who have left fly home.</p><p><br></p><p>But what exactly are they returning to?</p><p><br></p><p>In a world where borders are increasingly traversable and identities increasingly fluid, the journey home remains a stubborn, almost sacred act. Despite the weariness of jet lag, the inconvenience of shifting time zones, and the slow attrition of familiarity that time imposes, we go back. Year after year. The question is not so much why we return, but why we must.</p><p><br></p><p><b>Home as an Incomplete Memory</b></p><p><br></p><p>Home, once abandoned, never remains frozen. It changes. Streets are renamed, the mango tree under which you once played has been cut down, the house next door has a new family whose faces you do not recognize. Even the language you once wielded fluently stumbles on your tongue, rendered clumsy by distance.</p><p><br></p><p>Yet despite these shifts — or perhaps because of them — the pilgrimage persists. We return not in search of what is but what was. We chase not places, but the fleeting shadows of memory. In this sense, home is less a location and more an incomplete recollection, something that must be tended each year lest it dissolve entirely into myth.</p><p><br></p><p>To fly home every summer is to stage a quiet battle against forgetting.</p><p><br></p><p>There is something deeply atavistic in this urge. Anthropologists might call it a form of kin-based social maintenance. Psychologists may invoke attachment theory. But such explanations, while logical, miss the texture of the experience.</p><p><br></p><p>The truth is simpler, and heavier: we carry our dead with us. Not just those who have physically departed, but the long genealogy of ancestors who, though invisible, remain present in the cadence of our speech, in the ceremonies we half-remember, in the kitchen smells that make us pause mid-breath. Ancestry is not a static inheritance; it is a living, demanding presence that tugs at the periphery of our modern lives.</p><p><br></p><p>To return home each summer is not simply to visit parents or relatives. It is to enter a living archive. It is to submit, however briefly, to the gravitational pull of ancestry.</p><p><br></p><p><b>Air Miles as a Modern Pilgrimage</b></p><p><br></p><p>It is easy to reduce these journeys to something transactional: a visit, a family reunion, a duty. But this would be to confuse the visible itinerary with the invisible journey.</p><p><br></p><p>Modern life prizes velocity. Efficiency is currency. Yet these annual returns — bought with air miles, time off from work, and often at great financial and emotional cost — resist that logic. They are slow, deliberate, and deeply unproductive in any capitalist sense. There is no obvious “return on investment” in flying 10,000 miles to sit under a dilapidated roof or to argue with relatives over the same inherited grudges.</p><p><br></p><p>But perhaps that is the point.</p><p><br></p><p>In an age obsessed with optimization, flying home is gloriously inefficient. It is not a vacation; it is a pilgrimage. A pilgrimage not to a holy land, but to a landscape of the self — to the raw material from which identity was once hewn.</p><p><br></p><p>Distance, paradoxically, clarifies. From afar, the flaws of home — its petty politics, its suffocating expectations — are easier to forgive. Absence grants a softness to memory. Yet distance also deceives. The home we fly toward each summer is partly a fiction we have constructed in its absence.</p><p><br></p><p>Every return home discloses a small betrayal: you have changed; so has home. What remains, stubbornly, is the feeling — often wordless — of belonging. And belonging, unlike identity, resists articulation. It is felt in the muscles, in the breath, in the weary, contented sigh when stepping off a plane and inhaling air thick with heat, spice, and the residue of childhood.</p><p><br></p><p>For many, particularly within South Asian, African, and East Asian diasporas, these journeys are not simply personal — they are ritualistic reenactments of expectations. Women may find themselves performing the twin roles of dutiful daughter and successful expatriate. Men often carry the weight of unspoken comparisons — the child who left must return bigger, better, bearing gifts and stories of triumph.</p><p><br></p><p>Yet beneath these rituals of performance lies something more poignant: the unspoken fear that one day, there will be no home to return to. Parents age. Houses decay. Cultures shift.</p><p><br></p><p>The summer journey is, in some ways, a race against impermanence.</p><p><br></p><p>In his reflections on memory, Marcel Proust suggested that the true paradises are the paradises we have lost. Perhaps home, too, is most vivid in the rearview mirror of memory.</p><p><br></p><p>But the air miles we clock each summer are not flights away from reality — they are flights toward a deeper, if more complicated, truth. That home is not a point on a map but a geography of affection — a network of people, smells, rituals, and memories that shape who we are and who we continue to become.</p><p><br></p><p>Each summer, as we pack our suitcases and re-enter the ritual of return, we engage not merely in travel but in a quiet, stubborn form of remembrance. In boarding that flight, we affirm something ancient and enduring: that to remember is to belong, and to belong is to be human.</p><p><br></p><p>There is a certain humility in acknowledging that no matter how many miles we fly, we are always slightly estranged from the home we left. And yet, that estrangement is not failure — it is proof of life’s inevitable drift.</p><p><br></p><p>We fly home not to reclaim what was, but to honor what remains. Air miles accumulate. Ancestry persists. The journey — incomplete, imperfect, essential — continues</p><span></div>