This post was meant to be about many things. It was meant to be about self-love. About self-love not being a rite of passage, but an any-time-you-fucking-feel-like-it kinda thing. A kinda thing that we should be demanding of ourselves, and those around us, not teetering slowly towards. About my absolute loathing for the negative connotation of the word 'love handles', about wanting to reclaim the very definition of the word love handles. Sing it atop a mountain like a Justin Bieber song. Or something. This post was meant to be about letting go, and my desperate urge to over-share on the internet and JUST TALK ABOUT SOME FEELINGS, MAN. About sadness and guilt and love and loss, and every other film industry cliche. This post was meant to be about being back in India and feeling like a foreigner, about feeling culture shock, about being unsure and self-conscious on the very street that I grew up. About the most perfectly put definition of the modern Asian city as- “a place where nothing works but everything can be had at a price”. About coming home, in the most vague sense of the word. About watching my parents laugh, myself in between them, sitting in what has been my place, our places at the dining table since 1993, and feeling myself unravel into a puddly piddly puddle of total, inexplicable comfort.
Instead, this post is just going to be about Ålesund. About spending four nights with our favorite most viking family. And about finally seeing Norway as I'd imagined it to be in my head. Here in the wet, humid monsoon of Bombay, I am eating slice after slice of brown cheese and pretending that I am back.