With every pump of my heart, something heavy presses against my ribs.

It sits in my throat. 

It threads itself through my veins and arteries. 

It moves with ever sinew and tendon when I walk. 

It rises and falls with each breath. 

This will be my fourth year living away from home, and the second country I’ve lived in by myself. 

People say it gets easier. 

It doesnt. 

It doesn’t get easier with every family photo I’m not in. 

It doesn’t get easier with very funeral and Eid I miss. 

And it doesn’t get easier knowing that I don’t even want to be here. 

In an ideal world, Bangladesh would not feel like a place I had to escape in order to survive. 

In an ideal world, it would not be shaped by systems carved out by colonialism and shaped by capitalism. 

Systems that hollowed out institutions, warped politics, and turned staying into something only the unfortunate do. 

There wouldn’t be this constant unrest. This exhaustion. This cultural erosion. This suffocating mix of sexism, religious extremism and economic precarity. 

I think that’s why I care so much about colonialism. Because it doesn’t just live in the journal articles I have to read for class. It lives in the fact that I am not allowed to imagine a future in the place that I am from. It lives in my body, in every single cell that resists insulin. 

And each and every single one of these cells ache when the roads are too quiet and the air is too clean. 

Sometimes the sirens in the middle of the night remind me of the ones in Dhaka. 

When I’m crossing the road before the little man turns green, I think I feel echoes of the same rush I felt when my mum would march into traffic with her orna fluttering in the wake of cars whizzing by, while I scurry behind her, trying to not get hit by one of them. 

The grey air laced with smoke from vapes and cigarettes tries to emulate Dhaka’s signature cocktail of carbon monoxide and dust. 

But it’s not the same. Obviously. 

Ekhankar rastar moyla gula beshi porishkar. Kono gondho uthe na. 

Ekhankar brishti beshi bhodro. Prottekdin brishti porleo, ekdino desher moton gach-kapano jhor hoy na. Matir theke kono shugondhi gran uthe na. 

Majhe majhe ami nijeke ghinna kori. 

Ami amar deshe thakte eibhabe kore bhalobashte pari nai keno? 

Kintu jokhon eirokom jhapay monkharap lage, eiguli kisui jay ashe na. 

My body remembers the sweat clinging to my skin. 

The noise. 

The colours. 

The substantiality of it all. 

And it stays. 

Whether I like it or not. 

The feeling ebbs and flows. 

Sometimes its too much to bear. 

Sometimes I can bury it in the back of my mind.