Well, after ignoring my blog for over a year and a half I think it's high time to start posting again. After moving to Japan in April 2016 and starting living all by myself in a country where I had no family, no friends, in a city where I knew nobody, a lot has happened. Sendai became my second home, I was lucky enough to be blessed with amazing friends, and people who are genuinely worried about me whenever something comes up. I have learnt a lot in this one year, gone through a lot, but.. this post is not going to be about my experiences or travels in Japan, my friends and our adventures, nor about all those things that I'd like to tell people about Japan. We'll get there at some point.
Right now I want to talk about those feelings of nostalgia that seem to hit me in waves of tsunami sometimes at the odd hours of the night.
I will be completely honest here, I'm not the most emotionally invested person in any sort of my relationships (except for my nephews and niece, they are my angels and my love for them is unconditional, period). This might have to do with all of the abandonment issues that seem to have become a large part of my existence. I had even started worrying if I am emotionally damaged, but it is at these moments of nostalgia that I realise how emotional I actually am. Okay, okay, I'm not going to bore you with the small talk, let's get right down to business.
Being an insomniac, it is extremely hard for me to fall asleep at proper hours, and I usually will need some sort of an external help to fall asleep, be it pills, long baths, or (my favourite) listening to special playlists I have taken years to construct and train myself to fall asleep when listening to. But as any normal person I grow tried of the songs I listen to every single fucking day. Tonight was the same. And believe me, when I mean grow tired, I am trying to say starting to feel sick from simply listening to the same song for the freakin' 1000th time.
It was at this moment that I remembered the lullaby my mother and grandmother would sing me. With the reluctance of a sleep-deprived, I grabbed my phone, went to youtube and searched for my favourite version, you can find it riiiight here.
In an instant, the image of my mother singing the song to me in the cramped bedroom/study where I spent my childhood came rushing to my eyes. The dim light flickering in the study part of the room, my father sitting in front of a Pentium II, that used to buzz in the background, the smell of the old books all over the place, me tucked up in my tiny makeshift bed hugging the dozens of plushies, and my mother petting my head, singing this exact song to me.
The image grows fainter as I write this, but at first I got a sudden rush of sensations which simply left me stunned, teared up, filled with an enormous amount of emotions that were choking me. I'm not even sure if I should be calling this nostalgia, but yet another time I came to realise that music does take you back to places and in time. The one little song made me miss every single thing about home, my family, my friends, my home, my school.
I'm going to copy the translated version of my favourite verses, just so you know what I'm blabbering about here:
NIGHTINGALE, oh, leave our garden,
Where soft dews the blossoms steep ;
With thy litanies melodious
Come and sing my son to sleep!
Nay, he sleeps not for thy chanting,
And his weeping hath not ceased.
Come not, nightingale ! My darling
Does not wish to be a priest.
Leave thy chase, brave-hearted falcon!
Haply he thy song would hear.
And the boy lay hushed, and slumbered,
With the war-notes in his ear.
The song is more than just a lullaby, it tells you the pain of my nation. It is an old song, over a century old now. But it is passed down in Armenian families like a token of hope.
Back when I was still in my beloved Yerevan, I would sing this same song to my tiny nephew and niece. I think that a part of me hopes that someday when they listen to this song in their twenties when they feel alone and are far away from family and home, the song will remind them of their pure and beautiful childhood.
But I guess this is enough of late-night delirium of the madman. I'll try to get over myself and finally go to sleep.
