The Nowhere Kid

I have lived in more houses and been to more schools than there are years in school.

Fourteen schools. Seventeen homes. Cantonments, hill stations, border towns, strange countries. A childhood measured not in summers but in posting orders. Those crisp official letters that arrived every two or three years and rearranged my entire universe. New city, new school, new uniform, new slang to learn, new clique hierarchies to decode, new best friend to make, knowing full well you’d be packing again before the friendship had time to root properly.

I stopped unpacking my books after a while. Seemed pointless.

The Loneliness You’re Too Busy to Name

Here’s what people don’t understand about growing up in a defence family: you don’t experience the loneliness as loneliness, not while it’s happening. You’re too busy surviving it. There’s a kind of social athleticism you develop. You learn to read a room fast, make yourself likeable quickly, find the one kid who also seems slightly out of place and station yourself nearby. You become fluent in first impressions. You become very good at the beginning of things.

What you never learn is the middle. The long, unspectacular middle of a friendship. The part where you’ve run out of interesting stories about yourself, and you’re just two people sitting in comfortable silence, or arguing about something small, or showing up on an ordinary Tuesday for no reason at all. That part always got interrupted. The truck would come, the boxes would emerge from the storeroom smelling of old tape and distance, and the middle would be left unfinished, like a sentence cut off in the mid-

You told yourself it was fine. Defence kids are resilient. We adapt. And it’s true, we do. But adaptation is not the same as belonging, and for a long time, I confused the two.

Experts at Leaving

By the time I was eighteen, I had said goodbye more times than most people do in a lifetime. I had become an expert at leaving. I knew how to wrap a friendship in careful language — we’ll stay in touch, you have to visit, this isn’t really goodbye — and then let it dissolve gracefully into the particular silence of distance. I knew how not to cry at the gate. I knew how to walk into a new classroom on a Monday morning, find a seat, smile, and begin again.

What I didn’t know, what nobody teaches you, is that all that leaving leaves something behind in you. A hairline fracture in the part of you that trusts permanence. A subtle, pre-emptive grief that attaches itself to good things early, whispering: don’t get too comfortable, this won’t last either.

In young adulthood, when everyone around me seemed to be building careers, friendships, and the kind of social life that assumes you’ll still be in the same city next year, I found myself unable to fully commit to any of it. Not because I didn’t want those things, but because some deep animal part of me was always already half-packed.

Why I Chose the Hills

People ask, sometimes, why I moved to the hills. They expect a romantic answer. The views, the quiet, the clean air. And those things are true. But the honest answer is a tad stranger than that.

There’s something about the hills that suits a person who was raised to be self-contained. Up here, solitude is not a symptom. It’s the texture of the place. The fog comes in and erases the valley below, and you are, briefly, the only world there is. The neighbours are few and unhurried. Nobody asks where you’re from in that particular aggressive way city people do, as though the answer will tell them how to file you. Up here, people have mostly stopped needing to be filed.

I used to think I was running away. Now I think I was running toward. Toward stillness, toward a place I could finally unpack my books.

The New Shape of Loneliness

But loneliness followed me up the mountain, as it tends to do. It’s different up here. Quieter, less jagged, more like weather than wound. In the city, loneliness felt like failure, like everyone else had cracked a code you hadn’t. Up here, it feels more like the climate. Manageable. Even beautiful, on good days.

The army-brat loneliness, though? That doesn’t fully go away. It just changes form. It shows up when someone mentions their childhood best friend, and you realise you don’t have one. Not because you were unlovable, but because you never stayed long enough. It shows up when someone asks where you’re from and you give the answer you’ve given a hundred times, the diplomatic non-answer, the careful deflection, and you watch their face trying to locate you on a map that doesn’t quite have a pin for what you are.

Where am I from? Everywhere. Nowhere. Whichever answer you prefer.

It shows up, most quietly, when you realise that you’re not sure you know how to let someone stay. Not how to leave, that you know in your bones. But staying, being stayed with, building something that is allowed to become old and worn and comfortable. That is the skill you never got to practice. And in young adulthood, in the hills, in the deliberate slowness you’ve chosen for yourself, you are finally, painstakingly, learning it.

What the Cantonment Kids Know

There’s a particular kinship among defence kids that requires no explanation once you recognise it. You meet someone at a party, you discover they grew up in the same life, and in thirty seconds, you’ve covered more emotional ground than you might with a civilian friend in three years. The shorthand is complete posting, quarter, transfer, goodbye and underneath the shorthand is the shared knowledge of what it costs to keep beginning.

Most of us grew up more comfortable with strangers than with family. Most of us have at least one relationship we let go of too easily, because letting go was the only thing we’d ever been trained to do. Most of us carry a version of that half-packed feeling, a readiness to move that sits in the body even when you’ve decided, firmly, that you’re staying.

But most of us also carry something else: the knowledge that you can build a home anywhere. That home is not a place, or not only a place, but a practice. Something you do with your hands and your attention and your willingness to return.

Learning to Unpack

I unpacked my books when I moved here. All of them. Put them on shelves I designed and got built, in an order I chose, in a house I have now lived in longer than I lived in any posting of my childhood. The silver oak outside the window is the same silver oak it was last winter, and the winter before. The man at the market knows how I take my tea. There is a chair on the veranda that has the shape of my evenings in it.

This is what I came to the hills to find. Not escape. Not solitude, exactly, though I have that too, and I am no longer afraid of it. But continuity. The radical, almost revolutionary experience of being somewhere long enough that the place starts to know you back.

The loneliness of young adulthood is real, and it is hard, and for those of us who grew up with the earth perpetually shifting underfoot, it has particular teeth. But it is not the end of the story.

You can stop. You can stay. You can, if you are patient and deliberate and willing to learn a thing you should have learned at twelve, put down roots in the one life that was always, only, yours.

The mountains help. They are very good at staying.