Advice To A Boy Lonely In Montreal

An empty nester writes to his millennial son trying to find himself in the big city

- C. Y. Gopinath

One day, one of these days, you’ll come back to your hostel room in downtown Montréal, switch on the lights and look down upon the evening lights of Sherbrooke Avenue far below — and you’ll suddenly feel utter loneliness.

You’ll wish you were back home— where winter is a warm season; where everyone is familiar and friendly. You’ll long for your childhood. You’ll ache for your past.

I heard it yesterday in your voice and your words when we Skyped. “I know this is what I wished for,” you said. “I wanted to leave home, and go to McGill University. But my wishes have come true, and it’s nothing like the pictures.”

At this very moment there are a couple of hundred thousand young men and women like you, sitting in their rooms and thinking nearly the same thoughts. Their dreams came true—but now they just want to go back home.

Here’s a simple truth, son: You’ll want to go home for the rest of your life. To a simpler time, a safer, better place, where someone else took care of everything. But you can never go home again.

Till you start college, you do not know what it is like not to have a parent always anticipating your daily needs. But that disappears overnight, with almost no time to prepare.

You come home and no one’s been thinking of your dinner. You raid the fridge but all you find is what you put in there. No magic elves are stocking it up any more with juice and cheesecake for a late-night snack. You sleep late but there’s no one to wake you up so you don’t miss class. You wake up feeling feverish and ill — but there’s no one to cool your brow. Maybe this is what a baby bird feels like when it is nudged off the branch by mama and papa because it’s time for the little one to fly.