I left my home when I was eighteen. Back then, it felt like a simple, straightforward decision that I was making for my future. I was going to college in Pune, which is what you do when your hometown cannot quite contain your ambitions. What I did not know was that I was also beginning a much longer goodbye, one that would stretch across years, cities, and result in a slow reshaping of who I was. It has been over a decade now. I live in Delhi . My parents are in Odisha. In that entire time, I have never lived at home with them for longer than a month. And even those visits feel shorter each year, more compressed, more charged with the awareness of the return flight. What I have built here is real: a career, a life, a sense of self and independence. But there is a cost to that, and it took me years to be honest about what it was. It struck me when I visited my parents a few weeks ago.…