Touching the gate: Returning to a place that still remembers me
Memory has a way of wrapping around you when you least expect it – especially when you return to the places that shaped you.
My parents left in 2021 for the Philippines, after more than 40 years of working and raising a family as some of Dibba's first expats. Most of those who made it home have moved on too – to new places, new homes, new chapters. Only memories remain.
I told myself that squashing my kids into a car for the long drive from Dubai wasn’t worth it. But deep down, I knew why I stayed away: I feared that coming back would feel like holding a seashell to your ear and hearing not the ocean, but your own heart breaking.
Until Eid break brought us to my childhood home.
My husband was driving. I was in the back, juggling two squirming kids, when I felt it coming. My heart caught in my throat as I looked up at the familiar brown of the gates and walls lining the estate.
We stepped down for a quick photo.
Just before getting back in the car, I couldn’t help myself. On instinct – maybe the Catholic in me, or just the daughter, sister, the once-little-girl – I reached out and touched the gate handle.
The same one my sisters and I used to argue over whose turn it was to jump out of the car and open.
The same one that meant: We’re home.
This time, I didn’t open it. I couldn’t. It’s no longer ours to enter.
But my hand, as if remembering on its own, reached out to it – reverently.
The way we touch relics. Or tombstones. Or the hem of something holy.
The kind of reverence we give to places that once held our lives, and now hold only echoes:
Of home.
Of my parents now far away.
Of the love and light, and the sacred everyday that once lived inside.
I spotted the old cracks that I didn’t expect to still know by heart.
The motion was muscle memory, like the way a prayer falls from your lips without thinking. And in that moment came a revelation – of things I can’t touch but still exist. Not in the past, but in me. An entire world that had physically faded reopened itself for a fleeting eternity, reminding me it still lives on, though unseen.
You belonged here.
The flood of memory rushed in. Joy, noise, laughter, longing, safety, belonging – all of it, all at once.
The warmth of mum’s cooking – her signature black forest gateau in the oven, and the stove laden with chicken nuggets that were the true favourite for all of us siblings and our childhood mates.
The muffled sounds of dad’s voice outside, instructing the farm workers in his fluent Bengali in the middle of finishing his latest woodwork project.
The chatter of sisters negotiating whose turn it was to pick a TV channel or play their CD on the stereo.
The cozy feeling of knowing you were home and safe.
For a moment, I was a child again – brimming with big hopes and even bigger dreams.
It was an emotional flood. Overwhelming, not in a bad way, but in a full way.
I let go of the gate handle. My seven-year-old beside me gave me a small, knowing smile. My sleeping one-year-old, cradled in my arms, nestled closer to my deeply feeling heart.
I’m not the little girl running home. I’m the mother, remembering.
The same soul, now softened by years, and carrying more than ever before – memories, growth and grace.
Maybe that’s what memory is. Not a place we return to, but a place we carry forward – in who we’ve become, in the softness we’ve earned, in the stories we tell our children.
We stood together in front of the gate that will forever be home to my past. No longer a place I can return to, but one whose echoes live on in me, and in the woman I’ve become. Because sometimes, you return to places not to reclaim them, but to honour. And to carry them forward, quietly and forever.
I touched the old gate again, perhaps for the last time in my life. Not to open it, but to honour what once was. And to say thank you.
In the memories tucked deep in my heart, it’s still home. And always will be.
I didn’t expect to cry. But how could I not allow the solitary tear that escaped my eye?
As we drove away, and the old gate faded from sight, I realised: I’m still held by this place. And if I ever pass in front of it again, it will always be with a heart full of quiet gratitude.
“Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.”
– Dr. Seuss
Author’s Note
This is something I didn’t expect to write. But it’s been sitting in my heart – not so quietly – and needed to come out. Writing it felt like coming up for air.
I write for a living, but hardly ever for myself. So this piece felt like returning to the kind of writing that first made me fall in love with words: honest, tender, vulnerable. Not polished. Not strategic. Just true.
It’s not for a series or a purpose. It’s just for my heart – for the version of me that needed to put this memory somewhere safe and real. Maybe also for the part of me that hopes to share this someday with my daughters, long after I’m gone.
Truthfully, I do want more of this. Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t. Mostly likely, I’d love to – but I’m also a crisis and communications professional in the corporate world, a mother of two, and a wife.
Just managing to do my skincare routine consistently in the morning and night already feels like a victory most days. So this… this felt like a gift to myself.
And maybe that's the gift of moments like these: they let you stand still long enough to remember, while gently reminding you who you're carrying forward.
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