22 is a hurricane.

When it rains, it pours,

My bottled up feelings show,

When I compress, they explode

And I’m forced to let go.

-Breakdown-

Before it rains, it hails

I’m reminded of untimely Mumbai rains,

Of adventures in the local train,

Swaying in the wind, we were too young to care.

-Passion colors everything-

Hostel room, guitar class, pulling all-nighters

       Now it all seems like a  waste,      

    Etched in my memory to remind me

  That happiness comes to those                                                                                                              who are brave.

She doesn’t have an organized personality. She gets disappointed often these days, like yesterday, when she was trying to download something but got lost in the instruction manual and day before that; sitting in a class, wondering what she’d learned in these two years. Upon coming with no immediate answer, she sat lamenting the trajectory of her not-so-happening life. And the never ending questions which take breakage at: How DID she end up here?

How DID she end at a classroom at DTU, studying artificial intelligence and machine learning, and half solved solutions of problems which were too made up? How was she not in the next room, where the Model United Nations’ conference was going on? Why was she not part of the friendly banter? Why was she not one of those happy, energetic faces? Why was she sitting among people who were too muted, too tired, and too dispassionate? Why was SHE, one of them?

She used to be different, more of herself, less of this molded version of her molded self. She’d always had an unflinching optimism. She’s a cheery and foolishly unflappable person. And she has only wanted to be more, more of the person she’d wanted to become. But she has seamlessly and inadvertently found herself settling, or as she likes to call it: succumbing. People say that she is brave; she believes that she is nothing but an intrepid coward.

She is mostly scared, that things she holds so close to her heart are drifting away. She’s scared of a gradual decline in her interests, in her love for things and people, and vice-versa. Her worst nightmare is the kind of change that slowly creeps in, and intermittently destroys every sought-after connection, renders every conversation useless, every hobby a waste of time. She dreads uncalled unhappiness, the one that alters you; the kind of change that portrays a lifeless picture of the guitar, shrouded by books. She dreads insanity.

Hurriedly, like a mouse scuttled across the room, she picked up the jumbled pieces; HER jumbled pieces. Haphazardly, she tried to put them together, lacking any clear cognition of how it looks and how she wants it to look. She is scared that the things which make her who she is, will be forgotten; that she will no longer be able to afford her dear mundane tasks, because the price will be too heavy to bear.

She’s confused, and there is no one to blame. Even then, when she talked about Guitar, her father talked about Badminton. When she talked about Art, her father talked about IIT. When she was looking at decent universities in the US, her father was looking at Harvard. He’d always wanted something rigid, something which was defining, or as she likes to call it: confining. But she’d always flung at breakable threads, something not rigid, but fulfilling. She’s emotional, sensitive; but she has always been so, only that she’s realizing it now.

Go outside and feel the breeze, she tells herself. This is the person that she has always been. Even if everybody stops caring beyond one certain point, she’ll still be here. She’ll still have the same blood running through her veins; she’ll still have the same eyes, same smile. Every once in a while someone, or something will awaken a boldness in her, which will keep the fire burning.

But it’s getting cold. She needs to come back inside.