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.
Traveling
to a place we’ve always wanted to explore is an enriching experience. A planned
trip is a journey whose destination we surely know. But it brings me immense cognitive
joy to think about the place I might end up at, knowing absolutely nothing prior
to reaching there. Knowing that whichever place it would be, it will be different
from where I really am, or maybe it would be the same place. But the curiosity
and the thrill of travelling will make it worth it.
An
unbridled lust, to explore different parts of the world, to meet new people, to
learn to live, to fall in love with all of it, is now what has taken over my
bucket list.
In
the past twenty-one years, I must have traveled as many places as I could
count on my fingertips. Therefore, I would not call myself a traveler and
neither have I been a tourist in another country. But, it would be absurd of me
to not have a list of places I would love to visit and explore. Therefore, I do
have a quite vague list that I started making since when I was in 8th grade. Funnily it started off with Las Vegas, and to be precise the destination
was supposed to be the Miami Space Club. I know, it sounds very outlandish for
an 8th grader, but that’s how far-fetched our ideas used to be. The
list goes on to experiencing drinking champagne in Venice and ends somewhere at
going to watch the Northern lights, or visiting the Deception Island in Antarctica. The list could go on and on,
depending on the amount of obscure facts I could gather about a place.
There
is something utterly romantic and heavenly about travelling, no, scratch that,
travelling can’t be contained in a few lovely adjectives because it is mired in
several different adjectives. When we travel, along with exploring myriads of
paths and places, we also explore ourselves; our limitations, our strengths,
our fears, our open-mindedness, our temperament. Travelling for me is indeed self-exploration
in its truest sense.
I
have dreamed, and I have imagined, of innumerable events taking place in a
disjunctive world that holds no relation with reality. I have dreamed of
walking in the streets, brushing past strangers, with a sense of belongingness.
And at times, I have felt my heart beating out of my chest, and felt the rush
of blood from falling deep into the ocean. And it’s all part of the adventure,
of travelling to a different place, and therefore #TheBlindList, sounds
tempting. It would be a glorious experience, to fall in love with the world, to
experience everything to its extreme; all without knowing where you’re going to
end up at. Moreover, it would be a life lesson in disguise, quite literally!
Even
if I end up at the same place where I’m at, give me a few new directions which
lead up to where I am, if perception is all I’ll gain, I’m happy with it. I’m
the one who purports not to follow blindly, and I purport to be rebellious. Ironically,
a blind destination will soothe my conscience and feed my rebellious nature,
even though I’ll be following blindly, a path not known to me before.
A
misadventure onto the barren land, onto a mysterious cobbled street, and a voyage
into the uncharted seas- the blind list could entail only this vast expanse
filled with adventure, filled only with what is unpredictable.
My
eyes gleam, my head is full of dreams of such shades of skies which I’ve never
witnessed before. I am walking upwards, defeating gravity. I’m floating on the
land, flying over oceans, exploring possibilities and visiting places; where
the air is a bit cooler, where the trees are a bit taller and where the dreams
are much bigger.
As I ruined the most
important paper of my life, I thought about those three years and how
everything led up to this exact moment. How I landed up here. Three years ago,
if someone had told me that I’d be doing what I am doing now, I would have
laughed my ass off. I wanted to change that, but redemption turned out to be
axiomatically in the negative.
I'm all the things I thought I'd never be. The good and the bad, both. And
I know that I will never be what I'm not. I will never have that brazen
feeling, the one which would make me dauntless. The landscape has
changed, drastically. I'm the mis-toggled shirt, the rust tainted pure white
paper.
This failure of mine, it
will never cease to define me. Because it's all I had wanted to be.
It feels so different, in every sense of the word.
Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I can’t shake this feeling of living
in a perpetual nightmare. I’m still in denial, in utter disbelief. It’s crazy.
I just cannot define this feeling.
Tell me shadow, you love darkness. I loathe it. Yet, it follows me. Yet you
follow me. Why?
But no matter how bad the nightmare is, I've learned that the trick is to
never talk about it. I do this often, only because I just don’t know how to
react to other people’s dilemmas. I’m empathetic but I don’t know how to
empathize. And sympathy is nothing but pity offered by callow people.
“Oh”. What a pretentious expression. Tell them a sad story, teach them how
to laugh.
Lately, I’ve been compelled to question everything. A wrong moment in time
seemed to outline every choice I’ve ever made in my life, and made me look
back; to all the wrong friends, wrong acquaintances, wrong place, wrong
path, wrong university, wrong school, wrong talk, wrong class, wrong questions,
wrong conversations-every connection.
I’ve learnt to sketch all
that was wrong for me since the beginning of time. Perception.
Indulgence. Lessons.
I try to think about all the extremely wonderful people who’ve been in my
life, or could be in my life, but are not. And never will be.
But I’ve learnt some
things.
I'm going to be proud of my goals, no matter the result. I will say
NO- to stupid hangouts, stupid conversations, outright invasion of privacy,
people who try to bring me down, deflating opinions of people about me. I'm
going to stay away from all of this.
Ultimately all that makes you unhappy, all the people who make you unhappy,
everything that screams unhappiness is meaningless. It does not define you. It
does not define me. It’s a black space. Aurthohin.
I’m starting over, again. What do you think shadow? Wait, don’t
answer. I’m leaving you; and everyone else, and everything else, of you, with
you.
The year was 2015.
University had just started and I had to get used to waking up in the morning by myself. I
remember how difficult the exercise of waking up on my own turned out to be. So
my mother would wake me up nonetheless, calling me up at 6 am in the morning and
jolting me out of my sleep. And then we would end up talking for a while, which always robbed me off of the luxury to wear my eye liner in the morning.
Pretty soon, I figured
that it was more work this way than trying to do it on my own. If something can be done just
right by one person, why bother another?
So evidently I had
to get used to waking up on my own.
View from my room window.
Gradually
I got used to waking up by myself, to this serene view outside my window. And I
did it happily, day after day; also making sure that I woke my roommate up too.
On my way to the mess, I’d greet people and marvel at how in the morning,
people were a little more open; maybe because they had a whole day to sort out in
front of them. It seemed as if people really knew you in the mornings, and
there were no secrets. These were the times when the corny old phrases suddenly
made sense.
So
markedly, I almost never missed a class. Suddenly, mornings became the sole
reason for my happiness. A chance to dress up and get ready for classes, a
chance to reach the university early and meet my friends, a chance to drink
Chai before the class begun, a chance to laugh and share scandalous stories of
the night before, with my friends who did not stay at the hostel. It was all
this and more. I loved mornings. Mornings were a start of something new.
Mornings invigorated me.
Mornings
soon started holding a significant and tangible value in my life. Even under
the afternoon sun, everything lay buoyantly still for me, like a summer scene from a Van Gogh painting. And hence, these mornings were extremely productive and
valuable, if not the best. Of course,
some mornings I preferred to stay in bed. As it'd rain cats and dogs, I would
pull up the covers and stay in bed a little while longer.
I still
remember when I marked mornings as if they were an occasion, a festival of some
sorts. It was when I set my alarm clock to this song,
Morning comes slow today,
Memories push through from yesterday.
It was
also during the week when I was set to attend the Poets of the Fall concert. I
was ecstatic. A week before flying to Bangalore, this song had become a huge
part of my mornings. This song was picked on a whim, but it has given me a lot
to remember.
It's the little things, Little things, Little things, That make the world.
Holds true, to this day, thanks to that time of my life. Featured here. :)
"What if I'd left the conversation mid-sentence that
day, what if I hadn't disclosed my feelings? Would I still be who I am? Or will
your judgment of me be clouded by my "vulnerability" and just
that?"
She wanted to think of words that would make a difference,
words that were sufficient to make a change, to make her feel invigorated, to
make her feel more of anything that was less.
She broke the glass wall,
He flinched as she rubbed her hands against the glass,
The haziness disappeared, the breathing stopped.
The bleeding starts,
Because somewhere she reached where she didn't intend to
reach,
A place which brought upon a dissatisfaction not known
before,
To feelings unraveled and feelings heightened,
Another universe unimagined.
A place where all powers of understanding diminished into a
tiny speck of dust,
All images blurred, no negotiation, no compromise,
But the truth which only hurt.
And the only place which lies ahead of this place is so far
away,
It's the place where you feel nothing any more.
No love, no shame
No hurt, no pain
No loss, no gain. Reborn,
Unavoidable and uncontrollable urges ooze out,
Brewing of new blood beneath a vaunting smile,
Creation of magic from unassuming romantic notions,
Burning bridges,
Scattering pieces,
Clearing out,
Unmentionable conversations of grim old fairy-tales,
A girl with a passion for Art, Fashion and Photography, who is now crossing out all the wrong words. ;) I am awkward with my layers of silence on silence. I like - Books, Sketching, Letters, Writing. I wander around and listen to music.
Can you get past my 10 layers of shyness, awkwardness, creepiness and crazinesss? I ness you can't and you mustn't
Hello from the girl with a transparent mask of a lamb, worn to hide her idiosyncrasies and her urge to control spilling out the prodigious memory she has, of the shirt you wore on Saturday.
