What a girl. So sorted in her head, so confident, so decisive and sure. Knows so clearly what she wants in life and also how to go about it. Oh, look at yourself! Learn something from her. See how focused she is about her career? Saw the marks she got in her Board exams? How well she did in her college? And she is doing CA too! How aptly she multitasks, does so many things and does all of them so well too!
Yeah right. Bet their eyes would shine with malicious pleasure to see how she tries but doesn’t come close to this image that people have created of her somehow. How does she explain to them that they have it all wrong. That how unsure she is of what she has decided to pursue, how she is adamant to go on with it ONLY because her pride won’t allow her to give it up now that she is in the middle of it all. How lost she sometimes feels. That for all her calmness and composure, she would love to sometimes let someone else take control of things. To just be able to rest, not think. To trust and take someone for granted.
She wonders about a lot of things. Wonders about how it must feel to live her life each day sans planning, to simply get up in the morning, NOT having talked till the wee hours and slept only for a couple of hours, feeling guilty about not yet having finished what she was supposed to have done about 5 days ago.
She wonders how it must be, to be living on her own, in her own small pad… getting up when she likes, simply sitting and doling about. Living as she wishes, coming and going when she likes. NOT having to answer to people every hour as to where she is, whether she is ok, when will she be coming back. None of that.
She wonders too, how must it be, to take off for an impulsive vacation to an undecided location for days, simply looking into the local ways of life, absorbing them, meeting the people living there. Ladakh, Kashmir, Afghanistan.
Charleston- are the relics of the civil war, the scars left by Sherman’s army still there? Do the bells of St. Cecilia chime still? The boreens of Ireland, the barrier reef in Australia, the streets of Naples, the bullfights in Spain, the wilds of Africa, maybe the Kruger National Park in Mozambique, the Amish villages of the Israeli settlements in America.
There is so much she would LOVE to do. Love to see. Not just visiting these places as a tourist, but becoming a part of the milieu for a while. Then moving on. How do the deserts look in reality? do the sand dunes actually shift when a storm blows, are the glaciers in Antarctica actually so many hundreds of feet deep that you would forget you are on a moving mass of ice and not solid ground? Oh yes, these are silly questions. Questions which any primary school kid’s books answer as well as Discovery or NatGeo.
Ah. If only wishes were horses right now, she would own a stud farm!
She would also like to know what’s all this hullabaloo about being a part of the night brigade, going pub hopping, coming home drunk and disemboweled, totally disgusted with one’s self but still willing to go through the same jazz the next week. Oh come on, one time tries are great. She knows she isn’t ever likely to fall for this but hell, an experience is an experience.
She would simply like to sit in her room, doing her own thing, without being told off for wasting time and being given a lecture on time management. Yeesh.
Maybe then she might feel her now-considerably-considerable time on this planet hasn’t been wasted. Maybe it might somehow help kill a certain amount of that suffocating feeling, the restlessness, the dissatisfaction that seems to be growing at a reckless speed at the moment… .
