Fiction #2

The ugly duckling; she read that story when she was young and ugly. The people around her, they were perfect. They were and she wasn’t. Her neighbourhood girls would squirm with delight when she and her younger brother would go out for a walk. They would gape at his perfect hair, perfect eyes, and perfect skin. They were all a big blob of perfect. They would always unconsciously compare her, put her on a scale and measure her height, weight, skin, face. Always with the comparing. She grew up confused, confused whether to believe her eyes that saw a tiny human with all the parts intact, or to believe the people around her who always found someone who was better than her.

She grew up confused, always believing she’s not good enough, not strong enough. Because nobody ever told her. Nobody looked her in the eye and told her she was fine, that the world doesn’t judge, that in the end individuality matters. So, she grew up underestimating herself, always hiding, always running, just in case someone found out that she wasn’t good enough, before someone judged her and laughed and made fun of her.

She remembered one particular incident when one day her mother bought her brother a new tee-shirt and how she wanted that same tee-shirt for her too. Her mother refused and she cried. The neighbours laughed. She sat there crying while her neighbours laughed about how she cried. What hurt her the most was that her mother laughed along too. They were a big blob of perfect and everybody was a part of it, except her. They didn’t accept her like they accepted her brother.

And thus she underperformed at everything, scared of coming in the limelight.

Then, she met him. He walked into her life and picked her up, swept her off her feet. He looked into her eyes and told her that she was good enough, that she never needed anyone’s opinion to be just her, just the perfect her. She was living in a cage and he freed her. He taught her to be the beautiful girl she always had been. Her life was ecstatic! It was oh-so-brilliant! Suddenly she found herself floating in his sea of love. She could never sink, she was so sure of it.

‘I got drunk’, she told him once.

‘The drink got you-d!’, he replied.

‘You are amazing’, he told her and she hated her neighbours right there, right then. She didn’t need anyone to tell her she was imperfect. It wasnt their life. It was hers.

He left. From the same door that he entered, at the same pace. But he gave her a life to live and reasons to live it. He gave her reasons to be happy and why not to be sad.

Love is a miracle, even in cases where it never lasts.