Life lessons in general

She had always wondered what it’d be to live life on the edge. To let life take your breath away for a minute, and then give it back to you again. And what it’d be like to be numb, to not feel anything at all. So sometimes she’d walk up to the top of the small hill near her house and scream till her lungs felt limp. She’d dip her hand in a bucket of freezing cold water on a December morning till it felt numb. Her parents weren’t worried. They never were. And when her friends used to complain that their mothers would spend too much time deciding on the flavour of their birthday cakes, she’d laugh at them. She never had birthday parties, her parents never bought her a cake with stupid, silly stuff written on it with pink frosting. It was a waste of time, they said.

She found her refuse in books. Travelogues, fiction, autobiographies, poetries and an atlas her father gifted her. They were better than the friends she had at school, they never told her she wasn’t good enough. They never demanded things off her. They told her of places she’d never seen, of people she’d never met.

And as she grew up, life happened. She found out that everything in this world runs on trust.
Trust that tomorrow when we wake up, the sun will be up again. Trust that when we walk by the side of the road, the cars won’t run us over.  Trust that when a friend says he’ll be there for you, he will be. 

And then she met people. People who she believed couldn’t exist. Friends she thought she could never make. Friends who’d dance in the middle of a crowded road just for the sake of it. Friends who didn’t question her, didn’t need answers, didn’t come with terms and conditions. Friends who didn’t judge her, didn’t make her feel like less of a human being, who put friendship before anything else.
Life is a cocktail of emotions, bitter, sweet, spicy and bland at times. Though there was nobody who held her when she needed to be held, though all her life she’d never known what the fuck love was,  she didn’t care now. 

All she knew, all she ever knew was that she was alive. 

And hell, it felt awesome.