For
people like me, who left home years back, hang on.
Breath in.
For
it feels like I have left pieces of me in too many places, with too many
people, too many times. That one time when my friend and I sat in our hostel
balcony at midnight and I watched my miseries slowly diffuse away with the
smoke; that park near the river, that room in the middle of the city; with so
many friends who aren’t friends anymore and in the times where I felt like I couldn’t
be hurt more, when I held myself and rocked myself to sleep, and all the times I
hurt someone. Good God, is this how it really feels to be young? I feel like
this is forever. But it is not. Some days I come back from classes, exhausted and
crash on my bed, with the room dark except for the fairy lights above. I just
lie there, thinking to myself about how grateful I am for having a roof over my
head, all the people I love and who love me back. But then my anxiety rises
from a dark corner of my room and wants to know if I know that all of this is
temporary?
Yes, I do. Anxiety, fuck you. But then one thought leads to another and before I know it, my eyes are all teared up and I want to do nothing but hold on to the day and not let it slip by. Stay. Don’t go. Please, don’t leave.
But,
you do go.
So
at all of the places that I have lived before, it feels like a piece of me is
still there, existing in a parallel universe and maybe, she is happy. Maybe,
the people then didn’t leave and maybe everything worked out. And maybe I’ll be
home then.
And
if only I’d known then what I know now.
But
why wasn’t there any warning? Why didn’t the adults tell us that this is what
it is going to be like? That I would feel torn between too many places and that
I will have lost more people than I can count before I am even 23. That it will
sometimes take everything that I have got inside my petite body to show up and
muster the courage to smile back at someone and that it will this hard?
Why didn’t
anybody just fucking tell that despite it all, I am still going to survive.
So,
the point is, even though I don’t feel like it, the truth is that I am an adult
now. A D U L T. Spell it out loud to yourself, welcome to the rest of your
life. It going to be a series of fake smiles from here. It will be hard but let
me tell you that if you look hard enough, you will find the love of your life
just waiting there, only for you. You guys will fit together like fingers and
gloves and man, it will be beautiful. And maybe, they will even stay. But till
then and even after, it is solely your responsibility to make yourself happy.
So I decorate my hostel room, I organised everything like my life depends on it,
I try to be kind to strangers because, in the end, it’s only the present that
you have got. Yesterday and tomorrow are just delusions which exists inside our
minds, like ghosts and people who left you.
Chin up, little girl. You’re a
savage now.
