ADULTING 101

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.