JUST ANOTHER MIDNIGHT....

 

Just another midnight and she saw the moon in its fullness and the earth feeling like the abode of heaven and sensed the world resting in the arms of Morpheus. And there she was feeling the tension in her nerves, the influx of the morbid fantasies of life crushing her once tender heart. Yes, a heart that had withstood the tempests she had encountered the past year and a half had definitely taken it away from the ambit of ‘tender’. She genuinely missed the tenderness though, how knowingly and playfully naive it had been, the subtle games of foolish childishness that she liked playing with herself and others.

The year and a half that had passed was rather not-so-cool for an eighteen-year-old Gen Z. She obviously did not belong to the cool squad and her hard-earned wisdom had already absorbed the truth. She knew exactly where life was headed and had decided without a doubt that obsequious and unparalleled submission to the well-laid ‘plan’ that she had etched, burning the midnight oil was the ultimate way to 'material' success.

When on the threshold of youth, one apparently gets the true taste of life in its fullness. This also happens to be an unexplainably fulfilling experience. Unfortunately for her, these were seamless fragments of mere manifestations made by the inherently lucky population sitting in their ivory towers. For this misconception had been long flung into the air by a year of self-loathing and another half of constant clobbering of the self.

But tonight was different. A little more than a few months of utter calm with sporadic disruptions from the most unwelcome of all rivals, she was now waiting for the storm, just for it to pass and normalcy to hit her life again.

Yet, tonight was different. It was not the storm she had been waiting for. It wasn’t the end. Neither was it the beginning of the end. It was rather a gentle reminder to tame her mind to live with this, for this was never leaving her. It had always been there tormenting her as it could, in its zest for discovery. And the revelation was not as painful as battling its aftermath.

She had done it all with great aplomb and she was sure proud of herself.

But as she glanced through the pages she had scribbled whilst her heart was irresistibly racing, she could make out from among the already illegible writing and the pages half torn from tears that she still wished and perhaps yearned for a different life. And this time it was not an aspiration to attain the unattainable. It was a vague wish to enjoy life in its incipient form, incandescently fall in love with the phenomena that life is, and at least be able to be at peace with herself.

If this was too old for a girl her age to wish for, she was willfully old and if this was too selfish for a human to yearn for, she was wisely selfish.