She gathered her clothes and left. This could be the last day of her life. She had no explanation to give or the audacity to take a stand for herself thus she gave up. She woke up in the hospital bed after what seemed to be forever to her. Too many eyes surrounded her bed with the same question but no one knew the reason. So they assumed what anyone would have for a fourteen-year-old girl who goes to school and enjoys her life like no one else does. People stopped pressurizing her over studies and all that was expected from an ideal student. Life did not give up on her in one attempt and left her for others to torture. She broke her favorite mirror because it refused to recognize her scarred body.
She managed to step out of what she called a cave with no boundaries and went to seek solace in her home, the sea. She stood on the corner of the jetty and felt the breeze reach deep within her body and hug her from inside. The waves carried so much pain that it made it easy for her to finally let go and accept her failure. She spent hours there everyday talking to the waves in total silence till the day she knew she had to let go of her best friend and move on.
Moving on is the term she mistook for rebound. Too many rebounds over the years covered up her pain, meanwhile she lost her self on the way and then set out to search for herself. She landed on the same place looking for comfort, the sea. But it was dead and this time she really had to move on and take a new step, thus she did.
She made herself vulnerable enough to be approached by trouble but strong enough to reject it. She let her fears take over and smile at them. Her biggest fear was love, something she had always despised. It took her months to finally realize that there exists a brighter side of the world that she had failed to see all these years. She knew it was temporary but so is life. Life is short and we all deserve to be happy. She let her enemy be her best friend and impose itself on her till she finally accepted that she had finally fallen in love and this time it was not infatuation because for once it was all about respect and honesty that she had missed all these years. But this time there is even a bigger fear that’s taking over her and that is hope. What if this too doesn’t last and the scars that are finally fading become deeper this time.
In the end happiness always evanesces and the misery pacifies.
She said, ‘I’m so afraid.’ And I said, ‘why?,’ and she said, ‘Because I’m so profoundly happy, Dr. Rasul. Happiness like this is frightening.’ I asked her why and she said, ‘They only let you be this happy if they’re preparing to take something from you.”
It hurts more to have something and then lose it than not have it at all. But then again life wouldn’t be fun that way.
