The classroom

Looking back isn’t easy. It makes you dig deep. This past decade has been instrumental in defining me and my expectations from life. It has taught me lessons I will never forget. From finding the love of my life to losing the will to go on, from living my dream of writing books to realising that change is the only constant, life is a classroom and we are eternal students. Here is my abstract take on the years gone by

We are all born into this classroom

Where we learn, we forget, we are punished and we remember

Are 10 years enough?

For the lessons etched on desks and handles and withered doors, into the fading paint on the bathroom walls?

I open the stained pages of my notebook, I straighten its relenting spine and look back
To where I learnt that when grief and loss slice into you with their hungry talons, and it seems that the world must end, that it should end, the world ambles on at its pace. While the malignant pain sears through your emptiness, flowers bloom, the earth spins and the trees sway in the gentle breeze. Nothing stops

I learnt that dreams are amorphous and distant till you make your small but steady strides to them. That you will live in someone else’s make believe world till you paint your own canvas and splash it with the hubris of a mad magician, trusting the hands that only hold doubt

I learnt that there is as much hate in this world as love. That kindness floats like the battered lotus left on the banks of an angry tsunami. It shivers, quakes and rattles the firmament but gentleness and resolve can weather any storm

As the years go by, I am taken by the transience of time. Ephemeral and an unreliable trickster, it will play you and leave you by the wayside. So I have learnt to forget. That anything matters beyond my resolve, that there is a sky beyond my reach, that I can be defined and sketched by another’s pencil. I know now that I am enough and I forget that I was any less

My book brims with chapters of love, hate, lust, doubt, happiness and the index is flecked with fame and foibles. A hallmark of a decade etched into my veins and a life lived whole

I turn the lights out, drag the chairs back into place, pick up my pen and wipe the blackboard clean. For it is that time again. To learn, to fail, to live some more..

 

“This post is a part of ‘DECADE Blog Hop’ #DecadeHop organised by #RRxMM Rashi Roy and Manas Mukul. The Event is sponsored by Glo and co-sponsored by Beyond The Box, Wedding Clap, The Colaba Store and Sanity Daily in association with authors Piyusha Vir and Richa S Mukherjee”