Road To Nowhere!

This article has been submitted by Aadhya Kancharla for the CLATGyan Blog Post Writing Competition. If you think this article is a good read, ‘Like’ this article on Facebook (the button is at the bottom of this piece) or post a comment using the ‘comments’ section below.

June, 2005. A trembling girl of about nine years old enters her new classroom, in a new country, a new world. Her new classmates take in her pale face, her Professor McGonagall-ish glasses, her neat, well-pressed uniform – and smirk. They burst into laughter when they hear her speak, her American accent sounding hilariously foreign to them.

She looks around helplessly like a trapped animal until her eyes meet his. She sees the friendship in his eyes and gives a tentative smile-thinking that this place might not be so bad after all.

Five years later, the timid, downtrodden girl has changed. Towering over most 13 year olds at 5”8, she’s much more confident now. She’s learned to fit in, but the only one who ever knew the real her was him. She could be herself around him. He would patiently listen to her incessant ramblings about how unfair the system was, read all her short stories and make her laugh when she was down. He was that vine she could cling on to when she felt like she was stuck in a bottomless pit with no way out.

Every single person who saw them together kept saying that they would “make a perfect couple”, “it was only a matter of time”, they said. What they never understood was that they had a deeper bond, something more substantial than mere puppy love, something which she felt NOTHING could break.

So on the afternoon of December 10th, 2010 everyone was surprised that when she was called into the Principal’s office and when the news of his “untimely demise” was broken to her, she didn’t flinch. It took 3 days for the message to sink in – He was dead, gone, never to return.

She was carefully, calmly told by a counselor that being under a heavy influence of narcotics he had died in a motorcycle accident. He was a druggie – and she had never known.

Call it Karma, fate, what you will but nothing changes the fact that 3 years later she still wakes up in the middle of the night, screaming out his name-wondering if he had just confided in her, would he still be alive?
I guess I’ll never know.

—

Despite the so many unanswered questions stuck inside my mind, I’ve learned to move on. Sure, the learning process wasn’t exactly a walk through a park, but I’m glad it happened. By ‘move on’ I don’t mean that I’ve forgotten. No, I don’t think I ever will. In fact, I can imagine myself fifty years from now knitting by the fire and relating my sad sad story to my grandchildren – just like those stereotypical Hollywood grandmas.

People say that everything that happens to you in Life happens for a reason. After months of trips to the shrink, days and nights of wailing, screaming and blocking out everyone who cared for me- I realized what that reason was. It finally dawned upon me the truth of what millions of songs, movies and books have been trying to tell us.

When Life kicks you in the a** , you can either choose to get up and move on or be like those singers in Bullet For My Valentine-trapped in a world of endless days, waiting forever , tired and lonely- stranded on that Road to Nowhere.