A quarter and then some …

Every year I get tingles in my stomach, a week before my birthday. I wait for the day with bated breath, trying really hard to let every surprise be a surprise, every gift be unexpected. But in my excitement, I end up telling people what I want and digging out what plans have been made for the day. Despite all this information in hand, I still end up surprised !!

But, this year is different. This year it feels like something is about to change. Something life altering is about to happen in a few hours. Twenty five years …..TWENTY FIVE YEARS?????????? Not a huge number in purely mathematical terms. But in lifetime terms, a huge, gigantic figure. It’s more like chills down the spine instead of the sweeter, more adorable, tingles in the stomach.

I close my eyes and the whole quarter flashes by.

I see the playground in my kindergarten, the sand castles I built (and destroyed), the number of times I cried my eyes out after a silly fight, the figures I made using coloured putty, Mrs Marver (my favourite teacher) asking me to keep quiet.

I see myself wearing my school uniform, hair tied up in two plaits, the rickshaw rides to school, the uncontrollable desire to finish off the lunch that my mom had packed for me during class, Mrs Teresa Thakur asking me to keep quiet (Well, some things never change!!), Mrs Rajni Verma declaring me an asset to the class in my report card for 4th grade. I see my friends, friends who saw me through thick and thin, who shared their lunch with me. I remember the way Shraddha and I fought over who gets to eat Sony’s lunch, the way we literally stalked the cute “uncle” who used to come drop someone off in school. I remember how Farah, Malvika and I loved the same kind of music and books, the way all five of us spent hours and hours over the phone, the way I cut the call as soon as I heard the doorbell ring, for fear that my mother would find out I wasn’t studying but was busy gossiping.

My first crush, still remember his eyes. My first love, how I smiled for no reason, blushed every time someone took his name, how I wrote our names together in the last few pages of my notebooks and felt like that was all that was needed to be happy. My first heartbreak, how I cried every single day for months, thinking my life was over, that there was no future, that I need to live a life of perennial sadness, because he left me.

Then, I met him. Life changed thereafter. I realised what a fool I had been. Life is not just about one person, it can not be guided by who is with you. Of course, it cannot be spent alone, but it should not be built around someone else. You, yourself should be the central point of your life. He taught me that, and that is the thing I remember the most about these twenty five years – the feeling of knowing you will be fine, no matter what happens, that you will survive and be happy. So this note goes out to him, for helping me relive everything good and bad in my life, for helping me develop a comfort in my own skin.

So many people have touched my life in these years, some in a good way, some in not such a good way. But all I can think of today is how each of them have made me who I am. Here’s to wishing myself another quarter as eventful as the previous one. Cheers!!