Saturday, June 16, 2007
[Waiting in Vain @
She did not understand then, why such an ordinary girl was bullied so, when S____ did nothing wrong and looked quite ordinary; or perhaps the girl's memory, writing this five years later had failed to recount the details of her primary school life. But the fact that girl was bullied, and she participated in it, despite less severely than others, didn't quite change. In the end, S____ moved, and she, nor most of the students in that class never bothered to inquire about her destination. And here, five years later, for the first time, she contemplated about it.
"How scary it is to be bullied like that," she thought, and she recalled the blurry details. "How scary it is, if I were to experience something like that." But she did experience it, and she recalled it none too clearly, how passing jokes about her weight and her looks lowered her self-esteem so that one day she decided to stop going to school at the 8th grade. And that was it. She was ugly, overweight, and perhaps the only redeeming feature was her quick mind. Tired of being such an ugly creature, she decided to change. She changed the way she looked, the way she walked, the way she talked, and despite all the changes, the fact that she was once bullied, the wounds caused by the unrelenting cruelty of children never healed. It opened bigger and bigger, up to the point that she thought, that maybe it'll be easier if she never became self-conscious of her body, or that if she never took the jokes seriously and instead laughed along with their jests. She was much happier then.
That wasn't possible, she knew, and knows. A mind too liberated will never return to its earlier stage of bliss. Or bliss it is, the desire to never experience change. If she could have a say, she would rather remain in her childish ignorance, unaware of the world outside her life. Yet change is cruel and gentle, pacing us, slowly unfolding the chapters within our life until at last, our mind reeled at the sudden change it's experiencing. "What happened?" It would ask, what happened to the world we were so intimately familiar with? And there would be no other answer, except change.
This girl, 15 years of age, three months shy of being 16, longs for both; change, and an unchanging world. She longs for this chapter to finish, yet she can't bear to see it draw its conclusion and set pace to a whole passage vastly unfamiliar to her. She is afraid of being like S___, if one day people would simply not accept her and treat her like the people of her past did with S___. If that happens, she would not escape to the world of pain like she did before; but instead accept it as a punishment for the things she deserves and does not deserve.
Labels: Contemplation, Life, School
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