Moonlight

I was sitting on the porch keenly watching the circus I grew up in. My mother was running around taking care of every last detail, checking if I left anything in the house while screaming at my father for being slow. My father didn’t care, all he felt like doing was to make sure there was not a single particle of dust left on the surface of his beloved 10 year old car, time and logic were secondary in front of this beauty. Sometimes I feel like he is married to my mom but is more in love with his car.

My brother was loading every last bag I packed into the car and he was awfully quiet this morning. I had never seen him like this. He didn’t pull my hair or run around with my breakfast or call me names, he was just quiet. Everybody was being a little weird. I can’t blame them, I was weirdly quiet as well, sitting, observing and taking it all in. I guess it has something to do with me “leaving the nest” (as my misty eyed mom puts it every time I talk about it).

I was finally going to University. No more high school drama, no more uniforms. I felt so free, like my whole life was waiting for me. I felt like I could be any one I want to be. Yet I was so freaking nervous and I felt a pang of sadness too, I have never been without my crazy family and it freaked the hell out of me. But in my heart I knew I was ready. This is the fresh start my life needed.

As the car was moving past these beautiful landscapes, I couldn’t help the splashes of memory seeping into my head.

I used to be a delusional teenager who dreamt of fairy tales and wild passionate love. I day dreamed of the most beautiful man on this planet falling in love with every inch of who I was. Little did I know that people like me didn’t deserve that liberty. Little did I know that the mirror was going to be my worst enemy. Never in my wildest dream I ever thought that my prince Charming would loathe the very sight of me.

When girls around me were going through a heavenly metamorphosis and blooming into these gorgeous butterflies, all I got was a growth spurt of four and a half inches, really painful nausea inducing periods and some killer upper lip hair that the 12 year old boys in my class could kill for. When girls my age were getting perkier breasts and sharper cheekbones, all I got was an asymmetric jawline(the bane of my life) and an uni-brow. To say that puberty was unkind to me would be the understatement of the century.

A hundred heartbreaks and a thousand rejections later, I realized my life was no Jane Austen novel. I understood that I was not meant for love like that. The kind of love that sets your world ablaze with unknown desires, the kind of love that gives you blissful butterflies and is so intense that it scares the hell out of you, the kind of love that makes you so happy that you get all teary eyed, love that makes you feel alive. The kind of love that I was more than capable of and yet was not meant for people who looked the way I did.

The truth was bitter yet it was forced down my throat and I had to swallow it. It crushed the hopeless romantic in me. I often cried myself to sleep and wondered what did I ever do to deserve this. Why was I ever introduced to these world shaking romance novels if I wasn’t worthy?

So I started finding love in other things. Like falling in love with the trees, the wild flowers, the sound of the violent drizzle of the monsoon rains and the unruly thunderstorms, the smell of petrichor and fresh paint. Oh it did things to me. I fell in love with writing my heart out, dancing to the tune of my favourite songs. I fell in love with looking at the beautiful night sky and talking to someone I felt was out there somewhere looking at the sky at the very moment that I was, this feeling was so bizarre and surreal but I just couldn’t deny the connection I felt every time I looked at the sky. Maybe it was wishful thinking or maybe I was just crazy like that.

I was looking for my purpose,my calling while building up my inner fortress and a concrete wall around me. In theory I knew I had to fall in love with myself first, yet every time I looked into the mirror I realized I didn’t know how. So I stuck with matchmaking my friends, helping my best friend get with the guy we both crushed on because even if I couldn’t have that, but the world needed more of pure, unadulterated love. Though I no more wished for that wild kind of love for the world around me convinced every cell of who I was that I mirrored it’s ugliness.

Little did I know that my world was about to turn upside down.