Written by: Hrishita Ghosh
“There’s always tomorrow.” You smile at him as he says that but your mind echoes back; is there?
You unlock his door and step out, but not before checking once to make sure the hallway is empty. You take the stairs so that you can leave the scene of the crime as fast as you possibly can. Maybe if you get out of his RH quicker, it won’t feel like you are leaving a piece of yourself in his room every time you leave. You reach your room and let out a breath that you did not even realise you were holding. Your roommate asks you if you are okay and you just nod, because you are so sure that if you try to speak, you will end up crying on your bed for hours. Then, you decide to take a shower even though it is past midnight and the water is ice cold. You still need it. Maybe if you cry in the shower, it won’t count, because you will not see your tears. You let the water hit your skin for as long as you can bear it and then some. You come back to your room and your roommate is still awake. She is a little worried and you tell her not to be. “I’m just a little sad I went back to him,” you say. She nods and says nothing, just gives you a hug. C’est la vie. That’s life.
And you realise that is indeed how life is here, in the little bubble where you chose to spend four formative years of your life. You can have a conversation with anyone. You know nearly everyone in your batch. You smile at twenty people and fifteen others say hi to you in a single day, and yet, the persisting feeling is loneliness. As if even within this bubble that is Ashoka, everyone has their own bubble. And your bubble contains just you. But that’s life, so you tell yourself you will live with it.
You distract yourself with the endless assignments and the endless readings, and when you are done with them, you go for a walk and listen to your favourite songs on repeat. Maybe you sing for a while after years and you reread a chapter of your favourite fantasy book. And every once in a while, you decide to try and see for yourself what sort of satisfaction it is that all your peers find in their vices, so you down a bottle of alcohol that burns your throat and tastes like acetone and you inhale smoke into your lungs until your throat closes up and you let a random stranger run his hands over your skin even as your vision blurs. That’s just life.
The next day you wake up and your head is still dizzy and you regret not taking off the makeup from last night. And then thinking of last night brings in a wave of regrets, and yet again, the persisting feeling is loneliness because you remember why you rushed into all of it headfirst in the first place — you wanted to be distracted. Or maybe, you wanted to be seen. This need to be seen — in a place where no one seems to see anyone but themselves and the handful of people in their personal bubbles — it makes you weak. It makes you break down in tears on your floor. It makes you rush out of a classroom in the middle of a lecture because the professor mentioned something about cats and you remembered how the girl you liked suddenly stopped sending you cat reels. It makes you want hugs constantly, not knowing whom to ask for them. It makes you feel like you are swimming in the ocean with paper cuts all over your body, and that’s life.
Then someone does see you, or pretends to. You can’t tell the difference anymore because you are so tired from swimming in the ocean and trying not to drown, and you are immensely grateful when he pulls you out of the water because it feels like you can breathe for the first time in a while. You let him hold you for as long as he wants to and your paper cuts start to heal but then he tells you he has to leave. You want to hold onto him but you can’t, and that’s life, so you let him go and put on a smile as he leaves. Maybe it was the smile or maybe it was something else, but he comes right back, just as the waves come back to the shore — again and again. And for some reason, it feels different with him, so you let him come back; again and again. Maybe it’s because you like the colour of his eyes, or maybe you like the way he spells things out on your skin with his hands. Or maybe you like that he sees right through you in a way no one ever has. You tell yourself this is how life here is supposed to be and you do it over and over again until you’ve memorized all the posters on his board. “There’s always tomorrow,” he texts you now. You smile at the text but five minutes later, tears are falling down your cheeks. Because every day in this little bubble feels like a new one and relationships are made and remade in the blink of an eye. You tell him you’re going to sleep, but you shut your phone off just to stare at your ceiling, convince yourself to get over it somehow and control your tears so you don’t wake your roommate up.
C’est la vie.