Yesterday, I asked her what her biggest fear was. She didn’t say death or failure.
She said she didn’t want to grow up.
She told me she missed me.
And then she corrected herself very gently.. she missed her.
The silly, loud, goofy version of herself that laughed too much and wasn't aware how fragile time really was.
She said she wanted to be seventeen again. To stop at seventeen. To freeze at seventeen.
Because if time pauses, then everything stays. Her parents stay. Her cats stay curled up on the same warm corners of the house and her arms.The kitchen smells the same. The evenings feel the same. The gossip with her father and the shopping with her mother.. feels the same.
She knows it, though. She knows one day her Maa and Baba won’t be beside her anymore. And the thought sits somewhere in her chest like a storm.
One day she’ll have to stand in the world without them. One day the house will feel different. One day she’ll call for someone who won’t answer. One day she'll ask her father about where mom is after waking up in the morning.. and there would be no voices; but the empty hall, and the empty chair where her father used to sit.
She fears leaving home. She fears moving out. But she also wanted to make her parents proud.
And somehow.. she did, a little, at nineteen.
So now, there’s a war inside her. One side begs time to stop. The other keeps walking forward, maybe. She is not sure about moving forward, she likes it at nineteen. It's the happiest she has ever been for the longest time. But she also misses the time which she can never relive again.
She can never come back from school with her mother, in the monsoon.. all soaked in rain, with water inside her shoes. She can never look for the pair of hands of her father waving at her amidst the crowd after her board exam.
Her head aches from it sometimes.
The strange fear of being abandoned. Abandoned not by people, but by time itself.Abandoned by her parents. Abandoned by her pets. Abandoned by the little girl she used to be. Abandoned by her childhood.
When she was thirteen, she used to say she’d die by eighteen.
Back then eighteen sounded impossibly far away.
But today she is nineteen. And things are.. better now.
She doesn’t want to grow older. But maybe she doesn’t want to go back either.
“I don’t know,” she said softly. “It’s a paradox.”
Then she disappeared. The only thing I could feel were her nails digging into my palms, as if she was trying to hold on to something slipping away.
It was 11:30 in the morning.
I woke up. Freshened up. Stood in front of the mirror.
For a moment I just stared at the girl looking back at me.
She looked nineteen. But there was something in her eyes.
A quiet fear. A quiet longing perhaps.
I asked her what her biggest fear was.
She didn’t say death or failure.
She said she didn’t want to grow up.
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