About That Which Didn't Kill Me

The last year of my college was pretty much spend in isolation. Me alone with my illness and worried family members unknowingly intruding into my solitude with their impotent concern.  As a child, I was never prone to sickness. Even the once in the year fever was never prolonged for more than a day or two. So the whole hospitals-doctors-injections-xrays-multi coloured energy draining tablets thing was a pretty new scene for me.

I was terrified of injections back then.  Was till two years ago, to be more truthful. I remember getting into IIT and wishing I hadn’t when I saw the list of medical tests and precautionary vaccinations I had to get. And the look on the nurse’s face when she was about to inject me and I already had tears  rolling down my check. It looks so funny in retrospect. The illness changed things. Gave me plenty of opportunity to fight the fear. Got injections  even on my neck. LOL. I am not scared of injections anymore. That’s the best part, the only good part I sometimes feel,  about having fought and recovered. I am still scared of spiders though.

One never knows when the seed sprouts and the sapling sees the sky. Or when the minute hand moves from five to ten. Changes happen when we aren’t looking. Things that grow in our absence have a surprising power to change the course of our lives. So many things happened while I was in college yet it was the things, the invisible litte roots and webs that grew in my absence that choked my peace to a sudden and violent death.

Confined in the four walls of a room it is hard to measure the distance that grows between you and the things that matter to you. ‘Cause inside your head, in your memory they are only a touch away, waiting on the other side of the wall for you to return. But when life is disrupted and then you return to life you may not find things that you left behind as they were.

To me it changed so much that after the return I often found myself wishing I had given in. That a peaceful sleep was better than a broken reality. Like the proud emperor who won the war and returned to find piles of dead bodies waiting for him in the battlefield pointing to the emptiness of his victory. I wish I could turn to Buddhism or any ism that would take me far far away from the battlefield I was forced to return to.

But walking out on life and freeing yourself from everything that define you is hardly ever that easy. When you come back physically drained from an illness and see that solace is still far away it can weigh very heavily on you. Last year has been so difficult for me. I deserved  a treat for having overcome my fear of injections. Instead life gave me a year to teach myself how not to fall into depression. I don’t know how far I have been successful. But from where I stand now,I feel have come a very long way.

I am more than healthy now. And thinking of ways to shed  some extra health specially around the waist lol. And I am not really sad, though occasionally I feel bad about things. But I am drained. Drained is what I am but there are so many things to be done. Exams comings. At least 50 books left to be studied. Fuck. People are going to be asking me what the hell I have been doing the past one year when they see my results. Which I can pretty much guarantee will be awful. Everything is so easy when you look from the outside. 

I know this is a rant and I shouldn’t be doing this considering I want to be a real writer someday. But when thoughts pile up in your head writing gives you so much clarity. Helps you be fair. To yourself. To others. And to life. On days such as this I feel less bad about not being able to sing or dance. Everything has its perks. Even the setbacks that life throw on your face. I figure it’s true you know, what doesn’t kill you, really does make you stronger.