Prena Poetry

I once told my seat mate in sixth grade that I wanted to be a writer. She looked at me skeptically but then slowly smiled and told me that I could be anything I ever wanted, and she on the other hand wanted to become a doctor. Though I also told my relatives I wanted to pursue medicine someday, but deep down I knew I was never satisfied with what I had been my whole life. I wanted to know more, not about the textbook or complex equations. But I wanted to know more about what lived on the other edge and what befell after one’s death. I wanted to feel more than what this reality could provide to a 11 year old, because normality and forbearance was something I could never plant in myself since the day I realized I could think and create. So somehow middle school went by scribbling poetries, having innocent yet morbid thoughts and playing around with street dogs.

The people I knew, I could neither call them my friends nor enemies. Because a moment after a laughter with them I had to search myself in the eyes that conflictingly appreciated my existence. They loved me, but I couldn’t understand the mutual exchange of appreciation that was present between people. So I had to stay up past the bed time wondering, Why are we humans? Of all why are here?

Perhaps the days in highschool kept me alive with satisfying sarcasm and handful of people who thought I was someone aspiring. I wasn’t overwhelmingly content with what I was doing but I wasn’t joyless either. Somehow I felt myself lingering inbetween this reality and myriad world of untouchable fantasies. Then I felt a hole form inside when I began to understand that things change and life is just a series of unplanned events. The sixth grade seat mate who wanted to become a doctor landed up taking arts and I took science. I knew we had separated our ways long before even knowing each other.

Our fate is such a preposterous thing or what we say, something so foolish that it keep making us meet the people we no longer need in our life, but keeps us a billion strangers apart from the one we are meant to be with. Of course that sixth grade seat mate will hardly hold me as a part of her memory. But what is most convincing is that, somewhere, some people, hold the future for me as they also simultaneously let go of someone from their past.

And now after 7 years, I stand in a position where I have become almost everything I ever told that I would be. The kind people around me often regard me for holding the spine of poetry, while the relatives contently smiles at me. But somehow, something, living inside this heart, tells me that I want non of this. I don’t want to be a writer who carries the ache of the world. I don’t want to be known for being this person. Somehow, a part of me wants to sink into this soil beneath and be a heavenly part of this earthly mess. Significantly, the same part wants to be a star submerged in the space and explode, causing another cosmic creation. Because now I have known what it is to be ‘me’ and what it takes to be here.

and isn’t it terrible to be who you are