Prose before hos

Hi, 

I don't think I need to wait any longer to announce— 2025 has sucked dead monkey balls. 

I've spent countless hours in that room between fete, practice, sessions on how to cope with periods, dance parties etc. Unlike most parts of my school, I never particularly liked or disliked it. The man, our dance teacher, made a lot of girls feel like they are his children; and later during #MeToo, the allegations against him came as no surprise to me (or the group of people I follow on socials) that he was apparently a creep to many young girls. Doesn't shock me one bit. 

On most days I feel like an outlier. 

This 'growing up' with a heavy diet of 'tough love' usually translates to growing up 'alone'. The days when you had to eat tiffin alone and sit in the picnic bus alone or traverse through painfully complex math lessons in the back seat of the left row alone. 

Heh, the left row vs the rowdy girls on the right—always and forever—is as complex as trigonometry from tenth grade. 

You do a lot of growing up in growing up alone. 

Parts of it are forced on you, it's not like it was a choice given to you. You're alone in a crowd for over 7 hours, followed by struggling to understand the concept of 'sharing' your childhood with a sibling you believed would be just like you but isn't anything like you. You struggle in figuring out where and how it went wrong. It's not your fault that you don't know how two people with the same life and parents can grow up to be completely different adults. You're not supposed to know. 

One day you're 6 and alone and the next day you're 16 and have 10 friends who are pulling a surprise present for you. A white t-shirt is procured and handpainted with messages for you and pizza is bought that you share with these ten friends. You have friends who show up and care for you but in your head, you are 6 and alone through it all. 

Over the next decade, you meet people like you. Those who were misunderstood and those who struggled to fit in. Your friends in college are all those like you—the ones who grew up painfully depressed, in solitude, and had few friends or friends who they couldn't trust. You make them your world and they mean everything to you. 

Relatability is the biggest unifying factor in the world today, especially if all parties are on the same page. You encounter others like you. Growing up alone is serious business. A degree up in the chart and you will be forever scarred and anything remotely like a boyfriend in the formative years mean you didn't really grow up alone. You're faking it. 

However, somehow, wherever you ago, you find people just like you. It's symptomatic of the society to throw your type at you. I'd get into the details of how it happens but I'd also like to keep that precious detail to myself. 

You waste your time through your 20s as you navigate life. You waste time celebrating birthdays and attending parties and hosting parties and making more friends and giving yourself till the time you have nothing left to offer. You allow them in your bed and befriend them at work. You see them in your parents' friends and sister's boyfriend. You find them on dating apps begrudgingly and you also see them in the men you date. None of these people grew up alone, and neither did your closest friends today, but they're there because you offered them a sacred piece of your life—your time and companionship—that took away all that loneliness from your heart. You offered them the room and the whole damn bed in the corner of your heart where you grew up alone when you cried cause everyone had friends and partners to sit with but you didn't. 

As you grow up, you start to see kind people sharing a big trait in common, most of them grew up alone. Your closest friend from college who is still close to you because she gets what it means to be alone; the colleague you worked with briefly who understood what being alone means in a family full of crowd; the man you nearly dated who shared that trauma with you which made you realise you caught feels for him— all of them share this badge of honour. You heal your inner child telling them that they grew up alone but they are not alone in this. 

You pacify yourself giving all these examples of people you know—those who love you and those who grew up alone like you— you're all the same. You're all looking for people to make homes out of. Some made you their home and some of us are fighting hard to avoid the idea of making others into our home. A safety net that doesn't let you down like people in your childhood did. 

This is when you go on a quest. You do everything in your capacity to look for homes. When the man with a beautiful, sculpted body tells you how he was fat-shamed growing up and he was all alone, you know he's the one. You can hear the heartbeat getting rapid as he tells you this and you gently clutch his hand tightly to ensure he doesn't feel alone and look at him without saying a thing. 'I got you', he gets it. He holds you tightly when he sleeps and doesn't let you escape his arms even when you tell him you need to leave for work, 'don't leave me alone'. You tell him that you'll be back and proceed to cry in the car a little because nobody has made you feel just as safe as he did. You finally feel like belong and that you don't have to do any more growing up alone. 

You snap out of the momentary comfort that you shared when you realise he's leaving. 'I'll be back', he says. You believe him cause you shared a moment where you grieved over this painful solitude that became a part of your personality. 'If you think this was momentary then you're wrong', he insists that he's sticking around when you remind him that this is hard work and neither of us is in the space to give it that. 'We'll make it work', he tells you as he steers the ship and guides you through the trauma of navigating a complex situation alone, almost as complex as learning algebra where words are used in lieu of numbers. What was the point even? 

The point is always silly. In this case, he does leave you. He leaves you in the exact same manner as your classmates pulled a partner each and left you alone. He didn't have to pull the act but he did remarkably well. A seasoned player, you wonder, as you see him enjoy a night in with people closest to him. One day he's there and the next day he isn't. It's no big deal, you've done it before and you can do it again. 

Until it hits you many months later, on a night when you're quietly left alone in the comfort of someone else's bedroom. You can have a guestlist of over 28 people on your birthday and have 212 matches on a dating app and 5 messages in your pending folder and over 89 people in your block list but you can still very well be alone on a night when your inner child is angry at you and demanding answers. 

Why did he ever lead us on? Why were you never good enough for others? What does it take to be someone who has someone by their side? How does it feel like to have a man who doesn't abandon you for your friend? Will it ever be you who will have someone's crushing support by your side, the way you have offered everyone in your life consistently for years? It shouldn't matter after all these years and innate knowledge of operating alone in a highly productive and functional manner and yet it does. 

It does when you're alone on a Saturday night in bed and your devices are dry and you're wondering how the hell did we land up here after everything that has been going down in the fucking world.

 I started a new medicine to put me to sleep. However, a friend corrected it's not a sedative which is a plus, the minus of course is that it's done nothing to me except made me cranky. 

I had been long thinking about why we initiate relationships with people? Is it the intimacy and companionship that leads or is the bodily urge to bond, suck face and reproduce the deciding factor? In some ways, forging a relationship with someone who's far away and not in arm's length at all times is a bit like writing a journal entry. What are you upto? I'm chilling with the pets and playing a game and yourself? I'm losing a round of game but I should be working. Tell me, how's this exchange any different than me reporting this for two persons in a hypothetical script? Sure, the other person has a mind of their own and that is attractive enough to keep you down bad for them but besides that? Is it just fog and noise in the brain for the need to hold on tight to someone or do they truly add anything to you? 

 I think I've finally cracked the code about people rekindling their friendships from school in their middle age— to find known people from their life and to have them join you in the journey when you become the care-taker instead of your parents taking care of you. 

Among them is someone close to me, one of my first readers other than my family, who continued to visit this page, even when we were pursuing completely different journeys and had transformed into two wholly different people. We kept in touch through the years, annual birthday calls and if we were lucky, maybe even met once a year. But as we got to different stages in life (job for her and another university for me), it got harder to keep up.

In the last six months, I've steadily aged. I recall when my mom turned 30. I remember overhearing conversations and I remember being an audience to concerns. I remember when her mother, my grandmother passed away and I remember the trauma she went through. She aged between those years and she transformed as a person. 

Unknowingly, I've been down that road for a few months now. It didn't strike that the big, bad world of aging caught up. I'm now responsible for the well-being of my parents, and not just in theory but in action. This was a big concern when I was watching my grandfather in the hospital, lose his will to live each day and yet, it didn't occur that this experience will be brutal and transforming. When he did pass away, this gnawing thought of carrying down of the responsibility was looming in my head but the application hadn't hit in a way as strong as this. 

Two days back when I discovered the fire and woke up my parents in the dead of the night, it was terrifying. What was worse is that the day preceding that episode, I was at ease. I was singing through the day, prancing around the house, and being uppity about everything else that I forced for it to fall in place, including my state of being. I guess you can trick yourself into believing that you have got to pick up and chase a goal, any goal and that immediately transforms pity to strategy. I was down that road until of course the very real issues of mortality and responsibility came knocking down my life as reminders. 

"Hello, darkness my old friend."

At 7 am, things escalated further and an hour later the cops got involved. I lost my police station "virginity" (if that's a thing) and saw the insides of a police station, dealt with the hostile staff and basically lived a ridiculous experience which was straight out of an unreal fictional web-series that would be trending for it's "representation" of the authorities in poor light. 

Lol. 

What may sound convoluted to you is my reality. My life is a bag of complexities and problems that nobody I know in my age group is going through/will go through/has to ever go through. People have spouses, partners, extended family, and strong friendships. I have my scholarship to fall back on and roleplay all these characters to make up for their absence. I have to give myself company in this solitude of being that person who's holding the fort, who has to be responsible for the meals of the family in the absence of the gas stove working and even when we are facing inaccurate and false allegations against my parent. All of it. 

Somehow, none of this is ever interrupted by a windfall gain, a random man I like calling to tell me how he likes me back, my friends physically being here in any capacity, and having some form of security. With my grandfather, I lost that layer of a blanket, the safety net that I had looking out for my parents and me. Now, it's down to me to help them and help myself. I lived through the first of many such episodes waiting to happen and that I didn't cry is an achievement in itself. Didn't cry yet. 

When I called my school friend this evening, the same person who's been one of my first readers here and in life, who's seen me since I was 4 and we were in each mess together till we graduated from school, she heard the first word from my voice and gathered something was off. 

At some point over two long drawn phone calls with her, she and I found more than the similar ground to bond over. A renewed "interest" even. "I'm terrified each time the phone rings, there's some bad news."

It got a bittersweet smile out of me. It's something my trauma about losing my loved ones is made of and something I've written about in great detail here. She and I have lived through difficult moments of being in emotional duress and being in the roles of caregivers with our respective families unknownst to the other. We only ever realized in this call today that even though our journeys post-school may have been vastly different and the personalities we acquired over and above the existing lining carried out from the school may have been shaped differently, we are the same people with largely the same paranoia and wired to respond in an absolutely similar manner to unfair situations and be the first to stand for our respective family members, not just for the heck of counting heads but also as primary caretakers of the situation, regardless of however much it distresses us. 

We can outgrow silly school things and change our course of lives, but maybe we can't change who we were and how we knew each other inside out and how that wired us back in the day. 

The older I get and the more sense of weight that gets added to my shoulders, the more I find myself going back to being the same person I was when I was 15— always wary of people and largely distrusting everyone and everything, with little regard for niceties, and finding it easier by the day to settle deep in my skin of the personality— a fucking fighter till I die. 

I had a normal day today.